Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together fifteen 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.
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Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together fifteen 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.
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Seller's Description:
Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover.
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May have some shelf-wear due to normal use. Your purchase funds free job training and education in the greater Seattle area. Thank you for supporting Goodwill's nonprofit mission!
This collection contains some of the finest stories ever written by a Japanese American author. Many of them dramatize the constricted lives of Nikkei (Japanese American) women in pre-war rural America. If Yamamoto's stories are by turns ironic, humorous, and unfailingly honest, the narrative perspective is invariably humane and sympathetic. "The Legend of Miss Sasagawa," perhaps the author's best story, tells the tale of the eponymous protagonist, a former ballet dancer who shares a barracks in a World War II desert concentration camp with her father, an otherworldly Buddhist priest. Yamamoto treats the themes of normalcy and madness with a masterfully light touch. "Yoneko's Earthquake" and the title story are also notable. In particular the author is gifted at conveying the high-spirited, mercurial moods and vivid imagination of a female Nisei (second-generation Nikkei) adolescent. Art can redeem tragic histories and rescue the voiceless from oblivion. The stories of Hisaye Yamamoto accomplish both tasks admirably, and document the dailiness of living with a loving fidelity.