Though she often referred to herself as a housewife and not a professional writer, author Hisaye Yamamoto is best remembered for her sophisticated short stories about gender.
“Much of the early literary-critical scholarship on Yamamoto’s oeuvre focuses on the multiple oppressions her female characters face and the strategies they use to maneuver the limited spaces of agency that are open to them,” notes scholar Cynthia Wu. However, Wu proposes that one of Yamamoto’s most famous short stories, “Seventeen Syllables,” can instead be read as “a show of support for the men in internment camps who actively resisted their draft into the US Army during World War II.”
Yamamoto’s literary career began in the late 1940s, not long after her release from internment, and her work was compiled in the collection Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories in 1988. “Seventeen Syllables,” the celebrated tale that gives the collection its name, first appeared in 1949—although the events in the story are set in a farming community in prewar California. The short story is told from the perspective of the teenager Rosie Hayashi, whose mother, Tome, is devoted to writing haiku as a creative outlet in her unhappy marriage. But, when Tome eventually clinches a hard-won prize for her poetry, her husband explodes violently and destroys the award.
Rosie initially shares her father’s disdain for Tome’s love of haiku, especially as she’s not fluent in Japanese and can’t grasp the intricacies of her mother’s poetic language. In an early scene, Rosie decides to lie to Tome, rather than engage in a conversation about poetry. Rosie changes the topic by saying glibly, “Yes, yes, I understand.”
“It was so much easier to say yes, yes, even when one meant no, no,” Yamamoto writes. For Wu, the seemingly innocent phrase “yes, yes” is, in fact, a deeply sinister motif.
“[T]his double affirmative appears immediately again in the presence of its opposite, ‘no, no,’ and this time, its significance cannot be ignored,” she comments, alluding to the history of the phrase “no, no,” she writes.
In 1943, the War Department forced all male Japanese to answer a questionnaire, asking whether they consented to doing military service, and whether they would “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America…and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any foreign government, power or organization.” Those who responded in the affirmative could be drafted into combat in a segregated, all-Japanese military unit. But “no-no boys,” who answered both questions in the contrary, were imprisoned—which is the fate that haunts Ichiro Yamada, the Nisei or second-generation Japanese American hero of John Okada’s 1957 novel No-No Boy.
Even after the war ended, “no-no boys continued to be ostracized by other Japanese Americans because of their purported shirking of patriotic duty,” notes Wu. “The no-no boy, binary opposite to the heroic soldier, allowed the injustices behind the internment to be elided and, instead, for outrage to be displaced onto the unruly male Nisei subject.” Wu argues that Yamamoto intervenes in this fraught history by rejecting such a binary.
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The phrase “no, no” appears again after Rosie’s father wins an argument with his wife and causes the family to spend the drive home in sullen silence. Upset at both parents, Rosie fantasizes about the family dying in a car accident: “I wish this old Ford would crash, right now, she thought, then immediately, no, no…”
Still, the reader discovers, “it was too late” to take back the thought, as Rosie vividly imagines what a fatal wreck could look like, with “three contorted, bleeding bodies, one of them hers.” The broken bodies in this scene “could be a veiled reference to wartime casualties,” Wu suggests, as Rosie’s vision “hints at the eventual fates of the girl protagonist’s Nisei male brethren in the war.”
Indeed, Wu writes that “the Japanese American male body at risk” recurs throughout Yamamoto’s writing. For example, in another short story, “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” a girl suddenly loses her younger brother to illness after her mother has an abortion.
The climax of “Seventeen Syllables” is consistent with this theme. In an attempt to forestall Rosie’s romance with a Mexican farmhand, Tome confides the origins of her own unhappy marriage. Nearly two decades prior, Tome gave birth to a stillborn boy out of wedlock. To escape the social stigma, she had to leave Japan for an arranged marriage to Rosie’s father in the United States. After this bombshell, the anguished Tome repeatedly demands, “Promise me you’ll never marry!” Rosie replies, “Yes, yes, I promise.”
All the same, the text implies that Tome believes—with good reason—that Rosie is lying again.
“That the final instance of the double affirmative ‘yes, yes’…arises in tandem with Rosie’s discovery of an older male sibling…who would have been of age during the internment (which the reader knows is imminent) further solidifies this text as a critique of US actions with regard to Nisei men,” concludes Wu. In fact, she suggests that Tome and Rosie symbolize “the largely masculinist relationship between the nation-state and the Nisei male citizen,” given Tome’s maternal authority over Rosie.
“Although this interchange purportedly concerns Tome’s insightful critique of asymmetrical relations in the marriage contract,” Wu writes, “it also involves a benevolent form of coercion that is read as overwhelming for Rosie and for Nisei army recruits alike.”
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In other words, because Rosie’s agreement is often coerced, it can’t be trusted. Similarly, “[a]lthough many Nisei men had couched their decision to enlist in the language of civic pride, the fact remains that the choice was narrowly circumscribed,” Wu points out.
Critics have tended to analyze “Seventeen Syllables” in terms of the mother–daughter relationship and women’s silence. With this unconventional interpretation, Wu instead calls attention to “a more nuanced fashioning of political alliances across gender lines” in Yamamoto’s writing, where the author subtly “connects the political interests of women with the political interests of men.”
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