Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (掌の小説, Tanagokoro no Shōsetsu?) is the name Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata gave to more than 140 short stories he wrote over his long career, the earliest published in the 1920 and the last appearing posthumously in 1972. The stories are characterized by their brevity – some less than a page long – and their dramatic concision.
Although scattered individual stories had previously appeared in English, in 1988 Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman published the first substantial volume of English translations, a total of 70 stories drawn from the period of almost 50 years from 1922 until Kawabata's death in 1972, as Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Dunlop and Holman's collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux under the North Point Press imprint in 2006.
In 1998, Holman's translations of another 20 of the palm-of-the-hand stories that had been published originally in Japanese before 1930 appeared in the book, The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories, published by Counterpoint Press.
A more common reading of the Japanese 掌の小説 is "tenohira no shōsetsu" used in most publications, but Kawabata is said to have preferred the reading "tanagokoro no shōsetsu".
Famous quotes containing the word stories:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)