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Yasunari Kawabata. The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories. J. Martin Holman, tr. Washington, D.C. Counterpoint. 1997. x + 160 pages. $22. ISBN 1-887178-14-7.
There will doubtless be some readers who wonder whether yet another translation of The Dancing Girl of Izu, the 1926 work that brought Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) to prominence, is really necessary. Those familiar with Edward Seidensticker's 1954 translation (The Izu Dancer), notable for its disquieting omissions, will find Martin Holman's rendition refreshingly complete; however, the "Translator's Note," in which Holman claims that this is the "first unabridged English translation of . . . `The Dancing Girl of Izu'," is now technically inaccurate (see the review of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories in WLT 71:4, p. 872). This minor point notwithstanding, his offering is sufficiently...