[In the laudatory review below, Seibold admires the polish and precision of the pieces in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.]

Born in 1899, the same year as Hemingway and Borges, Yasunari Kawabata was venerated in his native Japan, and his writing attracted as much attention from the West as that of any of his compatriots since lady Murasaki. His career climaxed in 1968 with his being awarded the Nobel Prize, and to this date he is the only Far Eastern writer to be so honored.

The translators and publishers of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories take their title from a volume Kawabata published in the 1920s, at the beginning of his career, though this collection includes stories of similar scope that he wrote throughout his life; the final piece here is dated 1972, the year of his suicide.

Better than half the stories date from the '20s and all of them are extremely brief, few running over three pages in length. The longest is the last, entitled "Gleanings from Snow Country," a nine-page distillation of one of Kawabata's best-known novels.

As would be expected, these stories are distinguished by their remarkable compression and poem-like intensity of imagery and symbolism. Yet for all their brevity they are resonant with meaning and import, exhibiting how Kawabata was able "to endow a small space with spaciousness," as translator lane Dunlop notes in his share of the introduction. Kawabata himself said of them, "Many writers, in their youth, write poetry; I, in my youth, wrote The Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. The other translator, J. Martin Holman, suggests that these short pieces may have been Kawabata's most natural form of expression and that—like renga, the traditional Japanese form of linked verses—his longer works are constructed of these basic units.

During his lifetime Kawabata was considered something of a traditionalist, and much of his work seems concerned with perpetuating familiar Japanese themes and modes of expression, while still faithfully capturing his vision of contemporary Japanese life. That vision is not a particularly sunny one, and it grew darker with time—especially after Japan's defeat in World War II and subsequent westernization extinguished or perverted ever more of its traditional culture.

These stories are not limited to any particular subject matter, but all except one are set in Japan, and certain settings and images recur, such as the hot-spring inn (which, as another translator, Edward Seidensticker, has said, often offers "special delights for the unaccompanied gentleman"), the harbor town, women's hairdos and, particularly, pairs of lovers and spouses.

If Kawabata has a favorite subject here, it is probably love and its vicissitudes. About marriage he sometimes reads like a Japanese John Cheever, and nowhere more so than in "The Rainy Station," wherein two wives and old rivals, awaiting their husbands at a suburban train station, try to one-up each other upon meeting for the first time in years.

In another story, "The White Flower," a young girl is advised by an older woman to "Take care in marriage. It wouldn't do to have someone too strong. A man who looks weak, with no diseases and a pale complexion, would be all right. . . someone who always sits properly, doesn't drink, and smiles a lot." This poor girl keeps finding herself about to succumb to the charms of various suitors, only to lose interest as they take an inevitable wrong step in their pursuit of her. One, a writer, asks her to "put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words. . . ."

Where that writer failed in his courtship, Kawabata has succeeded. These stories are jewels, indeed, each one a soul, a life, or a whole world distilled to palm-sized proportions.