SEVENTEEN SYLLABLES AND OTHER STORIES
by Hisaye Yamamoto
published by New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xxiii + 134 pages. $14.00 paper.Review by MELUS, Winter 1999 v24 i4 p177, by Anne L. Thalheimer
COPYRIGHT 1999 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
Originally published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1988, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories was honored with the Award for Literature from the Association for Asian American Studies the year it was published. That edition is currently out of print, and has been replaced by this Rutgers University Press collection of Hisaye Yamamoto's short stories, which, like the original edition, contains fifteen short stories spanning Yamamoto's lengthy writing career. The collection begins with her first breakthrough publication, 1948's "The High-Heeled Shoes, A Memoir," which is, in part, about varying forms of sexual harassment, and covers a span of four decades before ending with the more recent "Reading and Writing," a short story about the unique friendship between two very different women, published in Hokubei Mainishi in early January 1988. Hisaye Yamamoto's most widely anthologized short story, the haunting "Seventeen Syllables," which juxtaposes the anguish of an Issei mother trapped in a difficult, loveless marriage with the bittersweet sexual awakening of her teenager daughter Rosie, is included in this book, along with the three other stories that earned places on the "Distinctive Short Stories" list, which lists the contents of the yearly volume of Best American Short Stories. As testimony to Yamamoto's storytelling skill, "Seventeen Syllables" made the list in 1949, "The Brown House" and "Yoneko's Earthquake" in 1951, and "Epithalamium" in 1960.
Yamamoto, who in 1986 won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, often composes stories informed by not only by her own history, and Japanese-American history generally--which includes her internment in Poston, Arizona during World War Two--but also issues that relate to gender, race, and ethnicity (with an emphasis on residual suspicion of Japanese-Americans after World War Two, shown in "Wilshire Bus"), and the difficulties and frustrations of family life and marriage (often arranged) in immigrant families.
Each of the fifteen stories details, in some way, the particular anguish of Japanese and Japanese-American women, from things as seemingly simple as a loveless arranged marriage in "Seventeen Syllables," or a strained union such as Henry and Marge Kusumoto's marriage in "My Father Can Beat Muhammad Ali," to severe mentally instability, possibly as a result of camp life or an inattentive ascetic father ("The Legend of Miss Sasagawara"). Some stories go further into the detail of women's lives but do so only through relying upon the reader to interpret what Yamamoto implies. For example, "Yoneko's Earthquake" tells the story of Yoneko Hosoume, who waits in vain for God to answer her prayers to end the aftershocks of an earthquake. She does not seem to fully comprehend the events around her, though their meaning becomes clear to the careful reader.
It is a credit to Yamamoto that the voice of her ten-year-old narrator in "Yoneko's Earthquake" is entirely convincing, a skill which establishes Yamamoto as the clear predecessor of current female Japanese-American writers, such as Lois-Ann Yamanaka, who create vivid female characters. Yoneko narrates the events of her own life in detail, while making only passing reference to those things--such as a sudden and mysterious mid-week trip to a city hospital and the simultaneous abrupt departure of Marpo, their Filipino farmhand-happening around her. The astute reader quickly pieces the hidden narrative together, aided by Yamamoto's masterful control of detailed depiction, and realizes that despair runs deep not just in Yoneko, but far more poignantly and tragically in her mother.
"The Brown House" and "Epithalamium" also deal with women who make choices--in the former, a wife who becomes resigned to her husband's gambling problem, and in the latter, a woman who chooses to marry an alcoholic who is intoxicated even as they recite their vows--and cast, like "Seventeen Syllables," a dim view over marriage and male-female relationships, as well as over men in general. Fathers (and father figures) do not fare well in these short stories, but that is not to say that Yamamoto passes judgment upon them, for she is skilled at making a character's vice his virtue, and never portraying anything as one single thing. Like haiku, a character in and of itself in "Seventeen Syllables," Yamamoto's short stories are layered in metaphor, imagery and irony, but never wordy or given to digression.
The introduction by King-Kok Cheung, Professor of English and Asian American Studies at UCLA, provides an excellent introduction to Yamamoto's work, especially to the reader unfamiliar with either Yamamoto herself or Japanese-American history. Cheung, who has written extensively on Hisaye Yamamoto's life and work, along with other Asian American authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Joy Kogawa, provides an efficient and interesting overview of Yamamoto's work, including a series of notes which place Yamamoto's work within a continuum of Issei (Japanese immigrants), Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans), and Sansei (third generation) writers and scholarship.
Her introduction also provides the reader with a brief but sufficient synopsis of Japanese-American history, enough so that the connection between history and its appearance in Yamamoto's work is clear, but the history lesson is spare enough so that those interested in the topic are encouraged to read more, aided, in part, by the carefully compiled bibliography. A selected bibliography of both primary sources (listing where and when Yamamoto's stories originally appeared) and secondary sources (including scholarship of interest to both readers interested in Asian American literature and those more specialized in Japanese-American writing) is included.
The only complaint about the introduction is that, perhaps, it should have concluded the book rather than opening it. So many of Hisaye Yamamoto's short stories--for the first-time reader, anyway--possess a sort of power, an element of surprise seen in some of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and rely on the reader to first wonder, then suspect, and then finally understand the hidden part of the story. King-Kok Cheung's analysis of Yamamoto's short stories is by all accounts first-rate but gives away the so-called "secrets" of the short stories. So, for those readers who have not yet had the fortune of reading any of Hisaye Yamamoto's works, the introduction should certainly be read, but only after reading the collection. On the other hand, Hisaye Yamamoto's short stories, like this collection, and like King-Kok Cheung's introduction, all merit multiple readings.
Anne N. Thalheimer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delware, completing a dissertation on representations of gender, violence, and hetero-ideology in lesbian comix.
Named Works: Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (Book) - Reviews
