First Snow on Fuji

Marking the 100th anniversary of Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Kawabata's (Thousand Cranes) birth, this is the first English edition of these eight stories and one play, originally published in Japan in 1958. All are accomplished pieces written late in the author's career. In ""This Country, That Country,"" a housewife named Takako hides a newspaper story on spouse-swapping, a subject of her fantasies, from her husband. The bond between desire and the act of hiding, the existential side of perversion, fascinates Kawabata. He composes his short fictions of seemingly disparate elements, leaving it to the reader to find the organic connection. On the way to visit a colleague and friend who can neither move nor speak after a stroke, the writer who narrates ""Silence"" hears from his taxi driver that the ghost of a beautiful woman has been appearing in cabs in the area. At the house of his friend, Omiya Akifusa, the narrator observes the strange attitude that Akifusa's daughter Tomiko has toward her bedridden father--a mixture of love and spite. With ""the voice of a woman in hell,"" Tomiko reveals that she may write about her father's many affairs, and the appalled narrator, who feels that Akifusa is now ""a sort of living ghost,"" believes that Tomiko may have been ""possessed by something in him."" The cab driver on the way back tells the narrator that he is sitting next to the female ghost, although he doesn't see her. This Jamesian interplay between the limits of perception and the insufficiency of action is further explored in ""Her Husband Didn't."" Outside the bounds of decorum, the story's adulterous lovers are still baffled by the incommunicability of desire. Junji's fetish for earlobes and his disappointment with Kiriko's ears throw the couple's entire relationship off balance. For readers who have never read Kawabata, these short stories are an excellent place to start. First serial (""Her Husband Didn't"") to Tin House. (Sept.)