Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Style and themes. For Susan J. Napier in the "Monumenta Nipponica", Kawabata's brief stories express the facets of his novels, while at the same time "providing an intensity of focus that is the essence of Kawabata's celebrated 'haiku-esque' style", working with "evocations and suggestions". Often, the stories focus "on feelings rather than understanding", presenting "the chaos of the human heart", and depict "epiphanies, transformations and revelations". Reviewers also pointed out a "delicate lyricism" and "warmth and fragility" as well as a "cool formalism" and "sharp experimental intention and edge". Kawabata reportedly claimed  to feel most at ease with the short-story form and explained that, while other writers tended to writing poetry in their early years, he wrote his "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories". English translations. In 1988, North Point Press published the first substantial volume of English translations as "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories" (scattered individual stories had previously appeared in English). It contained a total of 70 stories drawn from the early 1920s until Kawabata's death in 1972, translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman. The stories "Japanese Anna" and "The Sea", which appeared in the 1920s, had  not been included in Dunlop's and Holman's anthology and were translated by Steve Bradbury for the Winter 1994 edition of the journal "Mānoa". In 1998, Holman's translations of another 18 of the "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories", that had been published originally in Japanese before 1930, appeared in the anthology "The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories", published by Counterpoint Press. Adaptations. The story "Thank You" was adapted for the film "Mr. Thank You" by director Hiroshi Shimizu in 1936. Four stories from "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories" were adapted for an anthology film of the  same title that premiered in October 2009 at the Tokyo International Film Festival and was officially released on 27 March 2010. The film contained the stories "The Man Who Did Not Smile", "Thank You", "Japanese Anna" and "Immortality", with each episode directed by a different director (Kishimoto Tsukasa, Miyake Nobuyuki, Tsubokawa Takushi, and Takahashi Yuya).