PALM-OF-THE-HAND STORIES <i> by Yasunari Kawabata Translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman (North Point Press: $9.95)</i>

This collection of brief, spare stories spans the author’s long career, from 1923 until his suicide in 1972. The miniature tale, one to three pages in length, seems to have been Yasunari Kawabata’s basic unit of composition: His novels resemble chains of linked stories. The brief vignettes in this collection echo the themes of his longer works: love and its attendant sorrows, loneliness, the passage of time and its inevitable effects on the human heart.

Kawabata writes as a perpetual outsider, observing the innocent beauty of children at play in “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket” or the complex sorrows of a widower contemplating the birds his mistress gave him but his wife cared for in “Canaries.” Brief but poignant, these tiny slivers of unhappy lives suggest the whole of human existence, as the crescent moon suggests the orb. An excellent introduction for American readers to the work of Japan’s only Nobel Prize winner.