Studying the girl's physical appearance, and smelling her scent, Eguchi was experiencing mixed emotions. The smell reminded him of babies, but he realized that a young woman approaching twenty could not smell like milk. He might have actually returned to his own age of the innocence, "a passing specter" (idem, 20).

The author creates a very strong contrast between everything that old and young symbolize. Old age is represented only trough ugliness, decay, coldness, dark, bad smells. On the other hand, youth, the thing that Eguchi and all the rest of those visiting the house were hoping to find, is full of nursery smells, warm feelings, nice, melodious sounds. The story further unravels another possible explanation for the smell of milk Eguchi first sensed lying beside the girl. He was almost senile, but he still had something left from his virility that made him slightly different than Kiga, his friend who introduced him to the house. He was also able to detect the smell of a young woman in her odor.

For the old Kiga, the experience was like "sleeping with a secret Buddha"(Kawabata, 22). It seemed both mystical and also available only to those initiated. By contrast, Eguchi was at first only able to find earthly, palpable features in the sleeping young girl. He was able to feel the smell of babies, to remember his own daughters' smell from the time they were nursing his grand-children. The experience becomes more complex. It adds to what could be a rather sexual episode destined to make...

He remembered the geisha he used to visit who got angry because he smelled like his younger son, he held in his arms just before coming to her. That represents fatherhood, treason, jealousy, all the features of the passionate young age. Further, Eguchi remembers the blood he sucked out of the breasts of his first love. "It was a triviality, but the girl whose breast had been wet with blood had taught him that a man's lips could draw blood from almost any part of a woman's body" (idem, 25).
Although Kawabata will never clearly indicate what is was that Eguchi longed for, making him come back to the House of the Sleeping Beauties over and over again, the reader can guess that everything must be related to the secret of life. The young men who are able to make love over and over again, being at the peak of their sexual potential, are also feeling empowered by that virility. The act of making love may be the only way to forget about death and decay for a few moments that the orgasm lasts. Mankind's only chance to stay away from death comes from the ability to make love. Old Eguchi may be longing for the lost weapon when he is experiencing the sleep beside another sleeping young beauty.

Kawabata, Tasunari. House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories: And Other Stories. Kodansha International, 2004