No-No Boy (Classics of Asian American Literature) - Softcover

Okada, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295955252 ISBN 13: 9780295955254

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 1978

Synopsis

" No-No Boy has the honor of being the very first Japanese American novel," writes novelist Ruth Ozeki in her new foreword to John Okada’s classic of Asian American literature. First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel’s importance and popularized it as one of literature’s most powerful testaments to the Asian American experience.

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys." Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle. As Ozeki writes, Ichiro’s "obsessive, tormented" voice subverts Japanese postwar "model-minority" stereotypes, showing a fractured community and one man’s "threnody of guilt, rage, and blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world."

The first edition of No-No Boy since 1979 presents this important work to new generations of readers.

About this title

About the Author

John Okada was born in Seattle in 1923. He served in the U.S. Army in World War II, attended the University of Washington and Columbia University, and died of a heart attack at the age of 47. No-No Boy is his only published novel.

Review

Asian American readers will appreciate the sensitivity and integrity with which the late John Okada wrote about his own group. He heralded the beginning of an authentic Japanese American literature.

(Gordon Hirabayashi Pacific Affairs)

Nisei will recognize the authenticity of the idioms Okada’s characters use, as well as his descriptions of the familiar Issei and Nisei mannerisms that make them come alive.

(Bill Hosokawa Pacific Citizen)

[This new edition] brings Okada's groundbreaking work to a new generation...an internee and enlisted man himself, [Okada] wrote in a raw, brutal stream of consciousness that echoes the pain and intergenerational conflict faced by those struggling to reconcile their heritage to the concept of an American dream.

(Nancy Powell Shelf Awareness 2014-01-00)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0295955252
• ISBN 13: 9780295955254
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264