SOURCE: Palmer, Thom. “The Asymmetrical Garden.” Southwest Review 74, no. 3 (summer 1989): 390-402.

In the following essay, Palmer emphasizes the importance of Kawabata's “palm-of-the-hand” short stories to his fictional oeuvre.

In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Concerning this unprecedented citation, Professor Donald Keene, in his gargantuan work of scholarship, Dawn To The West (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), writes: “The Japanese public was naturally delighted to learn of the award, though surprise was expressed that a writer who was difficult to understand even for Japanese should have been so appreciated abroad.”

While it seems an odd instance of refreshing insight that the Swedish Academy (emphatically Occidental in literary sensibility, at least until 1968), chose Kawabata, one of the most scrupulously traditional of modern Japanese writers, the greater likelihood is that the selection was influenced more by timing than by appreciation. One story maintains...