[In the following review, Ury praises the stories in Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.]

A woman, breaking with her married lover, gives him a pair of canaries as a memento of their affair. The birds, which initially had been placed in the same cage by the bird seller through chance and are now unable to survive without each other, come to symbolize for the lover his relationship with his wife, who had cared for the birds and averted her eyes from his affair. Now that she is dead, the husband writes to his former mistress asking her permission to kill the birds and bury them with his wife. In another story, a man who has taken an aversion to his wife and left her, sends a series of letters from ever more distant post offices enjoining her and their daughter to make no sound. Mother and daughter cease "eternally to make even the faintest sound. In other words," Yasunari Kawabata says, they die. "And strangely enough, the woman's husband lay down beside them and died, too."

In yet another of Kawabata's "palm-of-the-hand stories," a little girl carrying a branch of crimson berries with green leaves gives it to a woman in a new silk kimono who is seated on the veranda of a shabby inn. The girl's father is a charcoal burner, and he is sick; the woman has been receiving unstamped love letters from her postman. The season is autumn. This is less a story in the usual sense than a mode of storytelling, where sounds, textures, tastes, colors, trajectories and intimations are gathered, ready to expand over an invisible canvas. Inevitably, the stories, like Kawabata's longer fiction, are compared with haiku; but another comparison might be with the work of Virginia Woolf, especially the autobiographical fragments of "Moments of Being" and "Mrs. Dalloway," with its deceptive appearance of fragmented time and movement, its moments of illumination and its flashes of an immanent, inexplicable reality. Insistently Japanese, Kawabata was also well acquainted with European modernist literature.

Kawabata's stories are difficult to summarize; many of the finest elude even the attempt. In one of my favorites, "The Wife of the Autumn Wind" (the translation of the title seems not quite right; "The Wife in the Autumn Wind" might be better, or perhaps "The Autumn-Wind Wife"), the event narrated is the shadowy encounter between the protagonist and the devoted wife of a dying man, his neighbors at a hotel—or rather, between the protagonist and the idea of the woman, for what we are made to see is his discovery of some strands of her hair after she has left the hotel on a brief errand. What the story is about is sweetness, drabness (and its sensuous appeal), cold, the nearness of death, the coming of an autumn typhoon, the varieties of love and tenderness and the unbridgeable gap between the protagonist and the woman. It is just over two pages. There is not a word in it that could be dispensed with.

The longest of these palm-of-the-hand stories are perhaps a half-dozen pages; the shortest are less than a page. There are 70 in this volume, about half of an output that spanned their author's writing career. He is said to have considered these very short stories his finest work.

Yasunari Kawabata was born in 1899. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968—the only Japanese writer thus honored so far and a somewhat controversial choice, since not every Japanese critic likes him. He died in a gas-filled room in 1972, a probable suicide. He is well known in the West for The Master of Go, a minimalist novelization of a newspaper account of a competition at go, a distant cousin of chess, in which an aging master was defeated, and for Snow Country, an enigmatic novel of unreciprocated love set in what is, for Kawabata, a region of voluptuous white and cold. As a child, he was repeatedly orphaned. His father died when he was 2 years old, his mother when he was 3, his only sister when he was 9 and his grandfather—his last surviving close relative—when he was 16. According to the instructive chapter on Kawabata in Donald Keene's history of modern Japanese literature, Dawn to the West, the boy came to be known as a "master of funerals" from his authoritative demeanor at funeral services.

Intense sorrow often brings with it a heightened esthetic perception to the sufferer, shabby tenements seem to glow with color, and past and present time to collapse into one and become almost tangible. Not only death but deafness and blindness appear repeatedly in these stories—the latter depicted as a special, ecstatic kind of seeing. Death itself is a metamorphosis, one of many kinds in these stories. An older sister gives herself to the lover of her younger sister who is ill, and imagines herself also marrying the sister's husband after the sister's death. A woman recognizes the face of her mother in her daughter. A meek young woman, loving her husband to distraction, cuts her hair, wears thick spectacles and tries to grow a mustache and join the army so as to be exactly like him; ultimately, God transforms her into a lily. Kawabata's characters, incapable of ordinary human intimacy, dream of the merging and dissolution of the self.

The translators, Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman, have dealt respectfully with their texts, but just because they have done such a careful job over all, the occasional rough spots are noticeable. Each of the translators has contributed a prefatory note. For Mr. Dunlop especially, the translating seems to have been something of a personal journey.