Seventeen Syllables

            The short story Seventeen Syllables is told through the eyes of Rosie. Rosie is apathetic when it comes to studying her Japanese, and she doesn't have clean-cut perspective of her parents. At the end of the story we learn that her mother, Tome Hayashi is in an arranged marriage to Rosie’s father. Rosie’s aunt arranged this marriage because Tome had an illegitimate child with a young man in her village. After birthing the child Tome was neglected by her family and threatened to kill herself unless she could move to the states.

            The background of Tome is important because it connects to the bigger picture of why this family is normal on the outside, but has a lot of internal conflict. Not any different from other families with secrets, the secret eventually arises and changes a characters perspective on their family and life in general. For this story the secret comes out when Rosie’s Dad destroys a picture that is a prize won by Tome for her haiku. In the beginning of the story we learn that Tome becomes two people. The first person is the person she has always been and has the duties of a mother. The second person is Ume Hanazono. Ume is a bitter person who doesn't like to respond to her family and spends her time at night writing Haiku’s.

            All of this is valuable information when learning about Rosie. Rosie starts off not really caring about Japanese or Haikus. When she learns this it seems that Rosie doesn't really care about her culture or her ancestors. Then she decides to care when she realizes that she has a brother who is in Japan.

All of that aside, there are parts of this story that need to be analyzed. One of the most important parts of this text is when Rosie thinks that she is more shocked by the request of her mother than the revelation. This is important because Rosie has such a concrete depiction of her mother that she doesn't believe she would make such a request to tell her to not marry. The secret seems less important because of how obtuse the request is. This relates to a pretty much everyone. This relates to people that know their parents and people that don't know their parents. By the time that most people have kids they have already grown up, made important life decisions, and created a network of people that they know. A lot of times parent’s kids don't even know who their parent were before they were born. Also this story is a great example of how we are not defined by a past secret, what really matters are who that person is on a day to day basis.

Vocabulary from the story:

Garrulous – Rambling in a roundabout manner

Rambunctiously- difficult to control

Haiku – Poem of seventeen syllables