She could still smell the perfume. As she often did as a teenager, she had spritzed the scent between the pages. The opening of yuzu and blood orange was long lost, but the heart of moist green basil and grassy vetiver drydown remained. It was a scent which always stirred something in her, the first she had chosen for herself, a rebellion against two decades of gifted precious jasmine spritzes and soaps: she was the last of five generations of women born in Los Angeles, the last three named after native flowers – Poppy, Azalea, Jasmine. Her mother nearly named her Bouganvilla, but instead settled on the indolic night-blooming flowers that erupt across the city in the declaration of spring. But the jasmine which grows in LA is star jasmine, which isn’t technically jasmine at all—fake, like the city, she liked to say.

In the book, The House of the Sleeping Beauties, a sparse, esoterically erotic 1961 novella by Yasunari Kawabata, elderly men visit a brothel of sorts to sleep beside drugged virginal young women. The men are not allowed to make love to the women, nor to do anything of bad taste like putting a finger inside their mouths. The protagonist, a man called Eguchi, recounts the dreams and memories which come to him as he lies next to each of the unconscious girls: visiting a sex worker, the weddings of his daughters, an affair with a married woman. Eguchi’s memories seem unremarkable compared to his silent communion with the sleeping girls.

The reasons Eguchi and the other patrons are willing to pay more than they would to visit an awake woman are not always apparent: proximity to the girls’ youth might serve as an antidote to the melancholy of old age; perhaps the men are spared from guilt and shame because the girls will never be able to gaze back at them, or they prefer erotic power only when it is safely contained. They know nothing of the girls, not even what clothing they wear, and the girls know nothing about them. Just take sleeping girls as sleeping girls, the proprietress of the house instructs him when Eguchi expresses a desire to wait around until one of them wakes up.

To make rent, Jasmine had been cam-girling since dropping out of graduate school. It’s been done to death, her disheartened advisor had said about her thesis on the uncanny anatomical Venuses, unsettlingly salacious wax dolls used to teach anatomy in the 18th and 19th centuries, when female cadavers were in short supply. Relics of a time when art and science were more entwined, bodies created for medical observation also served as works of art: dolls with their heads thrown back in orgasm and necks adorned with jewels featured windowed openings to their intestines and reproductive organs. It’s a coffee table book, not an academic monograph. Every aspect of society glorifies strength and agency, Jasmine had insisted. Was beauty born from weakness and fragility not also a worthy object of contemplation?

She suspected the men in House of the Sleeping Beauties visit the house to commune in silence with the girls because they were at their most beautiful in sleep: their bodies and minds finally united. A sleep like death.

As she reread the book, Jasmine decided to livestream herself, drugged and sleeping. She needed money, and ever since one of her cam clients accused her of having the voice of a bored phone sex operator, she suspected she wasn’t cut out for the job. And she knew this much: she didn’t want any man’s hands on her. No fingers in her mouth. Filming herself sleeping seemed the perfect solution to her predicament: people would pay for anything, and she preferred to do all things in repose. Since adolescence, Jasmine’s romantic relationships could best be described as loosely-knit, avoiding the suffering and sacrifice innate in more dutiful commitments—there was no one to object to her getting a little thrill from imagining herself passive and watched. A quick internet search confirmed what she already suspected: viewer-voyeurs would watch a girl do anything on the internet, and sleep-streaming was allowed on major platforms as long as the stream was still moderated by a viewer. One streamer claimed to have views skyrocket while sleeping, making 10 to 15,000 dollars each night, only to see views plummet the moment she woke up.

Jasmine would need to channel a different aesthetic than the streamers she found online: pastel hair, neon lighting and infantilizing pajama sets didn’t suit her. She acquired a cheap Hollywood Regency brocade chaise lounge and antique Persian rugs from an estate sale, and swathed a corner of her apartment in raw silk. When she set up her webcam to test what it would look like to her viewers, the effect was not unlike Sarah Bernhardt sleeping in her coffin.

End of Except