Sleeping Beauties

“Good day, mother,” said the Princess, “what are you doing?” “I am spinning,” answered the old woman, nodding her head. “What thing is that that twists round so briskly?” asked the maiden, and
taking the spindle into her hand she began to spin; but no sooner had she touched it than the evil prophecy was fulfilled, and she pricked her finger with it. In that very moment she fell back upon the bed that stood there, and lay in a deep sleep, and this sleep fell upon the whole castle.

(Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," 1812)



Yesterday - Friday here in the Far East - I spent most of the day in a state of amazement. Though I am dubious of Kim Jong Un's ultimate ambitions on the Korean Peninsula,(1) his very presence in the Korean Demilitarized Zone across a table from South Korean president Moon Jae-In, and walking side by side with him, planting a tree and even having what looked like a friendly conversation away from microphones, was an amazing spectacle. 

However unconvinced I am that Kim has turned over a new leaf, this has to be an immeasurably heartening moment for Koreans - in the south, that is. Who knows what the North Koreans have even heard about the meeting? I have written about the year I spent (1997-98) in what the U. S. Army calls Area One in South Korea, the area between Seoul and the DMZ, so my interest in what happens next is personal. Since everyone is speculating about possible conditions prior to actual negotiations for peace, I suggest only one: how about a Kim-free Korean peninsula?

But earlier on Friday, in the wee hours, I was equally amazed when I learned that Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of sexual assault in a court in Pennsylvania. I have not mentioned Cosby in the years since women started to come forward with accusations, most of them remarkably similar, that he drugged them and had sex with them when they were unconscious. Like most people, I believed the women's stories, and not simply because, eventually, there were so many of them. 

I am rapidly approaching the age of 60 (less than three weeks!), so I remember watching I Spy when I was a boy and listening to some of Cosby's many comedy albums. I didn't hear his Fat Albert stories until later. Then there was The Cosby Show from 1984  until 1992. It was easy to like Cosby by then - an innocuous wise old man. His chastisement of young black comics (like Eddie Murphy) who used foul language in their comedy was a little silly - especially now that we know about Cosby's dirty little secret. 

Phylicia Rashad, who played Cosby's wife in his hit TV series, made some callous statements after the first victims came forward with their stories. After trying to walk her remarks back, Rashad then insisted that "What I said is this is not about the women. This is about something else. This is about the obliteration of legacy." However much she may have tried to defend Cosby's "legacy," it's all over by now. 

Whatever it's called by psychoanalysts, it's clear that Cosby had a definite taste for performing sex acts with helpless, defenseless women who were unaware of what he was doing. There is an interesting precedent for Cosby's strange behavior from an unlikely source: a 1961 novella by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata called The House of the Sleeping Beauties. It tells the story of an old gentleman named Eguchi who frequents an exclusive brothel that caters to old men who want to pay an unnamed sum of money to spend the night sleeping next to a naked young woman. The women with whom they spend the night are sufficiently drugged to make confidentiality certain. They're involvement in the transaction is voluntary, or, to use the legal term, "consensual." 

Eguchi is informed that sex with the young woman is forbidden. The first sentences of the novella make this prohibition explicit: "He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort." But the simple fact that the girl is naked (beneath a quilt) arouses the expectation in the reader that some form of sexual contact is taking place. 

Given the key to the room, Eguchi smokes a cigarette outside the door. "He was a light sleeper, given to bad dreams. A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned'. It was a line that Eguchi could not forget. Remembering it now, he wondered whether the girl asleep.. no, put to sleep.. in the next room might be like a corpse from a drowning. And he felt some hesitation about going to her. He had not heard how the girl had been put to sleep. She would in any case be in an unnatural stupor, not conscious of events around her, and so she might have the muddy, leaden skin of one racked by drugs. There might be dark circles under her eyes, her ribs might show through a dry, shriveled skin. Or she might be cold, bloated, puffy. She might be snoring slightly, her lips parted to show purplish gums. In his sixty-seven years old Eguchi had passed ugly nights with women. Indeed, the ugly nights were the hardest ones to forget. The ugliness had had to do not with the appearance of the women, but with their tragedies, their warped lives. He did not want to add another such episode, at his age, to the record. So ran his thoughts, on the edge of the adventure. But could there be anything uglier than an old man lying the night through beside a girl put to sleep, unwaking? Had he not come to this house seeking the ultimate in the ugliness of old age?"

Eguchi enters the room: "He locked the door, drew the curtain and looked down at the girl. She was not pretending. Her breathing was of the deepest sleep. He caught his breath. She was more beautiful than he had expected. And her beauty was not the only surprise. She was young too. She lay on her left side, her face toward him. He could not see her body, but she would not yet be twenty. It was as if another heart beat its wings in old Eguchi's chest." After he undresses, Eguchi slips under the quilt next to the girl. "She was not a living doll, for there could be no living dolls. But, so as not to shame an old man no longer a man, she had been made into a living toy. No, not a toy. For the old man, she could be life itself. Such life was, perhaps, life to be touched with confidence."   

Doing what he was told to do, Eguchi slips into reveries, and finally sleeps beside the unconscious girl. He dreams. Eventually he dreams of his mother, until the sight of blood oozing from a fish she had cooked in his dream wakes him: "Old Eguchi awoke with a groan. He shook his head, but he was still in a daze. He was facing the dark girl. Her body was cold. He started up. She was not breathing. He felt her breasts. There was no pulse. He leaped up. He staggered and fell. Trembling violently, he went into the next room. The call button was in the alcove. He heard footsteps below."

How long must it have taken Bill Cosby to work out the correct dosage of whatever he was using to drug his victims? And how far was he prepared to go to exercise his power, his control over his sexual encounters with all those women? Rape - non-consensual sexual contact with another person - is a kind of murder - the taking of something that was not his to be taken, that would otherwise not be given: another person's physical integrity. Perhaps Cosby is lucky that his peculiar sexual practices hadn't, after all the years he practiced them, resulted in charges of murder?


(1) Kim's statement that "New history begins now" sounds suspiciously like Pol Pot's declaration to the Cambodian people that it was "Year Zero." What he meant - in true Marxist fashion - was that the political struggle of history was over.