Contextualizing the Affect, Ethics, and Politics of Female Silence in Hisaye Yamamoto's Short Stories, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Wilshire Bus” (1950)

This chapter examines short stories by Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Wilshire Bus” (1950). This chapter tests and examines Yamamoto’s engagement with the short story form in her attempt to reframe the stereotype of Asian American inscrutability—to see how the author invites her readers quickly into the plot and allows them to explore the complexity of her characters’ consciousnesses within the short form of the short story. This chapter especially focuses on the link between Yamamoto’s method of narration and silence. Yamamoto foregrounds silence in her writing as a crucial literary strategy to satisfy her communicative, thematic, political, and rhetorical ends. Interestingly, too, Yamamoto engages with different styles of third-person narration in order to preserve (in the case of consonant narration) and diminish (in the case of dissonant narration) characters’ inscrutability at the level of discourse, and different kinds of silence in each story (inter-generational silence and the silence between Japanese American and Chinese American). This chapter also notes Yamamoto’s careful construction of female protagonists in both stories, drawing attention to how ethnic and gender identities intersect in postwar America.