-- Hisaye Yamamoto
Rosie fell for the first time entirely victim to a helplessness delectable beyond speech.
I feel as though when someone falls in love for the first time, as cliché as the saying may go, they tend to fall the hardest. Love, I used to think, was such a unique type of emotion only meant for that "one special" person. Having gone through my own personal first love heartache, I can confidently say that my opinion on love has since then changed. Love is not unique at all, but a mere emotion in which can be learned to be felt and learned to be forgotten. I have great confidence that I will love many times during the course of my lifetime. There will never just be that one single man. (Except for right now, right now is that one single man).
In Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables, I get the feeling that Rosie's mother is so religiously obsessed with her contribution to writing Haikus as a way to fill the void of a first lover's heartbreak back when she was a teenager. Anything in my opinion, can be temporarily cured by distraction. Distract yourself long enough and you put it off. Distract yourself even longer than "long enough" and you become in denial. Burdening a secret that has pained you throughout the course of most of your life is a distressful thing to harbor and keep hidden.
I chose the quotation above to illustrate the cycle of first lover's love as the beginning of how all first loves start. This isn't to say that some don't work out, because they do. However there is always that chance that it won't. Being in love requires such vulnerability. But I feel once you're in it, once you're fully surrounded and grasped into what it all encumbers to be. I am still unsure however what the title has anything to do with the actual story except for the connection that seventeen syllables make up a Haiku, which is Rosie's mother's distraction, which in return becomes a plea for Rosie's mom to beg her not to commit.
All of this is very confusing. But then again, so is love.
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