HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES by Kawabata. Do you agree with Eguchi that sex and death are related - Essay Example

This could be said either to be true just of this book or also of real life. It is a given that all things are related somehow. This can be looked at from an elemental standpoint. Fundamentally, humans are primally focused on the will to survive and avoid death as well as the will to attain sexual gratification from another individual. Death is something so organic in nature. It returns human bodies to a carbonic state and ends a cycle. Sex is certainly a natural and universal motivator, that it only makes sense to see a link between the two most natural and unavoidable acts a human will engage in.

No one is free from impending death or an end at some point in there life whereas sex can be a beginning or a place of origin. We are born as a result of sex in most cases and then return to the earth via death. This is a basic and certain connection between sex and d death. Kawabata is known for his strange parallels between the things which we may consider to be dark such as death and sadness; and things which we may consider to be good such as beauty and sex. These parallels are acceptable because Kawabata is capable of bringing the two opposites together onto a common plane.

In the case of this particular work by Kawabata, Eguchi is a character who finds himself in the house of the sleeping beauties which is essentially a bordello that offers a night‘s sleep with heavily sedated women who almost appear to be corpses. This is the direct link to the connection between sex and death which essentially meets one with the other in a halfway point of necrophilia. Eguchiis damaged due to the death of his wife and therefore seems to have a fixation on the issue of death and women as they converge.

This house of “sleeping beauties” seems to give the impression that men might find this the most ideal situation regarding a relationship with a woman or a sense of companionship, since the women are essentially in a