Bask - Shop now
Buy new:
-33% $24.10
FREE delivery Tuesday, April 15 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Ships from: Amazon.com
Sold by: Amazon.com
$24.10 with 33 percent savings
List Price: $35.95
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Tuesday, April 15 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or Prime members get FREE delivery Saturday, April 12. Order within 11 hrs 27 mins.
Only 5 left in stock (more on the way).
$$24.10 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$24.10
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Ships from
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Returns
30-day refund/replacement
30-day refund/replacement
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
$12.48
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
Ships directly from Amazon! PRIME eligible. Hassle free returns and customer service through Amazon. May contain some highlighting. Supplements such as access codes, CD’s etc not guaranteed. Ships directly from Amazon! PRIME eligible. Hassle free returns and customer service through Amazon. May contain some highlighting. Supplements such as access codes, CD’s etc not guaranteed. See less
FREE delivery Tuesday, April 15 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or Prime members get FREE delivery Saturday, April 12. Order within 14 hrs 42 mins.
Only 2 left in stock - order soon.
$$24.10 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$24.10
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Hisaye Yamamoto
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Updated with four new stories. Paperback – May 10, 2001

by Hisaye Yamamoto (Author), King-Kok Cheung (Introduction)
4.4 out of 5 stars 43 ratings
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$24.10","priceAmount":24.10,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"24","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"10","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"3seo8ahlP7tr27n4piMKUfdVY8m60Es%2FlEMBcnf7g%2B0uOKbH5YQqjpONHTM3joFRYskLNvkH4FEuQphcJB4jeZWTuqSNLlf0FdMnAaQ8o3kHq03roMl19%2BAO7wdCtKg95YLrE8CGbMc%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$12.48","priceAmount":12.48,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"12","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"48","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"3seo8ahlP7tr27n4piMKUfdVY8m60Es%2F61qqYtn2n3HEcDdjwENTnJVdoE5y7yUS7hfLHt0oHzOdMqyPpapwgOtteKYapUabqFYxUC7byxtX7GCAG%2FACqi8Ya3rsAVrpW%2Bc86oxIMJUpqXyYEWRT8nPhWENNjSmn4mlCexIlD4UimeV01d%2FVpivumdB4GQnB","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together nineteen stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's forty-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei, and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

In addition to the contents of the original volume, this edition brings back into print the following works:
- Death Rides the Rails to Poston
- Eucalyptus
- A Fire in Fontana
- Florentine Gardens
Previous slide of product details
  1. Print length
    178 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Rutgers University Press
  4. Publication date
    May 10, 2001
  5. Grade level
    9 and up
  6. Reading age
    14 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    0813529530
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0813529530
Next slide of product details
The%20Amazon%20Book%20Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Frequently bought together

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Updated with four new stories.
This item: Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Updated with four new stories.
$24.10
Get it as soon as Tuesday, Apr 15
Only 5 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
Interpreter Of Maladies: A Novel
$10.99
Get it as soon as Tuesday, Apr 15
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
The Flower Drum Song
$21.44
Get it as soon as Tuesday, Apr 15
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by JTN OUTLET LLC and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
Total price: $00
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
Some of these items ship sooner than the others.
Show details Hide details
Choose items to buy together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

These remarkable stories are written with the proportion and craft of the mastersùthere are hints of Chekhov, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, and Grace Paley. . . . Each of the fifteen short stories, written with the economy of haiku, is a treasure. ― Booklist

The writing of history and the telling of stories are in our time very different. But these stories about the daily lives of Japanese American women in and out of the World War II internment camps of the United States are history and herstory. The women are gutsy or fragileùthat is, like any of us would be caught in exile while at home. The stories are beautifully written so we feel them even more deeply. ― Grace Paley

You can imagine my delight to learn that a collection of her work is now finally seeing the light of day. How good that feels. At last more people will be touched by the grace that flows through Hisaye YamamotoÆs pen. The world will be a better place because of it. ― Joy Kogawa

Reading Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories is like sitting down and having a good talk with someone who really remembers, someone who will open a door to her feelings and thoughts about what it has meant to be Japanese American during the last 40 years. . . . Seventeen Syllables is an excellent resource, one that keeps getting better with time. ― International Examiner: The Pacific Reader

From the Back Cover

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories now brings together nineteen stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's forty-year career. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei, and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

In addition to the contents of the original volume, this edition brings back into print the following works:

