"Seventeen Syllables" by Hisaye Yamamoto tells the story of the mental

agony of Rosie's mother, Tome Hayashi who was trapped in a loveless

marriage.Tome Hayashi was a gifted poetess who specialised in writing the
japanese verse form, the haiku. A haiku was made up of seventeen syllables-
five each in the first and third lines and seven in the second line. Rosie's
father was not appreciative of his wife's poetic talent and was always angry
and irritated when she spent time writing haikus. Rosie's mother would publish
her hahaikus regularly in the Japanese neswpaper "Mainichi Shimbu" under
the pen name of Ume Hanazono. On one occasion she won a poetry contest
and the haiku editor of the newspaper Mr.Kuroda came home and personally
presented her the prize-a framed painting of a beautiful sea side scene. It
was the time for harvestingthe ripe tomatoes and Rosie's father was very
angry that his wife instead of helping out in the farm was wasting her time
talking to the editor. Rosie's father in a fit of jealous rage smashed the picture
to bits and burnt it and walked out of the house. Rosie's mother then narrates
to her how she got married and settled down in America. When in Japan she
had been in love with a rich man's son and had become pregnant and gave
birth to a still born child and since she could not marry him she wanted to
commit suicide.But her aunt Taka in America got her married.

Themes and Meanings

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Focusing on the relationship between Rosie and her mother, the story
illustrates the gap between Japanese immigrants and their American-born
children. The gap is rooted not only in generations, but also in linguistic and
cultural differences. As the title suggests, the linguistic difference is most
evident in the story and is given a symbolic role. The gap between Rosie and
 her mother is compounded by cultural differences, as shown by the fact that
Rosie fails to understand that her mother’s behaviors were acquired in a
Japanese cultural context.

Mrs. Hayashi apparently is not satisfied with her present situation and has
sought to release her emotions by becoming a poet. She uses a pseudonym
when she writes, and Rosie feels as if her mother is two different people. The
motivation of the mother’s writing is not explicitly discussed, however,
indicating Rosie’s disinterest in her mother’s inner world.

Mrs. Hayashi’s urge to write is born out of her suppression, which is primarily
caused by her linguistic handicap in the immigrant land. Another major factor
in her suppression is the submissiveness of women to men, embedded in the
traditional Japanese culture. She seems to accept her role as a wife, although
she tries to acquire her own world by indulging herself in writing poetry.

Her husband has the power to determine the welfare of the other members of
the family, and his disapproval cuts off Mrs. Hayashi’s creativity. When she is
talking about poetry at the Hayanos’ residence, her husband decides to leave
for home without consulting her. Although his self-centered action upsets
Rosie, Mrs. Hayashi remains calm and her frustration is not revealed. She
does not get sympathy but only contempt from Rosie for her reaction. Mrs.
Hayashi remains reserved, even when her husband’s irritation has grown into
outrage and he breaks the prize for her haiku poem.

The distance between Rosie and Mrs. Hayashi is inevitable, and no solution is
suggested in the story. Rosie is unable to perceive her mother’s deep
feelings, especially when the mother kneels down to beg her not to marry. At
the end of the story, their gap is confirmed with the perception of the mother’s
consoling hands. When Mrs. Hayashi consoles her crying daughter, Rosie
feels that the mother’s timing is a little too late.

Style and Technique

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Haiku serves as the metaphor of the narrative technique employed in the

story. Haiku is supposed to convey the packed emotion of poets while offering
their observation of the outer world. It is for the reader to connect the inner
and outer worlds. The poet is required to choose words carefully, as the poem
may contain only seventeen syllables.

As haiku demands a reducing of words, this story intentionally holds back

some information. Mrs. Hayano’s insanity is simply narrated as a fact, but no
accounts follow. Nor is the motivation for Mrs. Hayashi’s writing explained.
Apparently these episodes are related to the Japanese immigrants’ dismay
over their linguistic disadvantage.

