Seventeen Syllables

“Seventeen Syllables,” originally published in 1949 by the Partisan Review, is Hisaye Yamamoto’s most anthologized short story. Yamamoto was one of the first Japanese American authors to achieve critical and commercial success after World War II due to her celebrated short stories about life in Southern California and the experiences of Japanese Americans. Her stories were eventually published together in 1988, in a collection titled Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories released by Kitchen Table Press. This guide refers to a second edition of that collection published by Rutgers University Press in 2001.

“Seventeen Syllables” focuses on the life experiences of two Japanese American women: 15-year-old Rosie Hayashi and her mother Tome Hayashi. While the story is presented from Rosie’s limited point of view, much of the story concerns Tome’s life and the relationship between mother and daughter.

The story takes place in rural Southern California before World War II begins. Rosie lives with her parents on a tomato farm. She helps with the farm during the day and takes Japanese lessons twice a week. Tome, her mother, also works on the farm during the day. In the evenings, Tome writes haiku, a traditional Japanese form of poetry, which she submits to the San Francisco daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. For three months, she has regularly published her haiku under the pen name Ume Hanazono. Tome’s new hobby has caused tensions in the Hayashi family.

The story’s action spans only a few days. It opens with Tome reading one of her haiku to Rosie “for her daughter’s approval” (8). Rosie pretends to understand and appreciate the poem because she does not want her mother to know her Japanese comprehension is lacking. Tome, sensing that Rosie does not understand, explains the poem and the rules of haiku more generally: “a poem in which she must pack all her meaning into seventeen syllables only” (8). Rosie again only pretends to understand her mother’s lesson: “Yes, yes, I understand. How utterly lovely” (8). She reflects that it is easier to pretend than confront the fact that she and her mother rarely understand each other.

One day, the Hayashis visit their friends, the Hayano family. Although Rosie enjoys the visit with the four carefree Hayano daughters, she also observes the behavior of the four adults. Rosie notices that Mrs. Hayano, who was once “the belle of her native village” (10), now has a physical disability, while her husband remains “handsome, tall, and strong” (10). While Tome and Mr. Hayano discuss haiku, Mr. Hayashi looks at photos in Life magazine. He becomes irritated by the situation and abruptly demands they cut the visit short. Rosie notices how her mother, instead of questioning her father, apologizes for taking so long: “You know how I get when it’s haiku” (12). On the way home, Rosie feels anger at both her parents, “her mother for begging” and “her father for denying her mother” (12). She imagines the car crashing.

“Seventeen Syllables” is also a story about Rosie’s budding romance with Jesus Carrasco, the son of a Mexican family whom the Hayashis hire to help with the tomato harvest. In the middle section of the short story, Rosie and Jesus grow closer over the summer. They race to see who can harvest tomatoes faster while teasing each other. Once, Jesus frightens Rosie by putting a “pale green worm” (12) on top of her bucket of tomatoes. Then, one day, Jesus arranges for them to secretly rendezvous in a shed after work by claiming he has a secret to tell her.

That evening, Rosie’s Aunt Taka and Uncle Gimpachi are visiting, but she finds an excuse to meet Jesus in the shed. In the shed, the two teenagers overcome initial insecurities and share a momentous kiss. Although the kiss “lasted no more than a second” (14), Rosie is overwhelmed by emotion and runs back home. She ends up taking a long bath, singing at the top of her lungs so that “she would not be able to hear herself think” (15).

Yamamoto returns the story’s focus to the Hayashi family. The visit from Rosie’s aunt and uncle mirrors the previous scene with the Hayano family; Rosie’s mother, aunt, and uncle talk about haiku all evening, while her father is nowhere to be seen.

The next day, “probably the hottest day of the year” (15), everyone works hard to harvest tomatoes. Rosie, still too embarrassed to speak to Jesus, pretends she needs to go the bathroom and runs back to the house. There, she runs into Mr. Kuroda, the haiku editor of the Mainichi Shimbun, who is looking for Tome. After Rosie escorts Mr. Kuroda to her mother, the editor informs Tome that she has won first prize in the newspaper’s haiku contest, and that he has come to present her with a prize: a gift-wrapped ukiyo-e woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige. The print “was one of his favorite Hiroshiges” (17). Tome invites the editor to tea, leaving Rosie and her father to continue harvesting tomatoes without her.

While Rosie is distracted by thoughts about Jesus, Mr. Hayashi grows increasingly upset at how long Tome is taking with the editor. His temper finally erupts. He storms into the house and evicts Mr. Kuroda. Then he grabs the Hiroshige print, strikes it with an axe, and burns it.

Afterward, Rosie finds her mother strangely calm. Tome asks, “Do you know why I married your father?” (18). Together, they watch the fire die down as Tome tells her story: As a teenager in Japan, she fell in love “with the first son of one of the well-to-do families in her village” (18). She got pregnant, but, due to their class differences, the father would not marry her. Tome had a stillborn son out of wedlock. She wrote to Rosie’s Aunt Taka in the United States and said she would die by suicide if Taka did not bring her to America. That is why Aunt Taka arranged a marriage between Tome and Mr. Hayashi, “a young man of simple mind […] but of kindly heart” (19).

Rosie responds to the story by saying, “I would have liked a brother” (19), but Tome suddenly kneels on the floor and begs Rosie: “Promise me you will never marry!” (19). Rosie thinks of Jesus but tells her mother, “Yes, yes, I promise” (19). Tome, recognizing that there is a still miscommunication between mother and daughter, calls her a fool.