No-No Boy (Classics of Asian American Literature)

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Description

” No-No Boy has the honor of being the first actual 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 used to be virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment at the back of them. It used to be not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel’s importance and popularized it as considered 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 actual-life “no-no boys.” Yamada answered “no” twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as as to if he would serve within the armed forces and swear loyalty to the USA. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his circle of relatives, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his circle of relatives 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 vital work to new generations of readers.


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