And so it was that Eguchi had an affair with a married woman, a foreigner's wife. She had left her children with a nurse or governess, and she did not show the reticence one might expect of a married woman. And so the feeling of having misbehaved was not strong. Certain pangs of conscience lingered on all the same. But the happiness of hearing her say that she had slept as if she were dead stayed with him like youthful music. Eguchi was sixty four at the time, the woman perhaps in her middle or late twenties. Such had been the difference in their ages that Eguchi had thought it probably his last affair with a young woman. In the course of only two nights, of a single night, indeed, the woman who had slept as if dead had become an unforgettable woman. She had written saying that when he was next in Kobe she would like to see him again. A note a month later told him that her husband had come back, but that she would like to see him again all the same. There was a similar note yet a month later, He heard no more.

"Well." Old Eguchi muttered to himself. "She got herself pregnant again, with her third one. No doubt about it." It was three years later, as he lay beside a small girl who had been out into a sleep like death, that the thought came to him.

It had not come to him before. Eguchi was puzzled that it should have come now. But the more he turned it over in his mind the surer he was that it was a fact. Had she stopped writing because she was pregnant? He was on the edge of a smile. He felt calm and reposed, as if her welcoming her husband back from Singapore and then getting pregnant had washed away the impropriety. And fond image of the woman's body came before him. It brought no stirrings of lust. The firm, smooth, tall body was like a symbol of young womanhood. Her pregnancy was but a sudden working of his imagination, but he did not doubt it to be a fact.

"Do you like me?"

"Yes, I like you. That's the question all woman ask."

"But…" She did not go on to finish the sentence.

"Aren't you going to ask what it is like about you?"

"Al right. I won't say any more."

But the question made it clear to him that he did like her. He had forgotten it even now, three years later. The mother of three children, would she still have a body like that if a woman who had had none? Fondness for the woman flowed over him.

It was as if he had forgotten the girl beside him, the girl who had been put to sleep. But it was she who had made him think of the Kobe woman. The arm bent with the hand against the cheek was in his way. He grasped it by the wrist and stretched it out under the quilt. Too warm from the electric blanket, she had pushed it down to her shoulder blades. The small fresh roundness of the shoulders was so near as almost to brush against his eyes. He wanted to see whether he could take a shoulder in the palm of one hand, but held back. The flesh was not rich enough to hide the shoulder blades. He wanted to stroke them, but again held back. He gently brushed aside the hair over her right cheek. The sleeping face was soft in the gentle light from the ceiling and the crimson curtains. Nothing had been done to the eyebrows. The eyelashes were even, and so long that he could have taken them between his fingers. The lower lip thickened slightly toward the center. He could not see her teeth.

For Eguchi when he came to this house, there was nothing more beautiful than a young face in dreamless sleep. Might it be called the sweetest consolation to be found in this world? No woman, however beautiful, could conceal her age when she was at her best asleep. Or perhaps this house chose girls whose sleeping faces were particularly beautiful. He felt his life, his troubles over the years, fade away as he gazed at her small face. It wood have been a happy night had he even now taken the tablets and gone off to sleep. But he lay quietly, his eyes closed. He did not want to sleep… for the girl, having made him remember the woman in Kobe, might bring other memories too.

The thought that the young wife in Kobe, having welcomed her husband back after two years, had immediately become pregnant, and the intense feeling, as if the inevitable, that it had to be the case were not quick to leave Eguchi. It seemed to him that the affair had gone nothing to sully the child the woman had carried. The pregnancy and the birth were a reality and a blessing. Young life was at work in the woman, telling him all the more of his age. But why had she quietly given herself to him, without resistance and without restraint? It was, he thought, something that had not happened before in all his near seventy years. There had been nothing in her of the whore or the profligate. He had less sense of guilt, indeed, than he now had in this house, beside the girl so strangely put to sleep. Still in bed, he had watched with pleasure and approval as the woman quietly hurried off to the small children awaiting her. Probably the last young woman in his life, she had become unforgettable, and he did not think that she would have forgotten him. Though the affair would remain a secret throughout their lives, leaving no deep cuts, he did not think that either of them would forget.

But it was strange that this girl in training as a 'sleeping beauty' should have brought back the Kobe woman so vividly. He opened his eyes. He stroked her eye slashes gently. She frowned and turned away, and her lips parted. Her tongue shrank downwards, as if withdrawing into her lower jaw. There was a pleasing hollow down the precise center of the childlike tongue. He was tempted. He peered into the opened mouth. If he were to throttle her, would there be spasms along the small tongue? He remembered how, long before, he had known a prostitute even younger than this girl. His own tastes were rather different, but she was the one who had been allotted to him by his host. She used her long, thin tongue. It was watery, and Eguchi was not pleased. From the town came sounds of drum and flute that made one's heart beat faster. It seemed to be a festival night. The girl had almond eyes and a spirited face. She rushed ahead, despite the fact that she obviously had no interest in her customer.

"The festival." said Eguchi. "I imagine you're in a hurry to get to the festival."

"Why, you're exactly right. You've hit the nail on the head. It was on my way with a friend, and them I got called here."

"All right." he said, avoiding the cold, watery tongue. "Be on your way again. The drums are coming from a shrine, I suppose."

"But the woman here will scold me."

…

The girl tonight was perhaps two or three years older than the other, and her body was more a woman's. The great difference was that she had been put to sleep and would not awaken. If festival drums were echoing tonight she would not hear them.

Straining his ears, he thought he could hear a faint late autumn wind blowing down over the hills behind the house. The warm breath from the girl's small parted lips came to his face. The dim light from the crimson velvet curtains flowed down inside her mouth. It did not seem to him that the girl's tongue would like the others's, cold and watery. The temptation was still strong. This girl was the first of the 'sleeping beauties' who had shown him her tongue. The impulse toward a misdeed more exciting than putting a finger to her tongue flashed through him.

But the misdeed did not take clear shape in Eguchi's mind as cruelty and terror. The affairs with the Kobe woman and the fourteen year old prostitute, for instance, were of but a moment in a long life, and they flowed away in a moment. To marry, to rear his daughters, these things were on the surface good. But to have had the long years in his power, to have controlled their lives, to have warped their natures even, these might be evil things. Perhaps, beguiled by custom and order, one's sense of evil went numb.