SOURCE: "The Mysterious East," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 67, No. 4, Autumn, 1991, pp. 778-79.

In the following essay, Lebowitz discusses the prevalent themes in Kawabata's The Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, and how their compactness "reflects elements at once of primitivism and sophistication."

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...