SEVENTEEN SYLLABLES
1123
ancholy song? Rosie knew formal Japanese by fits and starts, her
mother had even less English, no French.
It
was much more possible
to say yes, yes.
It developed that her mother was writing the
haiku
for a daily
newspaper, the
Mainichi Shinbun,
that was published in San Fran–
cisco. Los Angeles, to be sure, was closer to the farming community
in which the Hayashi family lived and several Japanese vernaculars
were printed there, but Rosie's parents said they preferred the tone
of the northern paper. Once a week, the
M ainichi
would have a sec–
tion devoted to
haiku,
and her mother became an extravagant con–
tributor, taking for herself the blossoming pen name,
Vme
Hanazono.
So Rosie and her father lived for awhile with two women, her
mother and
Vme
Hanazono. Her mother (Tome Hayashi by name)
kept house, cooked, washed, and, along with her husband and the
Carrascos, the Mexican family hired for the harvest, did her ample
share of picking tomatoes out in the sweltering fields and boxing
them in tidy strata in the cool packing shed.
Vme
Hanazono, who
came to life after the dinner dishes were done, was an earnest, mut–
tering stranger who often neglected speaking when spoken to and
stayed busy at the parlor table as late as midnight scribbling with
pencil on scratch paper or carefully copying characters on good paper
with her fat, pale green Parker.
This new interest had some repercussions on the household rou–
tine. Before, Rosie had been accustomed to her parents and herself
taking their hot baths early and going to bed almost immediately
afterwards, unless her parents challenged each other to a game of
flower cards or unless company dropped in. Now, if her father wanted
to play cards, he had to resort to solitaire (at which he always cheated
fearlessly), and if a group of friends came over, it was bound to
contain someone who was also writing
haiku,
and the small assemblage
would be split in two, her father entertaining the non-literary members
and her mother comp:uing ecstatic notes with the visiting poet.
H they went out, it was more of the same thing. But
Vme
Hanazono's life span, even for a poet's, was very brief-perhaps three
months at most.
One night they went over to see the Hayano family in the
