The House of the Sleeping Beauties Read Free

with a beauty who would not awaken was a temptation, an adventure, a joy they could trust. Old Kiga had said to Eguchi that only when he was beside a girl who had been put to sleep could he himself feel alive.
    When Kiga had visited Eguchi, he had looked out into the garden. Something red lay on the brown autumn moss.
    "What can it be?"
    He had gone down to look. The dots were red aoki berries. Numbers of them lay on the ground. Kiga picked one up. Toying with it, he told Eguchi of the secret house. He went to the house, he said, when the despair of old age was too much for him.
    "It seems like a very long time since I lost hope in every last woman. There's a house where they put women to sleep so they don't wake up."
    Was it as if a girl sound asleep, saying nothing, hearing nothing, said everything to and heard everything from an old man who, for a woman, was no longer a man? But this was Eguchi s first experience of such a woman. The girl had no doubt had this experience of old men numbers of times before. Giving everything over to him, aware of nothing, in a sleep as of suspended animation, she breathed gently, her innocent face on a side. Certain old men would perhaps caress every part of her body, others would be racked with sobs. The girl would not know, in either case. Even at this thought Eguchi was able to do nothing. In taking his hand from her neck, he was as cautious as if he were handling a breakable object. But the impulse to arouse her by violence still had not left him.
    As he withdrew his hand, her head turned gently and her shoulder with it, so that the girl was lying face up. He pulled back, wondering if she might open her eyes. Her nose and lips shone with youth in the light from the ceiling. She brought her left hand to her mouth. She seemed about to take the index finger between her teeth, and he wondered if it might be a way she had when she slept. But only she brought it softly to her lips, and no further. The lips parted slightly to show her teeth. She had been breathing through her nose, and now she breathed through her mouth. Her breath seemed to come a little faster.
    He wondered if she would be in pain, and decided she was not. Because the lips were parted, a faint smile seemed to float on the cheeks. The sound of the waves breaking against the high cliff came nearer. The sound of the waves receding waves suggested large rocks at the base of the cliff. Water caught behind them seemed to follow after. The scent of the girl's breath was stronger from her mouth than it had been from her nose. It was not, however, the smell of milk. He asked himself again why the smell of milk had come to him. It was a smell, perhaps, to make him feel woman in the girl.
    Old Eguchi even now had a grandchild that smelled of milk. He could see it here, before him. Each of his three daughters were married and had children. And he had not forgotten how it had been when they smelled of milk, and how he had held the daughters themselves as nursing babies. Has the milky smell of these blood relatives come back as if to reprove him? No, it should to be the smell of Eguchi's own heart, going out to the girl. Eguchi too turned face up, and, lying so that he nowhere touched the girl, closed his eyes. He would do well to take the sleeping medicine at his pillow. It would not be as strong as the drug the girl had been given. He would be awake earlier than she. Otherwise, the secret of the fascination of the place would be gone. He opened the package. In it were two white pills.
    If he took one, he fall in a slumber. Two, and he would fall into a deep of death. That would be just as well, he thought, looking at the pills. And the milk brought an unpleasant memory and a lunatic memory to him.
    "Milk. It smells of milk. It smells like a baby."
    Starting to fold the coat he had taken off, the woman glare at him, her face tense.
    "Your baby. You took it in your arms when you left home, didn't you? Didn't you? I hate it. I hate