Seventeen Syllables

“English lay ready on the tongue but Japanese had to be searched for and examined, and even then put forth tentatively (probably to meet with laughter).”

Yamamoto personifies the languages of English and Japanese to illustrate how, for Rosie, English is familiar, while Japanese is more like a stranger. It is something so foreign that it must be “examined.” In this case, Japanese is also a source of anxiety or embarrassment for her.

“It was so much easier to say yes, yes, even when one meant no, no.”

This sentence, with its parallel structure, defines Rosie’s choice as either “yes, yes” or “no, no.” The unusual repetition of the word in both cases suggests that there is something more going on here than simply yes and no. The sentence also establishes one of the central conflicts of the story: Rosie’s failure to communicate with her mother.

“So Rosie and her father lived for a while with two women, her mother and Ume Hanazono.”

Yamamoto uses hyperbole to dramatize the situation. Rosie’s mother and Ume Hanazono are the same woman. But by describing them as separate people, Yamamoto depicts Rosie and her father’s emotional experience of adjusting to Tome’s new poetry hobby.

“Rosie would sometimes watch Mrs. Hayano, reputed to have been the belle of her native village, making her way about a room, stooped, slowly shuffling, violently trembling (always trembling), and she would be reminded that this woman, in this same condition, had carried and given tissue to three babies.”

This sentence describes Mrs. Hayano with alliteration and strong language. Its parenthetical aside emphasizes the severity of her condition. This dramatic portrayal of adult womanhood serves as the physical and visible equivalent of Rosie’s mother’s more psychological “condition.”

“I wish this old Ford would crash, right now, she thought, then immediately, no, no, I wish my father would laugh, but it was too late: already the vision had passed through her mind of the green pick-up crumpled in the dark against one of the mighty eucalyptus trees they were just riding past, of the three contorted, bleeding bodies, one of them hers.”

This aside, a fantasy of Rosie’s after her father forced them to cut short their visit with the Hayano family, foreshadows of the destruction of the Hiroshige print. The tension between husband and wife will eventually come to a head in a moment of violence. Rosie’s death drive here also foreshadows the revelation that her mother once threatened suicide.

“Once he had made her screech hideously by crossing over, while her back was turned, to place atop the tomatoes in her green-stained bucket a truly monstrous, pale green worm (it had looked more like an infant snake).”

Yamamoto describes the worm as “monstrous” but also Rosie’s screech as “hideous,” thereby equating the worm with Rosie in this moment. It should also be noted that Yamamoto continues to repeat the color green. The “pale green worm” recalls the “pale green pen” (9) that Ume Hanazono uses to write haiku and the “green pick-up” (12) that Rosie imagines crashed into a tree.

“Its bulk, looming in the dimness, took on a sinisterness that was funny when Rosie reminded herself that it was only a wooden frame with a canvas roof and three canvas walls that made a slapping noise on breezy days.”

Rosie describes the packing shed in such a way that she strips the building of its symbolic importance. She does so by reminding herself of the shed’s component parts. However, the reader will soon learn that the shed will mean something more to Rosie than her literal description suggests.

“Her vocabulary had become distressingly constricted and she thought desperately that all that remained intact now was yes and no and oh, and even these few sounds would not easily out.”

As Rosie’s vocabulary fails her, her ability to describe her kiss with Jesus is lost. Yamamoto uses euphemistic language (“oh”) to signal Rosie’s sexual awakening. But for the most part, the author relies on ellipsis to leave Rosie’s thoughts unstated while implying that more is being experienced than the reader has access to.

“She worked as efficiently as a flawless machine and kept the stalls heaped, with one part of her mind listening in to the parental murmuring about the heat and the tomatoes and with another part planning the exact words she would say to Jesus when he drove up with the first load of the afternoon.”

The sentence begins with a simile comparing Rosie’s farming labor to a machine. Then, the sentence deliberately elongates to reveal that “machine” labor is more accurately describing her ability to partition her brain into two processes: one for farming and familial obligation and one for Jesus. For the rest of the story, Rosie continues this doubled thinking.

“But suddenly, her father uttered an incredible noise, exactly like the cork of a bottle popping, and the next Rosie knew, he was stalking angrily toward the house, almost running in fact, and she chased after him crying, ‘Father! Father! What are you going to do?’”

Yamamoto uses an obvious simile for Mr. Hayashi losing his temper: “like the cork of a bottle popping.” Until this moment, he has kept his anger bottled up inside him. Now, Rosie, who has had no reason to fear violence in her father before, escalates this sentence until it peaks with running, crying, and the question “What are you going to do?”

“I am dreaming, Rosie said to herself, I am dreaming, but her father, having made sure that his act of cremation was irrevocable, was even then returning to the fields.”

The repetition of “dreaming” emphasizes the surreal quality of the event for Rosie. She tries to deny the reality that her father just destroyed the Hiroshige print. The father’s return to the field hammers home what happened and restores his story to what he considers normal.

“It was the most frightening question she had ever been called upon to answer. Don’t tell me now, she wanted to say, tell me tomorrow, tell me next week, don’t tell me today. But she knew she would be told now, that the telling would combine with the other violence of the hot afternoon to level her life, her world to the very ground.”

Yamamoto’s hyperbole and superlative language demonstrate Rosie’s extreme emotional state in the aftermath of her father’s destruction of the print. That act posed its own question: “What had become of her mother?” (18) But even that question does not compare, according to Rosie, to the mystery of why she married Mr. Hayashi in the first place. This new question seems to apply now to her, a young woman now thinking about romance.

“Jesus, Jesus, she called silently, not certain whether she was invoking the help of the son of the Carrascos or of God, until there returned sweetly the memory of Jesus’s hand, how it had touched her and where.”

Rosie’s budding romance with Jesus is threatened by Tome’s urgent request that she promise to never marry. For Rosie, the moment with Jesus in the packing shed has become a sacred experience to her. It is almost religious, as Yamamoto’s double entendre suggests.