The Story Archive

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Yasunari Kawabata · 1971 CE · Short Story · Japanese · Contemporary

More than a hundred pieces of two or three pages each, written across nearly fifty years: a bedridden husband his wife can only see through a hand mirror, a mother carrying a dead child's ashes, a canary bought for two lovers who have since parted. Kawabata worked the form from his twenties onward and said the poetry of his youth was in it. Gathered whole the year before his death by suicide in 1972.

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