The house in the title is a peculiar brothel catering to elderly men—men who have long lost their masculinity. They pay to spend nights lying next to beautiful naked virgins, girls who have been drugged and sleep a "death-like sleep." The protagonist, the sixty-seven-year-old old man Eguchi, finds himself entangled in a morbid game between loneliness, love, and death, experiencing the reality of aging as a true tragedy.

Three stories from the great Nobel laureate author, three parables about man's inability to fully experience the eroticism he feels, a "masterpiece of introspection" according to the opinion of another great Japanese author, Mishima.