[In the following review, Smock calls Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories one of "those dozen or so volumes necessary to life."]

Somewhere in my future is a small, simple apartment, maybe a couple of rooms near the sea somewhere, with high windows and a fireplace. On the mantel over the fireplace is a small stack of books, the only books in the place, those dozen or so volumes necessary to life. One of those books is Yasunari Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

These very short stories, which span his writing life, are the distillation of a beautiful talent. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 for his novels, The Izu Dancer, Thousand Cranes, Snow Country, and the others, which were so important to Japan's modern literature. But Kawabata believed that the very short story—the story that fits into the palm of one's hand—holds the essence of the writing art. It is to fiction what the haiku is to poetry. (His last work was a miniaturized version of Snow Country, shortly before he committed suicide in 1972.)

The grand themes are all here—love, loneliness, our capacity for disillusionment, the tensions between old and new—under the lens of Kawabata's microscope. The short form is suited to his love of detail, his preference for the finite gesture whose meaning reverberates through time.

In "A Sunny Place," the oldest story in the collection, a young man meets a woman at a seaside inn—it is the beginning of love—but the woman is painfully disconcerted by his habit of staring, and turns her head away. Embarrassed, he averts his own gaze, to a sunny spot on the beach, and thus discovers the origin of his bad habit. "After my parents died," he tells us, "I had lived alone with my grandfather for almost ten years in a house in the country. My grandfather was blind. For years he sat in the same room, in the same spot, facing the east with a long charcoal brazier in front of him. Occasionally he would turn his head toward the south, but he never faced the north…. Sometimes I would sit for a long time in front of my grandfather staring into his face, wondering if he would turn to the north…. I wondered if the south felt ever so slightly lighter even to a blind person." As a happy result, this memory heightens the intimacy the young man feels toward the woman.

A further testament to the power of Kawabata's economical stories: a movie was once made of "Thank You," a four-page story whose dialogue consists chiefly of thank-yous. It tells of a bus driver who takes a mother and daughter from their harbor town to the city, where the daughter is to be sold into a wealthy man's harem; but the driver's politeness to the cartmen they pass on the way so touches the daughter that her mother implores him to allow her one night of genuine affection before her enslavement.

I have returned many times to this story, looking for the source of its power—their (ambiguous) night together, the enigmatic figure of the bus driver, the journey's dreaded end? And I cannot be sure that I have located it. But I have felt it.

His better stories work this way. Swiftly. Mysteriously.

Kawabata wrote nearly 150 "palm" stories, of which 70 are published here, including "Gleanings from Snow Country," his last. The translators have rendered the stories in faultlessly simple language, as befits them.

For these stories are like small lanterns whose colored lights can be seen from very far away—little truths, nestled in a valley, the valley of the palm.