Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

[3] Often, the stories focus "on feelings rather than understanding", presenting "the chaos of the human heart", and depict "epiphanies, transformations and revelations".

[2] Kawabata reportedly claimed to feel most at ease with the short-story form[3] and explained that, while other writers tended to writing poetry in their early years, he wrote his Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

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.

[2][5][6] 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.

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).