house of sleeping beauties

This is another book by Kawabata, and I think that it is a better story than Snow Country, which critics have rated as his masterpiece. House of sleeping beauties falls in that perverse, sexual, repressed genre of japanese literature. If you like the works of Tanizaki, you will like this. It's about weird, creepy sex and power play that is strangely compelling. The House is like one of those weird underground fetish clubs, where old men go to sleep next to young nude virgins on one condition, can touch but no penetration. Not that they can get it up anyway, on account of their age. What is creepy is that the girls are drugged so they never wake up during a session, and don't know who they've slept with. The way it is described, it is like sleeping with a RealDoll. What is even creepier is that the narrator pretends to be impotent, so he considers the idea of raping the girls, to mark his territory, just because he can... the girls are also a way for him to remember his past love affairs. If made into a movie, it could be a really intense mediation on sex, death and memory, as well as attract the yangtze crowd because of the amount of nudity.

I was leaving from work on Thursday when some random lift passenger (employed by the same company) passed a comment in mandarin: Do you work here?
me: er, part-time, just started.
person: wa, you look very cute.
Note person is middle-aged female auntie, it is not a pick up line. If I was a serious journalist, I would be insulted. Since I'm not, I can't give a rat's arse. Then again, I was wearing a t-shirt, 3/4 pants and sandals with bedhair. Hopefully, she was referring to the extreme casuallness of my garb and my youthful visage...