SOURCE: A review of House of the Sleeping Beauties, in Japan Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, July-September, 1971, pp. 351-54.

In the following excerpt, Brock is harshly critical of the pieces in House of the Sleeping Beauties; he finds the title story, for example, "so dull that it requires positive effort to struggle through its sargasso sea of lifeless anatomical detail, to read page after page of its repetitive variations on a basically obnoxious theme. "

Kawabata Yasunari was born in Osaka on June 11th 1899. He lost both parents in his second year, his grandmother in his eighth and his grandfather in his sixteenth: losses from which he has, perhaps, never fully recovered. At Tokyo University he studied first English literature and then Japanese literature. While still a student he published Shōkonsai Ikkei (Scenes from Memorial Services for the War Dead) in 1921 and Kaisō no Meijin (An Expert at Attending...