I’ll have to look up that Morse book (I’m sure the library has a copy). I tend to picture all the homes in Kawabata through the lens of Ozu films.

I was reading the Archipelago press collection of Akutagawa, a gift from Will:
http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/

When I stumbled across him at work and thought that he sounded interesting the work that I chose to pick up to introduce myself to him was the Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, which it sounds like you would really love. They’re distillations of stories down to their very essence, most taking place over a single scene or, in some cases, single dream. Apparently he wrote them instead of poetry all throughout his life, and claimed that they were his ideal format.

The book that I was reading concurrently was Edward Morse’s 1886 text, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, published by Dover and, if it’s filed elsewhere as it is in my bookstore, in the architecture section of your local book dealer. It’s a great accompaniment, lavishly illustrated and extremely educational, not to mention entertaining. The time periods don’t exactly match up to Kawabata’s work, but I figured since Kawabata seemed to write more about the countryside than the cities that his settings were likely to be more traditional, and thus in keeping with what Morse so precisely and wonderfully describes and illustrates.

Did you read Penguin’s collection of Akutagawa with the great Tatsumi cover illustration (my introduction to his work), or some other collection I’m not familiar with? He’s got another collection put out by Archipelago press, which looks like a great publisher, but I’ve had a hard time working up the necessary enthusiasm to pick it up. Always so much more to get to, isn’t there?