"House of the Sleeping Beauties" is most certainly an esoteric masterpiece. (p. 7) [It] is dominated not by openness and clarity but by a strangling tightness. In place of limpidness and purity we have density; rather than the broad, open world we have a closed room. The spirit of the author, flinging away all inhibitions, shows itself in its boldest form. I have … likened "House of the Sleeping Beauties" to a submarine in which people are trapped and the air is gradually ...

In the following review, the critic asserts that the stories in Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties are "linked … by the theme of a lonely subject and his peculiar eroticism, and by the interplay of reality and fancy within a lonely mind."

In the following excerpt, Stuewe asserts that in House of the Sleeping Beauties, "Kawabata's writing … confronts the most basic contradictions of human life with poise and serenity, and makes high art out of the existential ebb and flow that will ultimately lay us low."

In the following review, Sibley asserts that the title story of Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties is "one of the finest works of Kawabata's late career."