Yasunari Kawabata

J. Martin Holman

Lane Dunlop

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata felt the essence of his art was to be found not in his longer works but in a series of short-stories which he called Palm-of-the-hand-stories - written over the span of his career. In them we find loneliness, love and the passage of time, demonstrating the range and complexity of a true master.

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Alan Tansman

Kawabata, Akutagawa and More

Best Japanese Short Stories : Works by 14 Modern Masters

Twenty-One Stories from the Japanese

A Late Chrysanthemum

Francis Ponge

In this work, begun during the German occupation, the eminent French poet and philosopher began to turn away from the small, perfect poem toward a much more open form, a kind of prose poem that recounted its own process of coming into being along with the final result.

Soap

"Lane Dunlop's translations read elegantly, and his selection of modern Japanese Stories is both fresh and persuasive." —Donald Keene, Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. The fourteen distinct voices of this collection tell fourteen very different stories spanning sixty years of twentieth-century Japanese literature. They include a nostalgic portrait of an aristocratic Meiji family in Kafu Nagai's "The Fox," a surprisingly cheerful celebration of postwar chaos in Sakaguchi Ango's "One Woman and the War," a chilly assessment of the modern society in Watanabe Junichi's "Invitation to Suicide," and much more. The writers also represent a wide spectrum, from renowned figure of Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the Noble Prize for Literature in 1968, to authors whose works have never before been translated into English. Westerners familiar only with stereotypical images of bowing geisha and dark-suited businessmen will be surprised by the cast of characters translator Lane Dunlop introduces in this anthology. Lovers of fiction and student of Japan are certain to find these stories absorbing, engaging and instructive.

Autumn Wind & Other Stories

Lane Dunlop

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