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Title	:	The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories
Author	:	Yasunari Kawabata
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 176 pages
Published	:	August 29th 1998 by Counterpoint (first published January 1st 1926)
Categories	:	Cultural. Japan. Short Stories. Fiction. Asian Literature. Japanese Literature. Classics. Asia

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

Yasunari Kawabata

Paperback | Pages: 176 pages

Rating: 3.77 | 2195 Users | 155 Reviews

Description To Books The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

This book (I read the ebook) consists of four short stories; the first, the story of the title, is by Kawabata; the other three are by Inoue. All four are exceptionally different in theme.



In The Izu Dancer a male university student is bumming around in the summer and falls in love with a young dancer and drummer in a group of traveling performers. He joins up with them just to have company while he travels. Apparently itinerant performers were considered low-class as they act honored to have the student with them. The time period is uncertain because it seemed to me an ancient time – traveling by foot on dirt roads and drinking from streams – but then the young girl asks him to take her to a movie. So perhaps early 1900’s? At the public baths he discovers the girl is really a child and the girl’s mother won’t let him take her to a movie. It’s a love that cannot be and as such reminds me of poignant moments in Death in Venice, where the older German man is pursuing a young boy, or the moment in Colm Toibin’s The Master when Henry James waits outside a young man’s window and turns away…

I thought the best story in the book was also the longest and most developed. The Counterfeiter is about a man hired by the family of a famous deceased artist to write his biography. The man has been writing this biography on and off over ten years (! – interrupted by WW II, but still!). As he visits private homes where his subject’s scroll paintings are housed, he learns many are counterfeit. His real interest shifts to the counterfeiter. In the introduction, we are told that Inoue’s work had themes of orphanhood, loneliness, fate, predestination, the arts, newspaper writing and his home province of the Izu Peninsula. All of these work their way into the story.



In Obasute we learn that there is an ancient Japanese myth or legend about taking elderly people (over 70, so I’m eligible) to the top of this mountain and leaving them to die. There is a mountain in Japan, Mt. Kamuriki, the story is about, and it has been renamed from Ubasate which apparently means something like “leaving to die.” Anyway, this story is focused on how a family deals with their elderly mother who starts talking about “it’s time to carry me up Obasute.”

The Full Moon is about office politics in corporate Japan. The CEO or President has just been fired by the board. The incoming president surrounds himself with sycophants and mistresses just as the former president did. It’s about money, power, women and decorations (awards) in that order. The outcome is predictable.



I usually write a brief note about the author(s). The book is oddly structured with one story by Kawabata and three by Inoue. The book gives us an introduction and a brief biography of Inoue but nothing about Kawabata. So I looked up Kawabata on Wiki and discovered a lot of info that matches that given in the biographical info about Inoue – that Kawabata was the son of an army physician, orphaned at an early age, and raised by a grandmother on the Izu Peninsula south of Tokyo. But that’s the same info given for Inoue in the translator’s intro! Then I started thinking that maybe Inoue was a penname that Kawabata had used in the past --- look at the similarities in their first names: Yasunari and Yasushi. But no, they have different birth and death dates. (Kawabata 1899-1972; Inoue 1907-1991. Apparently no one carried them up the mountain.) Could the translator have been so sloppy that he mixed up Inoue's bibliographical information with Kawabata's? Or more likely, Wiki is mixed up? After an hour of trying to figure it out, I gave up. Hopefully the pictures I used are accurate.



A landscape on the Izu Peninsula from
A scroll of "Old Japan Dying Cave" from alchetron.com/cdn/ubasute
Yasunari Kawabata from nobelprize.org
Yasuushi Inoue from Goodreads

Describe Books As The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

Original Title:	Izu no odoriko 伊豆の踊子
ISBN:	1887178945 (ISBN13: 9781887178945)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	Japan

Rating Containing Books The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

Ratings: 3.77 From 2195 Users | 155 Reviews

Discuss Containing Books The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

I only like a few of the "palm of the hand" stories that make up the second half of this book, but I still have to give the 4 stars because of how much I love the title story (The dancing girl of Izu), which I've read now maybe 4, 5, or 6 times in the last 25 years. One of my favorite short stories of all time for sure, and I would definitely give it 5 stars if it were published by itself.

Everytime i read for "Yasunari Kawabata" i got that feeling of being impressed and depressed at the same time ... there was a dark shadows that haunted me for days after reading this book, now that i also read for "Natsume Soseki" and " Yokio Mishima" i started to believe its a Japanese thing.

This is a collection of short stories by Kawabata. The title of the book comes from the first story called "The Dancing Girl of Izu"In general all of the stories had a strange feeling, very distant from me and yet very human. I enjoyed all of them quite a lot. I don't think this is for everyone though.Be well folks <3

This book (I read the ebook) consists of four short stories; the first, the story of the title, is by Kawabata; the other three are by Inoue. All four are exceptionally different in theme. In The Izu Dancer a male university student is bumming around in the summer and falls in love with a young dancer and drummer in a group of traveling performers. He joins up with them just to have company while he travels. Apparently itinerant performers were considered low-class as they act honored to have

I originally read Kawabata's story "The Dancing Girl of Izu" about an year ago as a separate work from this particular book. The story has to do with the interactions between a young male student from Tokyo, and a small group of travelling performers that he meets while touring the Izu Peninsula. The student falls in love with a girl from the group and only later realizes that she's actually a child, so she's not "of age" yet (I'm not sure how the student failed to notice that from the start).

Unfortunately this did not resonate with me, I felt very indifferent about this collection of short stories. This is not a fault of the author however, as I am starting to quickly understand that I simply do not particularly enjoy reading short stories. I must say however, that despite this i did enjoy the first story, 'The Dancing Girl of Izu' and can appreciate the author's writing style and what he was trying to achieve with most of his written pieces.

Real rating: 9.8/10This story may not be Kawabata's legacy or his great masterpiece, but it is Kawabata doing what he does best. The tale of a man uncertain with his life going to onsens. The writing and prose is an imagists dream and it flows with a simplistic structure that drives home the reality of all those involved in the tale. It is reality or as close to it as fiction can be before it drifts off into the doldrums of overly stylized journalism, that ironically bears only the faintest