SOURCE: "Small Lanterns," in American Book Review, Vol. 10, No. 6, January/February, 1989, p. 15.

In the following review, Smock calls Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories one of "those dozen or so volumes necessary to life."

Somewhere in my future is a small, simple apartment, maybe a couple of rooms near the sea somewhere, with high windows and a fireplace. On the mantel over the fireplace is a small stack of books, the only books in the place, those dozen or so volumes necessary to life. One of those books is Yasunari Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

These very short stories, which span his writing life, are the distillation of a beautiful talent. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 for his novels, The Izu Dancer, Thousand Cranes, Snow Country, and the others, which were so important to Japan's modern literature. But Kawabata believed that the very short story—the story that fits into...