Seventeen Syllables

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Seventeen Syllables
The Work
“Seventeen Syllables,” Hisaye Yamamoto’s most acclaimed short story, combines a number of themes that
appear frequently in her fiction. These themes include: the difficulties faced by Japanese immigrants to the
United States, the cultural separation between these immigrants and their children, and the restrictions
experienced by Japanese American women within traditional Japanese culture. Important for an understanding
of the story are some facts about the Japanese immigrant experience in America. Although the United States
welcomed Japanese immigrants after 1885, immigration was stopped with the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924.
Many of the first Japanese immigrants were unmarried men, who saved their earnings and sent back to Japan
for brides they knew only through letters and photographs. Many of these married couples proved
incompatible and were forced to make the best of an unsuitable marriage, keeping their problems concealed
from the children. The Alien Land Act of 1913 prohibited Japanese immigrants from buying or leasing land
for a period of more than three years. Since one-half of the immigrants lived in rural areas, the law forced
families to move constantly and dispersed them often. A Japanese woman frequently had no other woman in
whom to confide. In spite of these hardships, literature flourished and many immigrants wrote traditional
Japanese poetry.

Yamamoto’s story deals with these concerns through a device used often by Yamamoto, the double plot. On
one level the plot concerns the adolescent Rosie Hayashi and her secret plan to meet Jesus Carrasco, a
member of a Mexican family hired for the harvest. Rosie’s inability to speak much Japanese and her failure
to understand the interest her mother, Tome, takes in writing haiku, which she submits weekly to a
Japanese-language paper in San Francisco, highlight the cultural and intergenerational differences between
them. In the midst of the tomato harvest, when all workers are desperately needed, the editor arrives with a
prize for Tome’s poetry, a print by Hiroshige. Angry, her husband burns the picture. Tome reveals to Rosie
that she has married her husband as an alternative to suicide. Rejected by a well-to-do lover, she had given
birth to a stillborn son. An aunt in the United States arranged the marriage. Disappointed and disillusioned,
Tome asks Rosie to promise never to marry at a time Rosie is experiencing the blissful promise of young
romance. The story is a carefully nuanced and technically sophisticated combination of ethnic, feminist, and
intergenerational concerns.

Suggested Readings
Cheung, King-Kok. “Double-Telling: Intertextual Silence in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Fiction.” American
Literary History 3, no. 2 (1991): 277-293.

Cheung, King-Kok, ed. Seventeen Syllables. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

Seventeen Syllables 1
Yogi, Stan. Legacies Revealed: Uncovering Buried Plots in the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto. Studies in
American Fiction 17, no. 2 (1989): 169-181.

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Suggested Readings 2