ABSTRACT
Serialization of Sleeping Beauties began in 1960 and, following its release as a book the following year, Kawabata was awarded the Mainichi Cultural Prize. The novel has been praised as an "esoteric masterpiece", one of Kawabata's "most perfectly realized" novels, and "one of his last great works". This chapter discusses a few remarks about approaching Sleeping Beauties as a psychological novel, and intertextuality. Sleeping Beauties shares much with Genji, Thousand Cranes, and Female Masks. Kawabata shows how a traumatized child can psychologically transform into an adult perpetrator unwittingly inclined toward doing death work. The chapter also analyzes Eguchi Yoshio's triggered reactions stemming from and acting out of his dissociated foundational trauma by focusing on his intimate relationships with his premarital lover, his youngest daughter and the six "sleeping beauties" with whom he comes into contact in the House of Sleeping Beauties.
