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.
Character Analysis
Rosie Hayashi
Rosie is a 15-year-old girl, trapped between her sense of duty to her family on one hand and her self-actualization as an adult on the other. In many ways, she is the opposite of her mother. Where Tome is soft-spoken and proper, Rosie yells and plays the comedian. Where Tome embodies the virtues of haiku, Rosie fits better in Hollywood. As Rosie’s school friend Chizuko tells her, “Oh, Rosie, you ought to be in the movies!” (15). Like many nisei, Rosie sees herself as something new and distinctly American.
Although she cares for her parents and fulfills her responsibilities as a farmhand without complaint, Rosie actively resists pressure from her mother to engage with anything that is traditionally Japanese. This is partly because communicating in Japanese takes more effort for Rosie than communicating in English: “English lay ready on the tongue but Japanese had to be searched and examined” (8). She goes to Japanese school every weekend and twice a week during the summer, but she still struggles to think in Japanese, leading her to favor English art forms.
Rosie also associates more traditional Japanese culture with patriarchal structures which have left Mrs. Hayano to seem broken down by life while Mr. Hayano thrives—something she fears is happening to her own mother, too. Thus, Rosie is attracted to non-Japanese things like Jesus Carrasco and American songs and movies. These things represent alternative models for her future beyond the one she sees every day at home.
Tome Hayashi
Mrs. Hayashi is a soft-spoken and intelligent Japanese American woman who for most of her life has repressed a need to express herself creatively. When she was 18 years old and still living in Japan, she fell in love with the eldest son of a wealthy family. She acquired a taste for some of the finer things in traditional Japanese culture, such as haiku and ukiyo-e. However, this affair left her pregnant and abandoned; she would go on to lose the baby to stillbirth and her lover to another more class-appropriate marriage. Psychologically devastated and “despised” (19) by her family, she came to the United States for a second chance. She accepted the conditions of that second chance without complaint until, after over 15 years of feeling isolated by her stoic husband and nisei daughter, she begins nurturing a new version of herself: Ume Hanazono, a writer of haiku. Writing haiku gives her a new confidence in social situations, and winning the newspaper’s haiku contest is possibly the first time she felt fully recognized for who she was since her teenage love affair.
Like many issei mothers, Tome feels pressure to pass on aspects of Japanese culture that are important to her to her daughter. Especially because her husband is an unlikely partner in intellectual matters, Tome reaches out to Rosie in hopes for a kindred spirit in her home. When that fails, and as her confidence grows, she begins talking about haiku with anyone who will listen, attempting to carve some room for Ume Hanazono beyond just the page.
Mr. Hayashi
Rosie’s father is a stoic and stubborn tomato farmer who runs his own farm in Southern California. The farm, though large enough to warrant hiring the Carrascos for help during the harvest, is a small family operation that causes him a great deal of stress—such as when a heat wave threatens the day’s crop. Not much is said directly about his character beyond Aunt Taka’s description of him many years prior: that he was “a young man of simply mind […] but of kindly heart” (19). Aunt Taka arranged the marriage between Mr. Hayashi and Tome in a manner common at the time, as many young Japanese men immigrated to America for work and then took “picture brides,” agreeing to marry women still in Japan based on their photo. Mr. Hayashi’s kindness is proven by the fact that he never demanded to know “why his unseen betrothed was so eager to hasten the day of meeting” (19).
Taking Aunt Taka’s description at face value, Mr. Hayashi’s violence toward the Hiroshige print at the end of “Seventeen Syllables” is either not typical of his character, or something that was always there, dormant but building like a powder keg. The short story strongly suggests that Mr. Hayashi is a prideful man who starts to feel insecure when confronted by conversation topics (e.g., haiku) that he cannot participate in. It is clear that Mr. Hayashi does not support his wife’s efforts to find her own source of pride.
Jesus Carrasco
Jesus is a young man who attends the same school (Cleveland High) as Rosie two grades ahead of her. This summer marks the first time the Carrasco family is hired to help with the Hayashi tomato farm, and over the course of the season, Jesus and Rosie become “great friends” (12) while they work. They laugh often, and Rosie enjoys his company. While Jesus seems forward when he lures Rosie to the packing shed with the false promise of a secret, his nervousness in the shed suggests that he innocently hopes to learn whether Rosie likes him, too. In that moment, Rosie feels “a brand-new power” (13). When they kiss, Jesus becomes a collection of “lips and tongue and teeth and hands” (14), and afterward, he never returns to the story except as an idea.
Rosie imagines conversations with him in his absence, and at the very end of the story, she confuses him in her mind with the son of the Christian God (19). For Yamamoto, who often features encounters between different racial identities in her stories, Jesus represents the possibility of an interracial coalition. Although the Hayashi tomato farm would have been purchased at a below-market price by white farmers after the Japanese Relocation Act, the Carrasco family share their own memories of the tomato farm.
