Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Hisaye Yamamoto. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xxiii + 134 pages. $14.00 paper.

Originally published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1988, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories was honored with the Award for Literature from the Association for Asian American Studies the year it was published. That edition is currently out of print, and has been replaced by this Rutgers University Press collection of Hisaye Yamamoto's short stories, which, like the original edition, contains fifteen short stories spanning Yamamoto's lengthy writing career. The collection begins with her first breakthrough publication, 1948's "The High-Heeled Shoes, A Memoir," which is, in part, about varying forms of sexual harassment, and covers a span of four decades before ending with the more recent "Reading and Writing," a short story about the unique friendship between two very different women, published in Hokubei Mainishi in early January 1988.

Hisaye Yamamoto's most widely anthologized short story, the haunting "Seventeen Syllables," which juxtaposes the anguish of an Issei mother trapped in a difficult, loveless marriage with the bittersweet sexual awakening of her teenager daughter Rosie, is included in this book, along with the three other stories that earned places on the "Distinctive Short Stories" list, which lists the contents of the yearly volume of Best American Short Stories. As testimony to Yamamoto's storytelling skill, "Seventeen Syllables" made the list in 1949, "The Brown House" and "Yoneko's Earthquake" in 1951, and "Epithalamium" in 1960.

Yamamoto, who in 1986 won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, often composes stories informed by not only by...