Seventeen Syllables

“Seventeen Syllables” is told in a third-person limited point of view. It is limited because the reader is privy to the interiority of Rosie and no other characters. While Yamamoto does not stray from this structure, she complicates an assumption many readers have regarding limited points of view: that the character whose point of view the story is told through is necessarily the story’s central protagonist. Rosie is one protagonist in Yamamoto’s story, but Tome is a protagonist, too, despite the reader never learning her thoughts. Arguably, Tome is the story’s more central protagonist, and the narrative arc of her haiku career is the more primary plot. Rosie’s experiences with Jesus serve as more of a lens through which Tome’s story is understood, emphasizing the disconnect between mother and daughter. At the end of the story, when Rosie’s romance becomes thematically linked to Tome’s own teenage romance, there is a brief but ultimately unsuccessful moment when their points of view might merge.

Parallelism refers to the intentional repetition of structural elements in a story to draw connections between separate words, sentences, moments, or events.