Double Telling, Socio-Historical Context and Asian Americans

Often, in cases in which a literary text is adapted to film, certain elements and techniques in the literary text are lost. Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables and Yoneko’s Earthquake, written in the mid 1900’s, portray the lives of two Japanese American families. Approximately half a century later, Emiko Omori produced a film adaptation of the two stories melded into one, titled Hot Summer Winds. In her short stories, Hisaye Yamamoto employs an interesting strategy of running two plots parallel in a singular story line; the existence of a latent plot within a manifest plot. This tactic of “double telling” as described by King Kok Cheung, requires the reader to take an active part in reading the story; the reader must investigate beyond the text itself in order to understand the intricacies of the latent plot. The tactic of “double telling” is lost in Emiko Omori’s Hot Summer Winds; however her adaptation still remains true in that it succeeds to represent the As...