An Analysis of Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories --- Centering on Beauty and Ugliness, Life and Death

DOI

10.2991/aemh-19.2019.31How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Beauty and ugliness, Life and death, The problem of old age, Youth

Abstract

Yasunari Kawabata's novel House of the sleeping beauties and other stories tells the story of an old man named Eguchi who was introduced to a hotel called House of the sleeping beauties for nights. This hotel caters for the elderly. Every old man is provided a sleeping girl who is taken with a special medicine and cannot wake up. The old man Eguchi met six sleeping beauties here. As such a special setting, the encounter between the old and young women forms two kinds of contrast - beauty and ugliness, young and old. What does the author want to express through this novel? In order to solve this problem, this paper will try to discuss it by citing the original text. Generally, this paper is divided into eight parts, including the roles’ analyses, the characteristics and meanings of the beauty of sleeping beauties, the attitude of the elderly towards the beauty of sleeping beauties, the functions of sleeping beauties, and so on. Through these analyses, the two contrasts reflected in this novel, beauty and ugliness, life and death will be discussed. We will see the oppositions and connections between them in this novel.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zhengdong Xu
PY  - 2019/10
DA  - 2019/10
TI  - An Analysis of Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories --- Centering on Beauty and Ugliness, Life and Death
BT  - Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Advanced Education, Management and Humanities (AEMH 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 157
EP  - 165
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aemh-19.2019.31
DO  - 10.2991/aemh-19.2019.31
ID  - Xu2019/10
ER  -