[In the essay below, lebowitz maintains that the compression of detail in the stories in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is reflective of aspects of both primitivism and sophistication in Japanese culture.]

If, as historians have noted, giantism is an aspect of decadence, miniaturization—emblematic of love, tenacity, and control—expresses the mystique or teleology of a humane society. These stories [in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories] are rarely more than four pages in length. The particularity and concreteness of the Japanese mentality reflect a sort of primitive vitalism or vitality. Still, it is correct to say of all liberal, humane, and progressive societies that they embody, along with pristine elements of energy, formal prototypes that are civilizing in their implications and effect. So far as miniaturization partakes of the primeval energy of things, it reflects elements at once of primitivism and sophistication. One is tempted to say that the combination of these two factors defines civilization, as opposed, for one thing, to decadence.

In one of these stories, a character remarks that the girl he loves is remembered well, but only by his finger (!). Human association—"love"—particularly in our time, contains something so casual that it is nothing as much as physical or material contact. It is not simply violence or sex that accounts for such events but the random character of modern experience in which the immanence and imminence of disorder impart a physical ascendency to romanticism itself. romantic materialism as an aspect of modernity is a notable subject, quite relevant here.

In the same story, snow is symbolic of repression. The woman in this story has "cold hair," and the hero is psychologically cold. This "coldness" reflects something essential to an advanced or cultivated association—the creative dialectic of passion and repression—plus that formal principle essential to functional progress. The elusive question is what here to define as primitive.

Kawabata died in April 1972, a suicide. A Nobel laureate (1968), his controlling themes are loneliness, love, time as something concrete both for the mystic and the rationalist, and perhaps above all death. Death for the Japanese mentality, as mystical as it is rationalistic, becomes a sort obsession for Kawabata, in respect to the tone of his writings and its pervasive overtones. Its overtones become a subject matter, and death is a controlling theme.

The publisher prints one of the stories on the dust jacket, called "love Suicides." The protagonist takes a dislike to his wife and deserts her. Two years later, a letter comes from a distant land, saying, "Don't let the child bounce a rubber ball. It strikes at my heart." The wife complies. More and more letters come making similar requests. The wife continues to comply. Finally a letter from a different land insists, "don't make any sound at all, the two of you, not even the ticking of a clock!" Thus they cease eternally to make even the faintest sound. The husband lies down, curiously, beside them and dies, too.

On a prosaic level the theme is that husband and wife never parted, overcome rather by a fatal disenchantment or spell. The true theme is that the incongruity or ambivalence of so-called interpersonal relations is itself a type of suicide.

An old lady planning to sell her daughter to a strange man, possibly brutal and oppressive, confronts the bus driver who is to take them to their destination. The bus driver is the incarnation of courtesy and graciousness, and the lady remarks, "So it's your turn today . . . If she has you to take her there, Mr. Thankyou, she is likely to meet with good fortune. It's a sign that something good will happen." Is the view expressed here based on psychology, metaphysics, superstition, or mysticism? Or is it based on naturalism? Naturalism, too, is an effort to integrate moral and existential considerations. It is the philosophy of the Orient, particularly Japan and China, that suggests that the cultivated personality has it all over intellectualism as such.

The culture of the Orient, based on formalism, repression, and teleology, is highly cultivated but not lacking in primitive overtones. This is a combination of attributes that may define the quality of humanistic society in any age. Yet again, it is not easy to define what, if anything, in this context is truly primitive.

Primitivism is a static relation to the past, an incarceration in the past. Primitivism may be defined as the opposite of moral development, which may be synonymous with development itself. Thus the question whether the culture of Japan is primitive or not—or in what degree—is not that easy. One might note that the alterations introduced by science are existential rather than moral, although they sometimes have more effects.

No doubt the cultures of Japan and China defy the conventional categories of primitive or retrograde as against progressive and enlightened. The essence of Japanese culture is sufficiently "advanced" without being decidedly humane to be better than much in the West. Without being truly liberal or "forward-looking," some cultures may be superior to others that are.