Asian American Feminism’s Alliances with Men: Reading Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Seventeen Syllables” as an Antidraft Tract

Abstract

Reading Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables" as an Antidraft Tract T he work of fiction writer Hisaye Yamamoto has been widely read, taught, and researched within the sphere of US literary studies. Yamamoto was confined at Poston, a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, and her literary career began soon after her release when the war ended. She started publishing short stories in periodicals from the late 1940s onward. In 1988, Kitchen Table Press compiled a collection of her work titled Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, which was reissued by Rutgers University Press with four additional stories in 2001. The themes that most readily lend themselves to analysis in Seventeen Syllables are those that would be familiar to women-of-color feminism. Much of the early literary-critical scholarship on Yamamoto's oeuvre focuses on the multiple oppressions her female characters face and the strategies they use to maneuver the limited spaces of agency that are open to them ðYogi 1989; Cheung 1993; Yamamoto 1999Þ. There has also been a recent body of scholarship that foregrounds the significance of cross-racial contacts and coalition building in Yamamoto's work ðLee 2004; Hong 2006; Elliot 2009Þ. My treatment of the title story in this collection reveals the extent to which Yamamoto's Asian American feminism not only addresses the sexism to which women are subjected but also unpacks how gendered and racialized forms of violence affect men, too. When readers recognize this critique in "Seventeen Syllables," Yamamoto's exposure of the oppression that Asian American men face becomes more legible throughout the range of her fiction. At first glance, it is easy to condemn the actions perpetrated by her male characters; certainly, these men can be cruel-even brutal-to the women around them. However, a closer read of these texts indicates that a more nuanced consideration of complex dimensions of power is operating under the surface of Yamamoto's prose. With respect to "Seventeen Syllables," I aver that this critique takes the form of a show of support for the men in internment camps who actively resisted their draft into the US Army during World War II. Using the feminized sphere of the home and invoking its attendant themes of love, marriage, and childbirth, Yamamoto