allowed Seth, while he was studying at Nanjing
University in China, to travel to restricted areas
where few non-Chinese tourists had been. The
Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985), which won
him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), All
You Who Sleep Tonight (1990), and Three Chinese
Poets (1992) are his other books of verse. Beastly
Tales from Here to There (1992) offers yet another
example of Seth’s metrical propensities.
Seth first gained literary prominence in 1986
with the publication of The Golden Gate, his first
novel in verse based on Pushkin’s Eugene One-
gin. Consisting of 690 exact tetrameter verses, it
has been hailed by Norman Mailer as “the Great
California novel.” The Golden Gate tells of the lives
and loves of a group of friends in San Francisco,
immersed in the typically yuppie routines of the
latest foodie, yoga, and music trends.
Seth won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize,
and the W. H. Smith Literary Award for A SUIT-
ABLE BOY (1993). Organized around the fates and
fortunes of four families, it tells of the search for
a suitable boy for Lata Mehra and is an allegorical
narrative of the aims and aspirations of a postco-
lonial India.
The passion and knowledge of music that led
Seth to write the libretto Arion and the Dolphin
(1994) can also be seen in his novel An Equal Music
(1999). Set in Venice and London, it is a first-per-
son narrative about the life of a string quartet and
an intensely psychological study of an obsessive
and somewhat unstable character. In his most re-
cent work, Two Lives (2005), a memoir of the mar-
riage of his great uncle and aunt, Seth returns to
the familial terrain that was the inspiration for A
Suitable Boy.
Rajender KaurSeventeen Syllables and Other Stories
Hisaye Yamamoto [DeSoto] (1998)
Many of the stories in Seventeen Syllables explore
the intersections between race and family. The fa-
thers in HISAYE YAMAMOTO’s stories are frequently
stubborn and distant from their children and
wives, made so in some cases by terrible situa-
tions involving poverty, gender roles, internment,
and racism. Sometimes they are so entrenched in
the customs of where they lived before that their
behavior seems unthinkable to modern readers.
The mothers in these pieces often fare far worse; if
they survive childbirth, their marriages are rarely
happy, and they must make their own peace with
the situation. Often the stories are told from the
perspective of a young girl who is unaware of the
complexities of adult lives.
The most widely anthologized story of this
collection, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949), tells
the heart-wrenching story of an anguished issei
mother trapped in a loveless marriage, juxtaposed
with the bittersweet sexual awakening of her teen-
age daughter, Rosie. Rosie’s mother wins the first
prize in a haiku-writing contest sponsored by a
Japanese-American newspaper, but in a fit of jeal-
ousy, Rosie’s father destroys the prize, a beautiful
woodblock print by a famous Japanese artist. In-
furiated, Rosie’s mother tells Rosie that she only
married Rosie’s father as an alternative to suicide
after the birth of a stillborn son conceived out of
wedlock, about which her husband does not know.
She also makes Rosie swear to never marry.
“The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950) is one
of a handful of stories Yamamoto wrote about life
in an internment camp, drawing on her own expe-
rience. It is the story of a woman, Miss Sasagawara,
who was once a dancer but is driven insane by life
at a camp and by her distant, religious father.
“Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951), on the other
hand, tells the story of 10-year-old Yoneko Ho-
soume, who waits for God to answer her prayers to
end the aftershocks of an earthquake. She does not
fully understand all of what is happening around
her, but the careful reader can piece together the
family’s tragic history. Her father is initially made
distant by circumstance, as he was nearly electro-
cuted while driving during the earthquake, but
he becomes increasingly unpleasant as the story
progresses headlong into tragedy. Marpo, a Fili-
pino worker at the family farm, disappears one
day without saying goodbye to Yoneko and her
little brother, Seigo. What Yoneko does not know
is that her mother and Marpo had an affair, which
resulted in an aborted pregnancy. Not long after,Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories 265