[In the following review, DeVere Brown praises the spare style of Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.]

Kawabata's masterpiece, the novel Snow Country, is written in a spare, elliptical style. It seems as abbreviated as a work of literature can possibly be—until one reads the author's "palm-of-the-hand stories," which often tell a story or evoke an image in less than a page. "Gleanings from Snow Country," indeed, presents the highlights of the novel in a series of haiku-like images in five pages. That is much longer than the usual story, however.

Most of the selections juxtapose two images in less than a page and reveal a story by indirection. If Japanese literature requires much of its readers because it relies on suggestion rather than graphic detail and because resolution of the plot is incomplete, then the palm-of-the-hand stories require an incredible effort, but an enjoyable one. The orphaned girl of "A Sunny Place" stares at her blind grandfather as he turns toward the sun; at the same time she remembers being at a sunny place on the beach with him earlier. In "Hair" an exhausted hairdresser who is called upon to do the hair of all the village girls because soldiers are billeted in town passes word to her hairdresser friend in the next village that she would do well if she followed soldiers around; the second woman's husband, a miner, is not amused and slaps her around just as a trumpet sounds. "Hometown" centers on a village festival to which everyone is invited back to partake of dumplings in bean soup. Men are few in wartime, and the sister-in-law who has a letter from the front has grown plump.

What do the stories mean? Each reader will craft his own plot from the fragmentary evidence, which often is even less revealing than in the three examples cited above. Kawabata wrote palm-of-the-hand stories throughout his career, from 1923 to 1972, and they evidently had a market value in the periodicals of his time. Certain themes recur. Kawabata was a cultural traditionalist who wrote of hot springs, girls in the bath at an inn, or beautiful black hair in several contexts; but he also wrote of a taxi dancer in Asakusa (1932), of the water shortage in wartime Manchuria (1944), and of a woman who fled to London to recover from a failed marriage (1962). Prewar pride in culture, wartime privation, and postwar affluence and cosmopolitan life-style all come through in the works of this most Japanese of modern writers. The translators have performed the exacting task of transferring the obscure thoughts and misty images of his palm-of-the-hand stories into English successfully.