Yasunari Kawabata

J. Martin Holman

Lane Dunlop

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata felt the essence of his art was to be found not in his longer works but in a series of short-stories which he called Palm-of-the-hand-stories - written over the span of his career. In them we find loneliness, love and the passage of time, demonstrating the range and complexity of a true master.

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

charisa

there's a certain kind of elegance that characterizes all of kawabata's writing. it's almost even more obvious with these short stories as they're written like whispers—here for a minute to carve an impression and then gone the next. and yet despite the brevity of these stories, what i found most impressive was his ability to evoke strong and diverse emotion: peace, nostalgia, expectancy, confusion, vexation, disgust. he's so brilliant at using fragments of daily life to expose deep swaths of human psychology. 

that said, definitely not every story was written equally. his earlier stories in particular were a little... creepy, especially those that portrayed women, which was often through a predatory and demeaning lens ("the ring" was straight up gag-worthy). thankfully once we cross into the 30s, his perspective and interests seem to change; there's a lot of meditative observations on nature, windows into illicit affairs, dream-like sequences, historical references ("tabi" in korea, "water" in manchuria), even fleeting intersections with faith ("there is a God"). 

personal favorites: 
a sunny place (1923)
the grasshopper and the bell cricket (1924)
there is a God (1926) 
the jay (1949)
up in the tree (1962)
the white horse (1963), which i first read for fiction 1 in fall 2021 <3

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Reviews