Haiku

In Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables," the haiku represents a three lined poem consisting of the pattern 5,7, and 5 syllables in each line. As a haiku represents the constraint of maintaining the poets' thoughts and number of word use with a certain criteria, the constraints of such pattern represents Mrs. Hayashi and her life with her husband. As Mrs. Hayashi is an aspiring haiku poet, she often endures several impediments from her husband as his beliefs of values are placed on physical labor as working on the fields picking tomatoes as opposed to mental labor. Thus, Mrs. Hayashi often finds herself in situations during social gatherings where her husbands interrupting violent storms in and out of rooms causes her to render her conversations and intellectual creativity short in order to please her husband. As Mr. Hayashi destroys the painting given to his wife by the editor of a newspaper, the act of cremation was simultaneously an act of killing and burying his wife's creative character as a poet. Thus, "Ume Hanazono's life span, even for a poet's, was very brief-perhaps three months at most."

Susan Tran