“Seventeen Syllables” focuses on Rosie Hayashi, the teenage daughter of Japanese immigrants. The story charts Rosie’s coming-of-age over the course of a few months, the same few months in which her mother writes haiku.

One way in which Rosie comes of age is through her friendship and burgeoning romance with Jesus, a young Mexican American man whose family has been hired to help with the harvest on the Hayashis’ tomato farm. Rosie and Jesus begin as relative strangers, then become “great friends” over the course of the summer. Their friendship develops into something more when Jesus asks Rosie to meet him in the packing shed and kisses her. This is implied to be Rosie’s first kiss: the narrator reports that “Rosie fell for the first time entirely victim to a helplessness delectable beyond speech.” Before long, however, she breaks away and runs back to the familiar safety of her parents’ house; she is not yet ready to fully embrace adulthood or her emerging sexuality.

Rosie also comes of age by learning the truth about her mother’s past and her parents’ marriage at the end of the story. Mr. Hayashi’s destruction of the Hiroshige picture can be seen as a symbolic destruction not only of Tome’s alternate identity as the poet Ume—and with it the fragile joy in life Tome has found through haiku—but of Rosie’s childhood innocence about her parents’ marriage. Rosie’s innocence is even more emphatically lost when Tome tells Rosie about her stillborn child and why she married Mr. Hayashi. Stunned, Rosie responds by “pushing back the illumination which threatened all that darkness that had hitherto been merely mysterious or even glamorous.” Gaining knowledge, or “illumination,” is thus figured as part of coming of age, and experiencing loss and sorrow is figured as part of that process.

“Seventeen Syllables” provides a nuanced depiction of intergenerational conflict in a Japanese American family in the first half of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the story, Rosie and Tome’s relationship is notable for its lack of visible conflict—Rosie habitually responds to her mother by saying “yes, yes,” never disagreeing or voicing her lack of understanding. Yet the two share a language barrier that creates a deep conflict beneath the surface: while Rosie speaks little Japanese, Tome speaks little English. Even when she yearns to communicate with her mother, Rosie finds herself unable to do so, such as when she wishes she could tell Tome about the English haiku she read in a magazine. The author writes that

The truth was that Rosie was lazy; English lay ready on the tongue but Japanese had to be searched for and examined, and even then put forth tentatively (probably to meet with laughter). It was so much easier to say yes, yes, even when one meant no, no.

This linguistic conflict symbolizes a broader generational divide between Tome, who grew up in Japan, and Rosie, who was born in the United States. Rosie does not fully understand her mother’s passion for haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry, and she keeps her meeting with Jesus, a young Mexican American man, a secret from both her parents. At Japanese school, Rosie mimics famous American singers and actors to entertain her friend Chizuko, signifying her immersion in American popular culture rather than Japanese traditions. Finally, at the end of the story, Rosie must face the pain of her mother’s past in Japan, now passed down to her as intergenerational trauma. Tome hopes to save Rosie from sharing this same trauma by begging her never to marry, and Rosie finds herself reluctantly saying, as always, “yes, yes”—even though her true feelings on the matter are extremely conflicted.