Seventeen Syllables Essay

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“Seventeen Syllables”: A Double Entendre “‘Seventeen Syllables’: A Symbolic Haiku” by Zenobia Baxter Mistri shows how the tale offers multiple perspectives that must be peeled back layer upon layer. The tale records a Rosie’s awakening to sexuality, and depicts Tome Hayashi’s devastating annihilation. Before the story is told there is a brief biographical that talks about Yamamoto’s life during the Jappanese Relocation Act which incarcerated 110,000 Japanese in Poston, Arizona. Yamamoto moved to Massachusetts for a summer during war but returned to camp and was later hired by Los Angeles Tribune. The story depicts the cultural barrier that haiku creates between Tome, Rosie, and Mr. Hayashi. The tale unravels the destruction of a woman who creates independently. Ume Hanazono is the name Tome takes on when writing for the Mainichi Shinbun. Ume means an exquisite flowering tree which blossoms in early spring and bears fruit by the end of spring and Hanazono means “flowering garden.” However, her name Tome means good fortune or luck, her last name Hayashi means woods. Mistri shows how the motif of three is a big part of “Seventeen Syllables”. Tome’s brief awakening was “perhaps three months.” It took a season for the Ume tree to bear fruit, which a season is three months. There are three lines in the English version of a haiku. Haiku transforms Tome from quiet wife into a true Japanese woman. Rosie being unable to imagine the floating world that is represented in the gift given to Tome reaffirms the barriers between her mother and herself, also the Japanese culture and herself. When Mr. Hayashi takes the picture and burns it, and Tome and Rosie talk it is shown that the seventeen in the title does not only stand for the syllables in a haiku but also the seventeen silent years since the stillborn child Tome gave birth to, a syllable for each silent
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