Commodification of Women in Yasunari Kawabata’s House of The Sleeping Beauties

Abstract

Yasunari Kawabata’s novel House of the Sleeping Beauties unveils women’s position and condition in capitalistic patriarchal society. Their condition as shown in the novel is not better than marketable commodities. This commodification ultimately dehumanizes them and strips them of their humanness and autonomous subjectivity. They are controlled and mishandled for the pleasure of male. Eguchi, an old man is sexually inactive but he is filled up with the idea that man should be active even in old age. All the women characters are suffering from male domination caused by property handling.