Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life by Hisaye Yamamoto (review)

Reviews 167 seems drawn beyond observation into the action, into deeper involvement with his lover and her child and with the street violence he monitors from a laboratory window. In the end, though, he decides “to move uptown and devote myself to making a different start in the city.” DONN RAWLINGS Yavapai College Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life. By Hisaye Yama­ moto. Edited by Robert Rolf and Norimitsu Ayuzawa. (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten Publishing, Inc., 1985. 95 pages, including 13 pages of notes in Japa­ nese, 900 yen.) There is still no complete edition of Hisaye Yamamoto’s fiction, nor is there even, to my knowledge, an accurate bibliography of her work. (Elaine Kim’s excellent Asian American Literature misses at least two items.) This volume—published in Japan, testimony to her neglect here—is the best response so far to the first need. Besides the title story (published in 1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951), her two most anthologized works, this collection includes “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950), “The Brown House” (1951), and “Life among the Oilfields” (1979), a story previously unknown to me, and not noted by Kim. Especially unfortunate in its omis­ sion is “Las Vegas Charley” (1961), presumably considered too long for class­ room use in Japan. Yamamoto writes of the great theme of Japanese-American literature, the conflict of the first two generations, Issei and Nisei, and the painful gulf that grew between them. She creates a gallery of sharply-drawn female char­ acters, Issei women who are broken in the new land, and their daughters who grow to maturity through the cycle of stories. A controlling image is the Issei father, who is always a destructive force to the women and girls, and is sav­ agely treated by Yamamoto. Only in the missing “Las Vegas Charley” is he finally acknowledged—after his death—with “something akin to compassion.” In “Life among the Oilfields” she turns directly to the issue only obliquely present in the earlier fiction, the injustice of Anglo society to the Japanese Americans. These are rich, emotionally complex and tightly controlled stories. They should be better known and should be taught in our literature courses, even as they now are being taught in Japan. The Rolf-Ayuzawa collection is available from Kinokuniya Bookstore, 123 Weller Street, Suite 106, Los Angeles, California 90012, for $8.10 plus a shipping charge. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University ...