SOURCE: A review of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 1, Winter, 1990, p. 197.

In the following review, DeVere Brown praises the spare style of Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

Kawabata's masterpiece, the novel Snow Country, is written in a spare, elliptical style. It seems as abbreviated as a work of literature can possibly be—until one reads the author's "palm-of-the-hand stories," which often tell a story or evoke an image in less than a page. "Gleanings from Snow Country," indeed, presents the highlights of the novel in a series of haiku-like images in five pages. That is much longer than the usual story, however.

Most of the selections juxtapose two images in less than a page and reveal a story by indirection. If Japanese literature requires much of its readers because it relies on suggestion rather than graphic detail and because resolution of the plot is incomplete, then the...