The author uses haiku as the representation of the traditional Japanese

culture, as well as of Mrs. Hayashi’s packed emotions. Rosie’s incapacity to
appreciate her mother’s haiku highlights the linguistic and cultural gap
between them. Not understanding the language used in the mother’s poems,
Rosie does not decipher the mother’s complex inner feelings or her need to
write. The only emotion narrated in the story is Rosie’s, and the contrast of
Rosie’s inner voice with the absence of her parents’ voices shows that the
story is narrated from her perspective. At the same time, the silence of Rosie’s
parents shows the strict self-control that their native culture has encouraged in
them.

Hisaye Yamamoto’s writing itself signifies the essence of haiku poetry.

Yamamoto shows the gap between the first and second generations of
Japanese Americans by sketching the Hayashi family concisely. Yamamoto, a
Japanese American herself, is not foreign to the generational gap shown in
the story. As emotions are condensed in haiku, Yamamoto puts all her
emotion into a short story. She offers only a brief illustration of the Hayashi
family, and seldom describes the characters’ emotions.

The Role of Haiku in Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen

Syllables"
By Kiuchi, Toru

Read preview
 Article excerpt
Hisaye Yamamoto, a Japanese American writer who is best known for the short story collection
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stones, was born on August 23, 1921 in Redondo Beach,
California. She is the daughter of immigrants from Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, Kanzo and Sae
Yamamoto. The number of Japanese Americans with last name Yamamoto is the second largest
to those with last name Tanaka among others. Her work has a showdown with issues of the
Japanese immigrant experience in America, the gap between Is sei (first) and Nisei (second)
generation immigrants.

Hisaye Yamamoto's generation, the Nisei, was born into the roaming lives imposed upon their
parents by the Alien Land Law,1 which limits the property possession by Japanese immigrants,
and the Asian Exclusion Act, which in principle prohibits the immigration of Asians into the
United States. Yamamoto replied the interviewer about her repeated moving: "We moved at least
four times in the Redondo Beach area, then inland to Downey, Artesia, Norwalk, Hynes (the
Greatest Hay and Dairy Center in the world), which is now known as Paramount, and finally
down to Oceanside" (Cheung, "Interview" 77).

Yamamoto found ease in reading and writing from a young age. As a teen, she began publishing
her letters and short stories in newspapers. Many Issei immigrants tried to preserve their native
Japanese language, while the interests of the Nisei are likely to be in the culture of the United
States, easily obtained through the English language as Yamamoto says, "My spoken and written
Japanese is practically nonexistent" (Cheung, "Interview" 76). As a result, the relationship
between Issei parents and their Nisei children confronted immediate tension, causing them to
misunderstand each other.

Yamamoto became a published writer at the age of 14, writing for the Kashu Mainichi under the
pen name "Napoleon." Yamamoto attended Compton Junior College in Los Angeles, where she
majored in French, Spanish, German, and Latin. As mentioned in the short story, "Seventeen
Syllables," she also attended Japanese school for 12 years. Her father was a farmer, and the
family was living in Oceanside when World War II broke out.

At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there were more than
125,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the Pacific coast. Within two months of Pearl
Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, known as the Japanese Relocation Act
of 1942. All Japanese Americans, including U. S. citizens born in America, were forced to
evacuate from the West Coast. More than 1 1 ,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to ten
internment camps in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. The
Japanese Americans thus lost their homes, property, and business.

From 1942 to 1945, Yamamoto was interned at Poston, Arizona, along with her father and three
brothers Johnny, Jim, and Frank; her mother had died in 1939. Yamamoto was twenty years old
when her family was relocated to the internment camp. While interned, she wrote for the camp
newspaper, the Poston Chronicle. She wrote her first work of fiction, Death Rides the Rails to
Poston, a mystery that was later added to Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, followed by
Surely I Must Be Dreaming. In 1944, she and two other brothers were relocated to Springfield,
Massachusetts, but when the oldest brother, Johnny, died in Italy while serving with the all Nisei
 442nd Regimental Combat Team, she and two brothers came back to the camp in Poston at the
request of their father.