Death Rides the Rails to Poston Eucalyptus A Fire in Fontana Florentine Gardens

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rutgers University Press; Revised and Expanded edition (May 10, 2001)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 178 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0813529530
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0813529530
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 9 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 43 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Hisaye Yamamoto

Hisaye Yamamoto

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
43 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers
Write a customer review

Top reviews from the United States

  • Miss K
    5.0 out of 5 stars This is a lovely book.
    Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    You should read it.
    Helpful
     Report
  • Joyce T
    5.0 out of 5 stars Priceless
    Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    These stories by Japanese American author, Hisaye Yamamoto are beautifully crafted and are from the heart. She really knew how to draw the reader into the story.
    4 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • yuri
    4.0 out of 5 stars Insight
    Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    These stories gave an insight to how a Nisei (Japanese-American) feels. I am a Nisei and didn't realize that I had some of the same feelings until I read this book. The stories are short and easy to read.
    9 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • jf
    5.0 out of 5 stars Seven syllables
    Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2011
    Verified Purchase
    Great reading for especially for those with Nisei upbringing. Gives insight into Japanese American culture and history of events that was not discussed to this generation when growing up.
    11 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Charlie Canning
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great short stories by a little-known master of the form
    Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2013
    Hisaye Yamamoto was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1921 to a family of first generation (Issei) Japanese American vegetable farmers. Like many Nisei children, Yamamoto grew up speaking Japanese at home and English at school. After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066 consigning both Japanese-born residents of the United States and American-born Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to internment camps in the high desert regions of the West, Yamamoto and her family were interned at the Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona.

    Toward the end of the war, Yamamoto was allowed to leave the camp, and after a brief stint working as a cook in Springfield, Massachusetts, she returned to Los Angeles and began working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune, a weekly newspaper for the black community. Drawing on the journalism skills that she had learned while at Poston (Yamamoto had served on the staff of The Poston Chronicle, a camp newspaper), Yamamoto worked as a proofreader, a rewriter, and a columnist. Then in 1948, while still at the Tribune, Yamamoto adopted an infant child, an extraordinary thing for a single woman to do at the time. It was while raising her son that she wrote the prize-winning story "Seventeen Syllables" (1949). On the basis of this work, she was awarded a John Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship for 1950-51. The grant allowed her to complete three other masterpieces of the short story form: "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara" (1950), "The Brown House" (1951), and "Yoneko's Earthquake" (1951).

    Although Yamamoto has been compared favorably to Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, and even Maupassant, her work is probably closest to Flannery in effect. Both O'Connor and Yamamoto utilize limited third person points of view to mask startling illuminations of great power. But with Flannery, the blows come in fairly regular beats of "One, two, three!" In Yamamoto's stories, the count is more like, "One ... two ... threeee ...." Some of the stories never get to "three." In "Yoneko's Earthquake," for example, the shoe never hits the floor. It is still falling when you look up to refocus your eyes on a midpoint at the end of the room. You've finished the story and it should be over but it isn't. And then it hits you with something analogous to the force of Somerset Maugham's "Rain."

    The critic King-Kok Cheung, who wrote the "Introduction" to this edition, has commented about the power of what is not said in Yamamoto's stories and this is undoubtedly the most singular quality of her fiction. Sometimes, as in the case of "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara," the essence is so subtle that one is in danger of not getting it at all. But then you see the Buddhist ascetic father paired with his China-doll daughter in the wasteland of a high desert plywood shack during wartime and you know that for some people, culture and dignity are food and water.

    "The Brown House" is less opaque but no less powerful. Here, Yamamoto has cast the net a little wider. In addition to the signature Issei and Nisei characters of the previous stories, she has added the incomparable Mrs. Wu, the Chinese American proprietress of a rural gambling den "under cover of asparagus." In the Wu establishment, all people " - white, yellow, brown, and black - "are free to lose their money. It is a democracy of sorts, but far from the one imagined.

    The final story of the 1949-1951 period, written before Yamamoto put aside her writing to volunteer for a Catholic Worker organization on Staten Island, is "Yoneko's Earthquake." As with "Seventeen Syllables," it is told from the point of view of a young girl whose understanding of the principal events of the story is limited. Yoneko lives on an isolated family farm with her mother and father, her brother Seigo and the hired man Marpo, a talented and handsome Filipino jack-of-all-trades. After the earthquake comes, there is a realignment of sorts and we - along with Yoneko - are made to put the pieces back together. Again, it is not exactly clear what did or did not happen. Again, Yamamoto has created a kind of force field between characters who stand like silhouettes against a sky veined with lightning. Because we can see the lightning, we wait for the thunder. And when it doesn't come, it is even more present than it would be if it rattled the windows.

