First written in 1948, "Seventeen Syllables" was published in an anthology of Hisaye Yamamoto's most famous works in 1988. As a collection, it includes stories that span almost forty years of writing and as well as her seminal work, includes other notable stories "Yoneko's Earthquake", "The Brown House" and "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara". The stories all center around the theme of first generation Japanese immigrants, known as Issei, and their American born children, known as Nissei. Yamamoto draws on many of her own experiences in her writings and some of the stories are more like memoirs than fictional works.
The title short story, "Seventeen Syllables", is a story that follows the parallel lives of a first-generation American Japanese girl and her Japanese immigrant mother. Neither seems capable of understanding the other; the mother is obsessed with Haiku poetry, which is referenced in the story's title, as Haiku is a Japanese poetic form that consists of seventeen syllables. This passion baffles her daughter, who is involved in a budding romance with a young Mexican boy. This in turn perturbs her mother who cannot understand why she insists upon dating outside of her ethnic group. As the story progresses mother and daughter mellow towards each other and start to understand each other more. Along the way, Yamamoto explores the themes of the generation gap, the cultural gap between first generation American children and their Japanese immigrant parents, and also class resentments.
"Seventeen Syllables" is considered to be both the author's most endearing and most enduring short story, and has been reprinted more than all of the other stories she has written combined. It is also the most-taught piece of literature in Asian American Studies undergraduate classes.
Yamamoto was easily able to identify with the characters in the story, particularly the daughter, being the American-born daughter of Japanese immigrant parents. Because her early life involved a great deal of moving around, she found solace in the one constant she could find, and that was writing. As a teen she began to write short stories for Japanese-American newspapers, which dealt with the conflicting viewpoints of immigrants like her parents, and their American-born children, specifically the fact that the Issei wanted to preserve their old culture and its traditions in their new country, but their Nisei children felt a loyalty to America, the country of their birth. They wanted to speak English rather than Japanese, and Yamamoto used her short story writing to make it obvious on which side of this argument she stood; she wrote solely in English.
