thumb|First edition (publ. 新潮文庫)
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is the name Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata gave to the type of short stories he wrote during his long career. The earliest of these stories were published in the early 1920s, with the last appearing posthumously in 1972.
The first Japanese collection under this title appeared in 1952 and contained 100 stories in two volumes. In 1971, an expanded edition was published with 111 stories, and in 1989 there was a further expansion with 122 stories (based on the 1981 publication of Kawabata's complete works). Some scholars have classified as many as 146 such stories in total.
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 stories, which 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).
Love Suicides was adapted into a 2009 short film of the same title by Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo. Later in the same year, Yeo adapted Canaries into a short film Kingyo (replacing canaries with goldfish), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.