    Although the term "masterpiece" is too often used these days, the four short stories that Hisaye Yamamoto wrote on her kitchen table in the years 1949-1951 are as good as it gets. The back story - that they were written by a single mother who had spent two years in an internment camp during the war - only adds to their luster.
    19 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Alyssa Smith
    3.0 out of 5 stars “But, alas, most egos were covered with the thinnest of eggshells.”
    Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2016
    Here is a collection of short stories written by Hisaye Yamamoto, first published in 1988 and containing stories written during a 40-year span. This book contains some of her most anthologized works, including “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” “The Brown House,” and “Seventeen Syllables.” Though many of them are autobiographical, only two of them, “Life Among the Oil Fields” and “The High-Heeled Shoes,” are noted as memoirs.

    Seventeen Syllables was actually a lot more enjoyable than I thought it would be. The stories were very relatable, even as an American, and some were interesting to read about. Yamamoto is a great storyteller and has a knack for short story writing. Though there were a few stories I could not get into, most of them were fairly enjoyable and easy to read. “Seventeen Syllables,” Yamamoto’s most famous story, was probably one of my favorites. The story is about a young Nisei girl (a person born in America whose parents were immigrants from Japan) and her growing relationship with a Mexican boy working in the fields. It’s also about the girl’s mother and her passion for haiku writing, as well as the father’s resentment towards her mother. It has a lot to due with inter-racial interaction and class separation, themes that reappear throughout the book. I also enjoyed “The Brown House,” a story about a gambling husband, and “Epithalamium,” a story about a Japanese-American woman’s troublesome relationship with her Italian-American husband. I definitely liked this collection of short stories, even though I doubt I’ll read it again. I'm just not a huge fan of Asian-American literature.

    Of course, I’d never heard of Yamamoto before and it appears she recently died in 2011. Though this wasn’t my favorite short story collection, I did enjoy it and I truly liked Yamamoto’s writing. I think she had real talent with writing short stories, which is not something everyone has. I’m very particular about short stories, which sounds silly but they have to be written a certain way, and Yamamoto achieved that. She was no Neil Gaiman, but I liked her writing nevertheless.
    4 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Eleanor Brownn
    5.0 out of 5 stars It expanded my world view
    Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2011
    There are very few books from college I have kept over the years. Out of the hundreds of assigned texts I bought while an undergrad at UCLA, it would be safe to say I have kept only about a dozen or so for my permanent collection. Most "required reading" not only never got read as required, it got sold back to the campus bookstore the minute finals week ended.

    But a collection of lyrical short stories by Hisaye Yamamoto called Seventeen Syllables was special. Its subtle call to justice for Americans who were unfairly vilified during World War II brought me to tears. It's depiction of the tensions that stem from immigrants and the children of immigrants being torn between traditions and generations opened my eyes to a world much wider than my own. Her characters' humanity transcended time and culture. I still have the book, and from the moment I read it I never once gave a thought to letting it go.

    It's a book of fiction but the life stories and experiences on which she based it were real. Haunting and poetically written, it shows the resiliency as well as the fragility of the human soul.
    14 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • olenska
    5.0 out of 5 stars 日系アメリカ人女性作家の作品集
    Reviewed in Japan on April 22, 2004
    Verified Purchase
    日系アメリカ人作家、ヒサエ・ヤマモトの短編集。どの作品も秀逸。ある作品で、辛い現実（例えば太平洋戦争中の日系人強制収容）を扱いながらも、作者の淡々とした視点で、ときにユーモアを交え、展開していく。そうでない作品も、「劇的に面白い！」という訳ではないのだが、意味深なエピソード盛りだくさんで読者はそんな「意味深な世界」に深く惹き付けられる。年齢を問わず、日系女性が主人公の作品が多い。表題作、Seventeen Syllablesで、俳句コンテストで得た賞品を怒り狂った夫に焼かれるお母さんには泣ける。そして、その後娘に向かって発する言葉にも。ぜひぜひ多くの人に読んで欲しい。もしあなたが日本人ならもしかすると、おじいちゃんおばあちゃんの世代がアメリカに渡って日系人になっていたら、こんな日常が広がっていたのかも。翻訳が待たれます。
    Report
  • Juliet
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 21, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    good book, delivery is a bit slow though
    Report