ABSTRACT

Kawabata Yasunari’s novella The House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo [1961] 1967) uses the European fairy tale of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ to meditate on agency, ageing, gender and desire. This chapter examines two Australian works that retell Kawabata’s novella in intriguing ways: Venero Armanno’s novel Candle Life (2006), and Julia Leigh’s film Sleeping Beauty (2011). Where direct representations of Japanese people and places in fiction can become mired in stereotype, instances of cross-cultural literary intertextuality such as these can uncover more nuanced and challenging Australian relationships with, and ideas of, Japan and Japanese literature.