2009 books
47) Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988
Seventy miniature short stories that Kawabata wrote between 1923 and 1972. It's said the essence of Kawabata's writing can be found in these brief episodes in Japanese lives more so than in his novels, but in truth they often feel like fragments of larger stories that Kawabata may have discarded then stripped down to their absolute minimum. Many end with a character staring into the distance, perhaps wondering something, or with an unresolved issue still hanging uncomfortably in the reader's mind, but there's also a sense of give-and-take here because while Kawabata often goes for the minimalist effect he's also careful not to remove the points and markers that can give his characters an often luminous form. It's interesting to read short stories composed differently from the way I'm used to experiencing them, though I'm still left with a small sense of dissatisfaction with most, apart from those nearer the end of the book where Kawabata rounds his stories off with more depth: best of all is the brief, impressive ghost story 'Immortality', the imaginative flourish of 'Snow', and 'Gleanings from Snow Country', loosely connected to his famous novel Snow Country. Enjoyable, but too often too slight.