The Dancing Girl of Izu

[7] The narrator, a twenty-year-old[8] student from Tokyo, travels the Izu Peninsula during the last days of the summer holidays, a journey which he undertook out of a feeling of loneliness and melancholia.

After traversing the tunnel, Eikichi, the troupe's male leader, starts a conversation with him, telling him that he and his companions are from Ōshima Island and on a short tour before the cold season sets in.

During a walk, the student overhears Kaoru and Chiyoko saying what a nice person he is, which enlightens him and distracts him both from his melancholia and from the fact that the group are poor, uneducated people.

[7][11] Reviewing the 1997 American publication, Mark Morris in The New York Times called The Dancing Girl of Izu a "deceptively simple story […] about cleansing, purification", pointing out for one the "effacement of adult female sexuality and its replacement by an impossible white void of virginity", a common theme with Kawabata, as well as the protagonist's "personal absolution", received from people constantly living with the "stigma of social exclusion".

[12] In his review of a 2000 anthology, Donald Richie rated The Izu Dancer as Kawabata's most famous and popular work, an autobiographical and "seemingly artless […] evocation of first love itself".

[19] In 1968, Kawabata Yasunari received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind".