SOURCE: A review of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 4, November 1989, pp. 865-66.

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...