After World War II had ended, the internment camps were closed and their detainees were all
released. However, anti- Japanese sentiment continued throughout the country, but many
Japanese Americans returned to California, despite hostile demonstrations they often met with.
Yamamoto and her family also returned to Los Angeles, where she began working as a
columnist, reporter, and editor for the Los Angeles Tribune, a weekly newspaper for African
Americans, a job she held from 1945 to 1948. …

On His Blindness Summary

In "On His Blindness," Milton writes of his experience of blindness. He asks if
God wants him to keep working, in spite of the fact that his job caused him to
lose his sight. A personified Patience tells him that God rewards even those
who stand and wait to be of service.

 Milton went blind working for the English Republic. His service to the
government often required that he stay up late reading and writing. This
caused him to lose his sight.

 The poem takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. Petrarchan sonnets

traditionally focus on love and romance, but Milton subverts this in order to
explore his relationship with God.

 Milton fears that his blindness will prevent him from doing God's work.
Patience tells him that even his idleness is useful to God if he continues to
have faith.

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Summary and Analysis

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John Milton’s poem “On His Blindness” is an autobiographical sonnet in which Milton meditates
on his own loss of sight. For most of his life, Milton had been able to see perfectly, but his late-
night reading and writing on behalf of the government of the short-lived English Republic, in
which he held a very prominent position, helped ruin his eyesight. This sonnet—written in the
“Petrarchan” rhyme scheme associated with the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco
Petrarca—is divided into an eight-line “octave” and a six-line “sestet.” The octave rhymes
a/b/b/a/a/b/b/a. The sestet rhymes c/d/e/c/d/e. The sonnet is therefore a typical Petrarchan sonnet
in form, but in subject matter, the poem departs from the topics usually associated with
Petrarchan poems. Petrarch (the English version of Petrarca’s name) was most famous for
writing about love; Milton departs from that conventional topic to deal with a very practical, very
physical problem, but a problem with many broader spiritual implications.

By beginning line one with the word “When," Milton immediately signals that he is opening
with a subordinate clause (a dependent clause) that introduces the main idea to follow. Beginning
the poem this way creates a certain suspense; the main idea is postponed so that we have to
continue reading in anticipation of its eventual arrival. Shakespeare also often used this kind of
sentence pattern in constructing his own sonnets. By opening with a dependent clause, Milton
heightens our sense of anticipation by delaying the key statement.

The word “consider” implies careful, rational thought rather than purely emotional reaction. Here
and throughout the poem, the speaker uses his reason, which Renaissance Christians considered
one of the greatest gifts that God had bestowed upon human beings. The ability of humans to
reason, they believed, linked them to God and distinguished them from animals. The speaker
feels that his “light” is “spent” (extinguished) in several senses of the word “light.” This word
clearly alludes, at least eventually, to the speaker’s loss of sight, but "light" may also suggest
one’s intelligence. The opening line may at first seem to mean “When I think about how I have
used my intelligence,” but it soon comes to mean “When I ponder how my ability to see has
become extinguished.” This latter meaning is, of course, foreshadowed by the poem’s title.

The idea of losing one’s sight is obviously a deeply troubling one. The blind person is suddenly
at risk in all kinds of ways. The speaker in the poem feels vulnerable; he can no longer literally
see his own way or easily protect himself from dangers. The special tragedy of this particular
speaker is that he has lost his sight at an unusually early stage of life. Rather than becoming blind
when elderly, he has become blind in middle age. He now inhabits a world that seems “dark” (2)
in at least two senses: it is no longer physically visible, and it is a world full of sin and spiritual
darkness. The world, moreover, is not only dark but also “wide”: the speaker will somehow have
to navigate, both literally and figuratively, in a world which, because of its width or breadth, will
prose many dangers. If the speaker were confined to a single dark room, he might quickly and
easily learn his way around. Instead, he will have to make his way through a “world” that is both
“dark” and “wide” and thus especially challenging.
In line three, the speaker refers to “one talent,” thereby alluding to the famous passage in the
Bible (Matthew 25:14-30) in which a master gives three servants different numbers of “talents”
(coins) before he departs. The servant given five talents invests them wisely and earns five in
return, which he gives to his master when the master reappears. Similarly, the same happens with
the servant given two talents. However, the servant given one talent, mistrustful of his master,
buries that talent so that he will risk losing...

(The entire section is 1640 words.)