No-No Boy
John Okada, Karen Tei Yamashita (introduction)First published in 1957, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II & the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese—American writers & scholars recognized the novel’s importance & 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 & swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him & his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison & the hostility of his family & community when he returns home to Seattle.
As Ruth Ozeki writes, Ichiro’s “obsessive, tormented” voice subverts Japanese postwar “model-minority” stereotypes, showing a fractured community & one man’s “threnody of guilt, rage, & blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world.”
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Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Letters to Memory, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, & Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award & awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, & the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow & co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is currently Professor Emeritus of Literature & Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.