DATE: Sunday, November 2, 1997              TAG: 9710230678

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY ELIZA HOOVER 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

A YOUNG MAN'S SIMPLE YET POWERFUL GAZE

THE DANCING GIRL OF IZU

And Other Stories

YASUNARI KAWABATA

TRANSLATED BY J. MARTIN HOLMAN

Counterpoint. 160 pp. $22.

Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of Thousand Cranes and Snow Country, was 72 when he committed suicide in 1972. The stories in The Dancing Girl of Izu were all written, or reworked, when Kawabata was in his 20s.

The title story, a poetic, autobiographical one about a young man's travels and infatuation with a beautiful, young, itinerant drummer girl, was first published in Japan when Kawabata was 25; it appears here in its first unabridged English translation. Most of the other stories in the collection are ``palm-of-the-hand'' stories (so named by the author) of two or three pages. Kawabata used this short form repeatedly, refining it during his life.

The stories have the simplicity and power of fairy tales. Kawabata is an observer in his stories, scrutinizing his characters with detachment. There is no delving into psychological explorations; instead the characters are more mythic and one-dimensional than real, used by Kawabata to probe his own interior landscape and his interest in the themes of life, loss, death, memory, love.

The stories were clearly written by a sensitive man who turned inward at a young age, presumably because of the tragedies in his early life. Kawabata lost both his parents when he was 3, a grandmother and sister shortly thereafter, and then the blind grandfather with whom he lived as a boy.

There is more than a trace of youthful superiority in these stories, particularly in regard to the female characters, hardly surprising considering the dates of the stories (1920s) and the historic place of women in Japanese culture. The women appear as mounted butterflies, pinned by the author's gaze to their roles, their movements and actions directed in stylized fashion by their creator. They have little substance and warmth of their own, and do not exist apart from his gaze.

In ``A Prayer in the Mother Tongue,'' a woman returns to the hometown of a former lover to commit suicide. The young man expresses ``such irritation and anger you would think he wanted to kick the body.'' He is furious because she ``never could escape me,'' perhaps mirroring young Kawabata's own aversion to attachment.

Kawabata's male figures are clearly autobiographical. In ``The Master of Funerals,'' he depicts his sense of separateness from others, and his preoccupation with his inner life. The young Kawabata is asked by many relatives to be the family representative at funerals because of his solitary, pious manner. Each funeral presents him the opportunity to grieve his own early losses.

In most of the stories, Kawabata's honest and open voice redeems his youthful egocentricity, as in ``Diary of My Sixteenth Year,'' reworked in his 27th year, in which he admits his aversion to the physical deterioration of his dying grandfather while berating himself for his lack of compassion. In this story, he proves adept at examining the relationship between memory and imagination.

Many of these stories take flight with a poetry and an imagery that remain long after the story is gone, as in ``The Setting Sun,'' where Kawabata sketches vignettes of a small village as the sun goes down. Without knowing anything more about the eventual Nobel Prize-winning author, these stories alone would move the reader to search for his later writings. MEMO: Eliza Williams Hoover is a writer and attorney/mediator living in

Cape Charles on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

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