[In the following review, Anderer discusses the style and themes of Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.]

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories gives us an opportunity to redirect attention and critical inquiry toward the beginnings of what we have come to know—chiefly on the evidence of longer and later shosetsu—as Kawabata's style. In this collection of 70 tanagokoro no shosetsu, Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman, working independently, have made available not just some fine Kawabata writing but much of his earliest work. Forty-three of these stories were published between 1924 and 1929. Since literary historians generally agree that Kawabata wrote 146 such stories throughout his career, and that 85 of these had been written by 1929, this abridged collection reflects the distribution of this work over the course of Kawabata's writing life. In every decade through to his final publication ("Gleanings from Snow Country"), Kawabata wrote tanagokoro no shosetsu, although it is apparent that he most intensively cultivated such writing in his youth.

The opening editorial note acknowledges the especially close link between tanagokoro no shosetsu and youth, quoting Kawabata's own retrospective remark in evidence: "the poetic spirit of my young days lives on in them." In the same context, Kawabata observes that "many writers, in their youth, write poetry: I, instead of poetry, wrote the palm-of-the-hand stories." It is also the case that in his youth, Kawabata was better known for his criticism and reviews than for his fiction, and for his advocacy of a modernist movement—the Shinkankaku-ha—of which he was an active and crucial participant.

I mention this not to deflect from the pleasures of Kawabata's text, which Dunlop and Holman have rendered in uniformly good English prose (there are differences: Dunlop seems more concerned with getting the diction right, Holman more with sentence rhythm), but to suggest that many of these stories possess a sharp experimental intention and edge that is dulled if we search too deeply for traces of a renga tradition or are mesmerized by an image of Kawabata as a master traditionalist. At its best Japanese modernism of the 1920s, as pursued by the young Kawabata and Yokomitsu Riichi, represented a challenge to normative literary perception and response and cultivated a willful idiosyncrasy, even eccentricity, of style. This could invite a less conventional treatment in English than many of the stories receive here. A more concentrated, experimental translation might have produced interesting results (when Kawabata published his Yukigunisho in the Sand Mainichi, typographically it appeared in verse form).

There is a sense of warmth and fragility in the earliest stories, conveyed in their very titles—"A Sunny Place," "The Weaker Vessel," "The Girl Who Approached the Fire"—which offsets the cool formalism of Kawabata's spare and rigorous method. We encounter here an abstract "world without sound" whose contours are powerfully determined by memory and dream. Yet this world seems close to experience, to the feeling of some actual loss or betrayal, and so issues of a personal or a generational history are as pressing as the aesthetic method that distills beauty from them. Again, many of the stories appear childlike in their innocence of realism or of sociopolitical incident ("Glass" and "Water" are notable exceptions to this). But they often take bizarre, less-than-innocent turns. And so "a perfect snowy morning scene" is broken as sparrow heads poke through the breast holes of a dying girl's discarded corset ("The Younger Sister's Clothes") leading the narrator to say, as readers might, to describe the effect of many such stories: "It was like a painful fairy tale."

Indeed very basic elements generate Kawabata's condensed, almost implosive short fiction: sun and snow, light and darkness, desire and deprivation. Over time this style, increasingly refined and abstracted from experience, drifts more toward a cold isolation: "the snowy landscape was all there was" ("Snow").

At the very end, red cheeks, detached from a woman's face, "float[ed] amid the snow" ("Gleanings from Snow Country") Preoccupied as he had been for so long with the snow country of his art, it is no wonder that in his last tanagokoro no shosetsu, Kawabata distilled and crystallized his favorite landscape, his own otherworldly and deeply modernist home.