“Palm-of-the-hand Stories” Yasunari Kawabata

I bought “Palm-of-the-hand Stories” more than a decade ago, and the book has been on my reading for years, but was always nudged out by others. I had gotten to the point where I found short stories unsatisfying, but I thought a book of stories as short as Kawabata’s would be different; they are sometimes only one-page long and rarely more than 4 pages. My dissatisfaction in short stories lay mostly in the inability to continue reading more about the same characters, so if a story was so short that I could not develop an attachment to it, maybe that would be okay. I have come to enjoy short stories again, and have recently read several collections. I am particularly looking forward to “Olive Kitteredge,” because the stories have a common theme. I think that will give me greater satisfaction than a series of disjointed stories. Both Tom Boddett in his End-of-the-Road Alaska stories and Annie Proulx in her Wyoming stories have recurring characters, an aspect I like. I am currently reading William Faulkner’s “Collected Stories” and find he also has recurring characters, likable or not.

When I first ate sushi, my friends said to savor the taste of each type of fish by cleansing my pallet with pickled ginger and rice. Eating too much sushi one right after the other is a waste of the taste, and I might as well be eating Mom’s tuna casserole. I think the stories of Kawabata are the same. To sit down and read the book all in one go is the wrong way to do it, and I actually think the wrong way to read any collection of short stories. Each story must be savored and then the pallet cleansed before going on. Thus, I approached Kawabata’s book in that way, reading a story and then going off to do something else for awhile. To be honest, “Palm-of-the-hand Stories” was my bathroom book, so I read a story each time I make a pit stop. So, if you’re not interested in borrowing my copy of Kawabata, I’ll understand.

I didn’t understand all of the stories. Kawabata is able to describe a scene, the people and the action in short order, but I don’t think it is the brevity of the stories that keeps me from getting them; I think is it a lack of understanding of the motivations of the people. For example, in “Thank you,” written in 1927, a woman is taking her daughter on a 35-mile bus ride over the mountains to a harbor town to sell her. The bus driver is polite to the non-motorized traffic along the road, and every time he passes a cart or horse-drawn carriage, he is sure to say, “Thank You.” As a result, the mother has a change of heart and takes her daughter back home the next day with the same bus driver saying that she will wait until spring to sell her daughter. I was hoping that the daughter and the bus driver would get together, but that doesn’t seem to be the gist of the story, and would not profit the mother. Was it simply the courtesy that he showed the other people on the road that caused the change of heart? Is it really a change of heart to postpone the inevitable?

Other stories are straightforward, like “The Hat Incident.” In this story, a man drops his hat into a pond, and he is harassed by another man to reach in for it. The man says the hat is of no value, and he can buy another, but his antagonist insists that he will hold on to the man while he reaches for the hat. The man reaches and is dropped into the water, and the man holding him disappears. It is explained that a goblin of the pond often uses this device to play jokes on people.

One of the funniest, and hence most memorable stories, is about a farming community that was inundated with tourists in the fall who came to look at the changing leaves. These tourists needed a restroom, so after being annoyed by people asking to use the facilities, one man built a washroom and asked for money to use it. Not to be out done, another man spent a lot of money to build a mansion of a bathroom and planned to charge three times the going price (pun intended). His wife was doubtful that the tourists would choose his more expensive pit stop over the other, but one day he told her that he was going out and the tourists would start coming by later. Sure enough, people started coming by and paying the higher price. This went on all day long, and she wondered what had happened to her husband. Late into the night he still hadn’t returned. His “advertising” scheme was to go to the other outhouse and stay there all day. He kept making bathroom-type noises so people would know he was there, and the effort caused him to grow weak and die. He was lauded in the country for his most creative method of committing suicide.

Many of the stories are about people trying to make up their minds---about who to marry, what career to take, what to do about one’s children, etc. The later stories seem to be dreams. Kawabata lost all the members of his family by the time he was 15, and in his stories you can see some of the questions that have to be answered by someone who loses those connections at a young age. There are also questions of death and suicide in his stories. In one story, a woman and her child die when her estranged husband writes a letter saying that all the noise that they make in their daily lives is tormenting him. Kawabata committed suicide, or so it is believed, in 1972 when he was almost 73. I couldn’t help looking for insight into his death in the stories.

Kawabata was the first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. These stories were written from 1923 to 1972, the years between his matriculation into college and his death, so they span his entire literary career. Besides these stories, he wrote well known novels. I found it interesting that the novels he was recognized for as part of the Nobel do not contain the novel that he thought was his best one. This is one reason I like to listen to books read by the author; other’s interpretation of a work and their view of the impact of the work differ from the author’s, and I like hearing the inside story. I read somewhere, either on-line on in the introduction of the book, I can’t remember, but I read that he thought the true work of a writer was not the novels he wrote but poetry or short stories written throughout the span of his lifetime. If true, then this book is his true work.