27 pages • 54 minutes read
Hisaye YamamotoSeventeen Syllables
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Language Literacy
Language is immediately invoked by the title of “Seventeen Syllabus” and again in the story’s opening scene. One of the major contributors to the cultural distance between issei and nisei Japanese Americans, both in the United States writ large and for Rosie and Tome specifically, is language. Rosie thinks in English and is a poor student of Japanese. She “knew Japanese in fits and starts,” and “her mother had even less English” (8-9). When they speak together, there is aways a layer of possible mistranslation. Rosie wants to meet her mother halfway by thinking about a haiku in English and French, but she decides against it; she knows Tome will not understand it, just as Tome does not understand Rosie’s interest in other things. Meanwhile, Tome knows that Rosie merely feigns her literacy in Japanese. This language barrier deepens the gap between mother and daughter and contributes to their other misunderstandings—such as the lesson Tome wants to give about marriage.
Literacy is also a major factor in the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Hayashi. During the visit to the Hayano family, when Tome talks with Mr. Hayano about haiku, Mr. Hayashi looks through a “picture magazine” (11). In these social situations, those who have a taste for the literary are separated from those, like Mr. Hayashi, who lack the necessary literacy to participate. This literacy is also a proxy for social class, which becomes clear to Rosie at the end of the story, when Mr. Kuroda shows up from the newspaper. He speaks “in a more elegant Japanese than she was used to” (16), and her mother falls “easily into his style” (16) while her father does not. Here haiku, and that which is more traditionally Japanese, is revealed to be less about Japanese authenticity than it is a marker of social status within the old Japanese world.
Where Mr. Hayashi becomes stoic in moments of conflict, Rosie usually becomes verbose, with one exception. When Jesus touches her hand in the packing shed, “she could find no words to protest; her vocabulary had become distressingly constricted” (14). In a moment of heightened excitement, Rose is speechless, but Yamamoto chooses to describe this moment in a way that reminds the reader of language learning. By using the word “vocabulary,” Yamamoto highlights the fact that language literacy pervades these characters’ lives in different ways.
Loss of Innocence
Because “Seventeen Syllables” is written after the Japanese Relocation Act but takes place before, Yamamoto imbues the story with a foreboding sense of what might come next: the loss of the tomato farm, of the family’s belongings, and of Rosie’s potential relationship with Jesus. The reader understands that, most likely, the Hayashis will be moved to a concentration camp just as Yamamoto was.
This sense of an unavoidable, approaching change is also typical of coming-of-age stories. “Seventeen Syllables” concerns Rosie’s loss of her childhood innocence in many ways. She observes something about the nature of being an adult woman by watching Mrs. Hayano, who has changed from “the belle of her native village” (10) to someone “stooped” and “always trembling” (10). She also notices the way adulthood has affected Mr. Hayano less severely. Then, at the end of the story, she learns that her mother was once a belle of her own native village before she too lost something due to the men in her life. By the end of the story, Rosie may not yet fully understand what she has learned. The narrator notes that “it was not a matter she could come to any decision about” (10). But Rosie feels a sense of sadness in the stories of these women, and she likely makes connections between their lives and hers.
Meanwhile, Rosie experiences an innocent dalliance with Jesus on the tomato farm. Here, Yamamoto makes some clear metaphorical connections between the two teenagers and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. During their carefree play, Jesus at one point pranks Rosie with a “pale green worm (it had looked more like an infant snake)” (12), evoking the image of Lucifer tempting Eve. Immediately afterward, Jesus “brought up the matter of their possibly meeting outside the range of both their parents’ dubious eyes” (12). Now Jesus is asking Rosie more explicitly to break the rules. When she does, by meeting Jesus at the packing shed, Rosie also bites into a tomato, symbolic of the fruit of knowledge that leads Adam and Eve to be evicted from paradise. In this case, the knowledge is Rosie’s realization of herself as a sexual object of Jesus’s desire, and someone who also desires Jesus. Afterward, working with Jesus in the tomato fields is a completely different experience. There is no returning to their carefree play.
The Decision to Accept or Reject One’s Heritage
“Seventeen Syllables” is bracketed by conversations where Tome explains an aspect of her culture to Rosie. In both cases, Rosie responds to her mother with “Yes, yes.” In the opening scene, she says to her mother’s explanation of haiku, “Yes, yes, I understand” (8), and at the end, she tells her mother, “Yes, yes, I promise” (19) to never marry. In both cases, Rosie is asked to take on the burden of her mother’s past. In the first scene, it is an implied responsibility to safekeep a Japanese custom, and in the final scene, it is the expectation of Japanese womanhood as experienced by Tome. In both cases, she responds “yes, yes” when she really means “no, no” (8).
The repeated word is no accident. In 1943, the US War Relocation Authority forced all interned Japanese men over the age of 18 to fill out a survey that had two questions: First, if he would serve in the US armed forces, and second, if he was willing to forswear allegiance to Japan. This loyalty oath was infamous in the camps and would have been formative for Yamamoto during her time at the Poston camp. The Japanese men who replied “no” to both questions were arrested, and these men were called “no no boys” because they had answered “no” twice, just as Rosie’s responses tend to repeat the word. Although the survey had a military purpose, in essence these (usually nisei) men were being asked to deny their heritage in favor of America. For Rosie, the stakes are not as dire as prison, but nisei children often felt social pressure to reject their parents’ culture and act American to feel accepted. That Rosie answers “yes, yes” when she means “no, no” demonstrates how complicated this was for many nisei children, who likely felt the need to acquiesce to their issei parents’ requests at home while exploring non-Japanese culture in school.
The tragedy of “Seventeen Syllables” is that, for Rosie, this is always presented as a yes or no question. Rosie looks for a compromise with her mother; she wants to talk about the English haiku, and presumably she would like to speak to Tome about Jesus in terms free from the finality of a doomed marriage. But due to language barriers and Tome’s trauma, Rosie is expected to accept her mother’s heritage in total, bearing its full weight, or reject it entirely.
