'Seventeen Syllables': Hisaye Yamamoto (Women Writers: Texts and Contexts) by King-Kok Cheung

Author:King-Kok Cheung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-10-16T03:39:00+00:00

or Yuki Tsumagari, the Japanese girl from San Francisco, it was the next-to-the-last day at the Zualet Community on Staten Island. Tomorrow, Madame Marie would drive her to the village station and she would embark on the three-thousand mile journey by bus which would take her back to her mother and father on Saturn Street, to her married younger brother and his wife (with the two little girls who looked just like Japanese dolls), to her friend Atsuko who had been her soul mate since they had first met during the war at the Utah concentration camp called Topaz.

Also, although she did not know it, today was her wedding day. Yet, she should have suspected something unusual. She had awakened in the morning with Hopkins running through her mind:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed...

As bookish as she had been all her life, she had never come to consciousness before with poetry singing in her head. Perhaps this was to be the first and last time. In any case, the lines had sustained her all that strange day long; walking the wooded mile down Meadowvale Lane to meet Marco at the village trolley station (he had phoned and threatened, still drunk, to go away forever if she did not marry him that very day); riding with him on the trolley to St. George; standing before the city clerk in that little room with the podium, the American flag, and the potted palm, where a fellow civil servant had hastily been called in as a witness; promising to love, honor, and obey this inebriated man.

Afterwards, Marco was quite miffed because Yuki had refused to go to his hotel room with him. He went by himself to check out and return the key and must have found a bottle in his room because he came back to the rear stairway, where she had been waiting, drunker than ever. They rode the trolley only as far back as Princess Bay station, and because he was in no condition to take back to the Community, they remained there at the covered wooden waiting bench. He passed out with his head on her lap, and as she sometimes gazed down at that once perfect (many women had sought him), now battered face, flushed and swollen with drink, she thought, "This is my husband." For better or for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.

The months since March, when he had first confessed his love, had been alternately lovely and sordid and terrible and sweet. She had got more than she bargained for, certainly. Once they had walked up Meadowvale Lane in the spring rain and stopped every few minutes to cling and kiss, careless of their sodden clothes and the few cars that slowly passed. There was scarcely a nook or cranny of the Community

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