"Seventeen Syllables" and Other Stories Literary Elements

Short Stories, Short Fiction, Asian American Fiction

America, generally the West Coast, stories, stories spanning nineteen forties to nineteen sixties, set in the Japanese immigrant community.

The first person narrator of "The High Heeled Shoes" tells the story of harassment from her own, and other women's, perspective.

The tone is combative and all of the characters have a disconnect and a sort of "fish out of water" mood to them.

The protagonist of "The Brown House" is the wife who enables her husband to drink; her husband is the antagonist.

There is constant conflict in all of the stories between the Issei and the Nisei characters which is basically a conflict between the Japanese immigrants and their first generation American children. The source of the conflict is generally the fact that the parents want to maintain their Japanese culture and to impose it upon their children, but their children are American and feel a loyalty to the country of their birth.

The climax of "Seventeen Syllables" is the mother's victory in a Haiku writing competition because it not only rewards her artistic excellence but enables her daughter to start to look at her differently.

World War Two, and specifically the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, foreshadows the change in the way that Japanese immigrants and American-born Japanese are viewed within society.

There is said to be a dissonance between parents and children in the stories but this is an understatement because the communication gap between the generations is so great that it is almost insurmountable.

The author alludes several times to World War Two and the internment camps that the Japanese were put into.

No specific examples.

"Morning Rain" tells the story of a father and daughter, and tells how the daughter feels that her father does not hear her, and ignores her wishes, but this is a paradox because it turns out that her father is actually deaf, the daughter meaning that he is symbolically deaf, the father actually suffering a debilitating hearing loss.

In "Seventeen Syllables" the stories of the lives of mother and daughter are told in a parallel plotline. Both women experience a complete lack of understanding of each other.

Issei is a word used to describe all of the Japanese immigrants in a community.

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