by Frank Chin (Afterword), Lawson Fusao Inada (Introduction), Frank Chin (Afterword), Lawson Fusao Inada (Introduction), Ruth Ozeki (Foreword), John Okada (Author)
No-No Boy has the honor of being among the first of what has become an entire literary canon of Asian American literature, writes novelist Ruth Ozeki in her new foreword. First published in 1957, 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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 27 Aug 2014
ISBN 10: 0295994045
ISBN 13: 9780295994048
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 *It is both an important document of Japanese American and Pacific Northwest history and a compelling novel.
-- Emily Lutenski * Pacific Northwest Quarterly *Reading No-No Boy, this week, it no longer seemed bound to its past; it felt like a prophecy, a cosmic tragedy, a message in a bottle that arrives a half century later.
-- Hua Hsu * Page-Turner *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.
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