No-No Boy (Classics of Asian American Literature)

Easily one of the best books I have ever read (I studied English in college. I've read a LOT of good books, including this one which was an assignment for an Asian-American literature class), extremely well-done and thought provoking. John Okada deserves more recognition as an author and i'm just very glad that there's finally a Kindle version available for this. A lot of my classmates didn't like this book, but it was a very small class so I have a basic theory as to why: They were fairly sheltered and they missed its point. This is the only book I've studied where people didn't agree on the tone of the novel - generally, whether people like something or not, they can concede that it's hopeful, or dark, or terrifying, or what have you. I saw this book as dark but ultimately hopeful; those who didn't like it just saw the darkness...which is especially interesting to me because we started the semester reading America Is In The Heart, which is one of the most depressing novels I've read. We all agreed on that one. so why did this one cause such controversy? Maybe it's honestly just because it's written better. Okada is very talented and very complex, there's a lot of nuance in this and a lot of conclusions that could be drawn from the characters and what they say and do. If you're leery about paying money for this, maybe try a library first. It's not a long book and a pretty quick read, no dragging descriptions or flowy language. I got right into it and finished it in less than a week, and I've read it 5 or 6 times in 3 years. Love it or not, in my opinion, it's a work of genius.

No-No Boy is a novel written by John Okada in 1957. No-No Boy is about Ichiro Okada, a Seattle-born man of Japanese descendent, returning to Seattle, his hometown, after being imprisoned during World War II for not denouncing the emperor of Japan and refusing to report for U.S. military duty. I learned about this book because of some recent controversy over the re-publication of this book by Penguin Books. Penguin claims the work was not properly copyrighted and is public domain property. Since 1976, University of Washington Press had been publishing No-No Boy (and sending royalties to the Okada family). I bought and read the UW Press edition. Ichiro is shunned by the Japanese Americans that served in the military and saw him as a traitor to the United States. He is shunned by Whites because he looked Japanese. He was stuck in a no-man’s land of being seen as neither Japanese nor American. While this book is fiction, the emotions and situations were real. The Japanese Americans returning to their homes after the WWII internment was extremely difficult, and for those that were “no-no boys”, their experiences had to have been heart-wrenching. This book captures powerful emotions. What makes this story remarkable is that it was written at a time when no one talked about the Japanese American experience and how it affected them. Okada does a wonderful job of presenting the nearly hopeless, desperate dilemma faced by Ichiro. Okada’s writing style is almost poetic; it has rhythm. Okada does an admirable job of describing life in post-war Seattle, identifying streets and landmarks by name. One curious technical error is a reference to watching the local Seattle baseball team on television. At the time, televisions were available to the public but prohibitively expensive for households, especially Japanese returning from internment camps where everything had been taken from them. There was also no televised Seattle (Rainiers) baseball in the years immediately after the Japanese return to the coast (about 1947). The Seattle Rainiers didn’t televise their games until 1956. It took me a few days of research to check this out including watching a 90-minute documentary on the history of the Seattle Rainiers. I rate this book 5 stars because it evokes the emotional strain Japanese Americans must have felt after the war and because it was a landmark publication for its time.

NO-NO BOY (2014 reprint) is an interesting book both in itself and for its unique place as perhaps the first novel by a Japanese-American. First published in 1957, it was mostly ignored and quickly disappeared. "Rediscovered" and passed around nearly twenty years later and republished by an Asian-American consortium of writers, it has since taken its rightful place as an important classic. It was John Okada's only book (a librarian and tech writer, he died of a heart attack at just 47), and reads like an autobiographical novel. Quite the opposite. Okada served honorably in the US Army Air Corps. His protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, on the other hand, was the titular "no-no boy," who refused to serve in the armed forces or swear allegiance to a country which had confiscated his family's Seattle home and business and placed them all in a desert internment camp for two years. Because of his refusals he spent two more years in prison. The story itself covers a short period of days following his release from prison well after the war has ended. He returns to Seattle where his parents have reestablished themselves in a small grocery store with living quarters in the back. His younger brother is ashamed of him and can't wait to join the army after high school. His father welcomes him back, and so does his controlling mother, who is delusional in thinking Japan won the war and slowly slips into insanity. Ichiro tries to reconnect with former friends and look for work, but his prison time and his race hamper both endeavors. Interior monologues abound, many of them bitter and frustrated, all of them powerful testaments to rampant postwar prejudice directed at Japanese-Americans. Postwar America of the 1940s is vividly painted here, with its slang, swing bands, roadhouses and private clubs. Ichiro watches helplessly as one veteran friend, badly maimed, is hospitalized, and another no-no boy loses himself to drink and destructive behavior. NO-NO BOY is a powerful novel of being the wrong race, the wrong color, and on the wrong side after the war. John Okada was a very talented writer and this, his only book, is finally getting the respect it deserves. It shouldn't have taken so long. Very highly recommended. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Uma face da história da Segunda Guerra Mundial que ficou escondida. A crueldade feita pelos EUA contra os imigrantes e filhos japoneses, destituídos da cidadania, dos bens, e jogados em guetos.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this book. I actually really enjoyed reading it.

My relatives live in US. They are the third and fourth generation of Japanese American. Their grandparents and greatgrandparents were sent to the relocation camp. I visited them in 1988, but they did not tell me the detail of the life in the camp then.Reading of No-No Boy tells me how they lived and struggled through hard times.

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