Books like Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Seventy very short stories Kawabata wrote across his life, few longer than two pages, of chance meetings, love, death and the turning seasons.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
The Dancing Girl of Izu
Stories from Kawabata's early career, among them a lonely Tokyo student who falls in with a family of travelling performers on the Izu peninsula and is drawn to their young dancer.
The Lake
Gimpei Momoi, a former teacher who lost his job after an affair with a pupil, can't stop following women he sees in the street, and his memories drift back to a lake of his childhood.
Dark Avenues
Bunin's late stories of love, almost all of it brief, secret or ruined, set in the Russia of country estates, inns and railway stations he had lost.
First Person Singular
Eight first-person stories in which an ageing narrator looks back on youth and chance encounters, from a talking monkey who scrubs his back at a hot-spring inn to a jazz record that should not exist.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Twenty-four stories from across his career, among them a waitress granted one wish on her twentieth birthday and a monkey in Shinagawa that steals people's names.
Taipei People
Stories of mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan in 1949, generals, courtesans and servants, living on memories of the lives they lost.
The Life of Arseniev
Alexei Arseniev, the last son of a declining gentry family, recalls his childhood on a Russian estate, his schooling and his first love, in a novel close to Bunin's own life.
The Bread of Those Early Years
Walter Fendrich, who went hungry in the bombed-out cities after the war and now has money and a girlfriend, is sent to meet a girl from his home town at the station and falls for her on sight.
Love in a Fallen City
Stories of love and money in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s; in the title novella, a divorced woman goes to Hong Kong to win a rich playboy, and the Japanese attack.
The Street of Crocodiles
A son mythologises his father and their provincial Polish town in hallucinatory prose.
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
Eighteen stories by the father of the Japanese short story, among them a servant sheltering from the rain in a ruined city gate and conflicting testimony about a killing in a grove.
Ru
In short, luminous fragments, a woman remembers her childhood in Saigon, her flight from Vietnam by boat, a refugee camp in Malaysia and her new life in Quebec.