SOURCE: "A Man and the Idea of a Woman," in The New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1972, p. 11.

In the following review, Ury praises the stories in Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

A woman, breaking with her married lover, gives him a pair of canaries as a memento of their affair. The birds, which initially had been placed in the same cage by the bird seller through chance and are now unable to survive without each other, come to symbolize for the lover his relationship with his wife, who had cared for the birds and averted her eyes from his affair. Now that she is dead, the husband writes to his former mistress asking her permission to kill the birds and bury them with his wife. In another story, a man who has taken an aversion to his wife and left her, sends a series of letters from ever more...