No-No Boy (1957)

No-No Boy by John Okada is a Japanese-American experience after WWII internment camps and prison. Excellent follow-up to 'Silver Like Dust: One Family's Story of America's Japanese Internment' by Kimi Cunningham Grant.

Okada is a rare example of a Japanese-American published writer from the 1950s. A questionnaire was given to Japanese in camps which included 2 questions regarding the draft and renouncing Japanese allegiance (even though American citizenship was not an option). Young men who answered those questions "no," were called No-No Boys and taken to higher security and imprisonment. Okada writes of one No-No Boys angst-filled re-entry into Japanese and American community. I understood this book more because I read 'Silver Like Dust' first. Both were excellent.

The late Okada addressed perceptions from his view as an immigrant Asian confronting the narrow western view of "oriental" people. Not received much attention when published, it now offers a needed historical perspective.

John Okada's gritty, raw account of a Japanese's identity struggle upon returning to American culture after being imprisoned due to refusing to fight in WWII is a fresh detour from the typical Asian American canon. ( )

This is the single published book of the author, who is a second generation Japanese-American. The book was first published in 1957 and then rediscover a few decades later after the author’s death. The story is covering more or less one week of a person’s life. He just got out of prison where he spent two years for refusing to signing up joining the US army during World War II. Before that he spent two years in the internation camp. His return to his home town, Seattle, is marked with soul searching, pain and death. Throughout the book the anti-hero tries to figure out why he said no, and what doe sit mean for his future. His mother escaped to cognitive dissonance and doesn’t accept/believe that her beloved Japan lost the war. When her son forced her to face the inevitable she dies. So does his friend who did join the army but lost his leg and during this crucial week he dies of an operation. There are other equally tragic characters (his younger bother who enlists to the army the day he turns 18, an abandoned wife, a painter who paints truck signs in an institute, the tough boy who provokes his own death…) all of them contributing to the protagonist’s doubts. He has no home, his past and future was taken away from him, his identity questioned. Strong and eye-opening book on the Japanese American’s situation after the war. It is not an autobiographical boo, the author did serve in the army.