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Hospitality in Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties
- American Imago
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 67, Number 3, Fall 2010
- pp. 431-440
- 10.1353/aim.2010.0021
- Article
- Additional Information
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Using ideas of both Winnicott and Lacan, this paper describes the process of psychoanalysis as a form of hospitality through the reading of a late Kawabata novel, House of the Sleeping Beauties. In this house, naked girls sleep all night alongside old men. The girl in the company of the protagonist, Eguchi, never utters a word. Held by the unconditional offer of her sleep, the old man casts his mind back in time, like a patient free associating in the presence of a mute analyst. When Eguchi dreams of his mother, it stirs up a seemingly insignificant image, and he wakes with a sudden cry. At the end of the story, a word from the madam thrusts Eguchi out of his "potential space" and—in the manner of a Lacanian short session—propels him into a new dimension of life.