Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
- Jul 2, 2022
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
Yasunari Kawabata considered the essence of his art lay not in his longer works but in the 146 short stories he wrote during the course of his long career. He called these Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. This collection, containing 70 of them, was the first substantial volume to be published in English. I acquired a copy during the late nineties when I lived in the Bay Area and moved it, unread, to Kansas City, where I continued to move it, still unread, from place to place to place for nearly two decades—while, curiously, managing to read most of Kawabata’s full-length novels. Eventually, when I was forced to reconsider why and how books made their way onto my shelves, I traded it in but not before hedging with a scanned PDF for when the time came to finally, at long last, read it.
Kawabata is certainly entitled to the opinion that his “palm-of-the-hand stories” are the ultimate expression of his art. All of the characteristic traits one might call “Kawabataesque” can be found within, and there is much for the Kawabata lover to enjoy. For me, essence, however distilled or concentrated, doesn’t necessarily translate into potency. These stories come across as little more than curios, tasty bites that ultimately prove unsatisfying because they’re gone before you’ve had a chance to savor them. I had hoped, then, that the whole would prove greater than the sum of its parts. In some ways it does, giving the stories a gravitational pull that, taken separately, might get lost to the wind. In others, it does not. I wonder if I had chosen to approach these more like poems and read them singly, one per day or perhaps one in the morning and one in the evening, whether each might have an emotional heft that a cover-to-cover reading did not allow for. It’s an interesting thought, but I think I’ll dismiss it: to do otherwise would be to elevate these short stories above their modest station.
Comments