Yasunari Kawabata Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Martin lebowitz

Critical Essay by Martin lebowitz

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

In the essay below, lebowitz maintains that the compression of detail in the stories in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is reflective of aspects of both primitivism and sophistication in Japanese culture.

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...
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