PALM-OF-THE-HAND: Stories

by Yasunari Kawabata ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 1988

Kawabata once said of these brief, exquisitely crafted, elusive stories: ""Many writers in their youth write poetry; I. . .wrote 'palm-of-the-hand' stories. . .the poetic spirit of my young days lives on in them."" Most of these 70 pieces were written in the 1920's and 30's; and the last-a ""miniaturization"" of his novel Snow Country--was finished shortly before the author's suicide in 1972. The icy-fine configurations of these deceptively delicate dramas reveal characters beset by loneliness, impotence, and a longing for the past almost too intense to be borne. In ""Snow,"" an aging man returns, in carefully induced hallucinations, to those who had loved him--a father self-wounded in his love, and his women ""riding on birds through the the falling snow."" Women are stabbed by reminders of the past--a smell, a sound, or tableaux of happiness composed of strangers. In the ""Silver Fifty-Sen Pieces,"" a glass paperweight is all that remains of a prewar life in which small things, small domestic bustle, could be cherished. In the chill of loneliness one recognizes with horror the possible artifice of a loving face. In ""The Man Who Did Not Smile,"" a wife's gentle face, once a stage mask has been taken away, seems a ""face of a wretched life."" Yet a simple, natural beauty can transform--whether a stolen branch of silverberry that touches the generosity of a bitter prostitute, or, in the case of man-made artifice, a portrait that shimmers above its subject and the ""ugly, pale, sick urchin"" who was its creator. Kawabata's symbolic images burn at the core of bleak revelations. In ""Gleanings from Snow Country,"" a girl's eye is mirrored in the window of a train: ""a beautiful, bewitching, glowing insect that floated on the waves of the night darkness."" The author's extraordinary stylistic compression can reduce life dramas to a minute's reading, as in ""A Child's Viewpoint,"" which in one page unstoppers the venom in a marriage and a home. Lovingly translated from the Japanese: dark gems, tantalizing, sometimes baffling--and special.

Pub Date: July 19, 1988

ISBN: 0374530491

Page Count: -

Publisher: North Point-dist. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION