Customer Reviews

No-No Boy

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In my AP English Literature class, I had a choice of reading any novel of "literary merit" I wanted, and to complete a 25 page analysis of the novel. Of the four books I analyzed in this way this year, No-No Boy was by far my favorite. I am caucasian, yet have always been interested in the dark side of America's role in World War II - the Japanese internment camps. This book is a vivid portrayal of one young man's suffering due to his decision not to swear loyalty to a country that had foresaken his rights as a citizen, and the consequences that result from this decision. Okada deals with a very touchy subject in this novel, for both the white and Japanese-American communities. Ichiro's self-inflicted punishment helps the reader to realize just how awful this experience was for the real No-no boys. This realistic portrayal is rather ironic, since Okada himself chose to serve the United States loyally in the army during World War II. Perhaps this novel was written from the side of him that related more to his Japanese roots than to his newfound American identity, and the guilt he himself must have carried when serving in the Pacific, telling Japanese to surrender in their own language. Okada also deals with a seemingly untouchable issue - that of the discrimination the Japanese-Americans themselves practiced toward other U.S. citizens, although they faced discrimination themselves. This adds to the truthfulness of the novel. Perhaps the only disappointing aspect to the novel is the all-American, happy ending that seems a little too contrived, although it must have been necessary for Okada to write the novel this way in order to gain any readers, because the novel's subject was so controversial at the time it was written. This novel should be taught in high schools and universities across the country, in American literature courses, and not just Asian-American literature courses. Now, multicultural education movements have succeeded in gaining the teaching of more women and African-American writers' novel, but Asian-American literature has still been neglected. The tolerance and understanding that students will gain from reading this novel should be evident immediately after one has read No-No Boy, even though the novel is enjoyable and is hardly preachy-sounding.

Ichiro, the main character in John Okada's novel, "The No-No Boy", is put an a very unusual situation - because of his past decisions a lot of his peers do not accept him as Japanese or American.

John Okada does a brilliant job of getting the reader to empathize with the Ichiro's struggle to find direction after being held in an internment camp (jail) for two years. His mother is happy he made the decision to refuse service in the United States Army, his brother believes him a coward, and his father has turned to whiskey for comfort from the constant tug-o-war created by war. He has friends who have sacificed more than he, but are satisfied with his decision to not go to war, and he has friends who never tasted true battle but despise him for not doing so.

At times, I was getting bored with Ichiro's constant whining about his predicament, but Okada did a good job of easing up the saga when it was almost too much and then bringing it back when necessary.

It must have been difficult to try and live in a country that believed you had to prove your loyalty because people who looked like you had attacked your nation of birth. This novel does a good job of making one think about the struggles Japanese-American went through before, during, and after the war.

Okada manages to create dialogue that is not so predictable it becomes a too easy of a read. He keeps the characters in this novel above the routine writing style of most authors.

This book is easy to read, thought-provoking, and contains enough fictional and non-fictional information to make for an entertaining novel.

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It is sad that John Okada wrote only one novel in his life, but it gives me great joy just to mention this book to anyone. _No-No Boy_ is a novel that deals with the high emotions of those felt by Japanese Americans during the tumulous times of the second world war. It is a time when American citizens are incarcerated into "relocation centers" without any wrong doing except that their last names were Okada, Sone, and Ikeda. However, as John Okada traces the story of Kenji, a nisei who refused to answer yes to the loyalty questionaire, we do not feel any strong bitterness about the whole situation that could be all too common in such a text. This touching novel is ultimately about one's search for a home, for loyalty, and for acceptance into society. These themes, while prevalent in many Japanese American texts written about this time period, are universal and can be shared by anyone who has ever felt the pangs of loneliness associated with being an outcast. If anyone is interested in reading more about fiction, good fiction on these issues, there is no book I could recommend more highly than this one. John Okada's book is the ultimate in Asian American literature and should be required reading for all those who want to read more about American history and American literature

John Okada explores race and identity in postwar North America with an unflinching, sensitive eye. His protagonist is a Japanese-American who has spent the duration of the war in prison for refusing military service, on the advice of his mother, who believed the Japanese emperor would call them all home some day. He struggles with the consequences of that decision for the remainder of the novel. This isn't simply a Japanese-American internment story, but a rich analysis of what it means to be non-white in the United States, and all the pain and joy that accompanies such an identity.

Beyond the compelling subject matter, his prose is poetic, visceral, gently engaging of all the senses. The dialogue is evocative without being bogged down by elaborate dialect. Okada has a talent for a natural, flowing narrative voice that almost dreamily leads the reader through complex emotional issues. I cannot understand reviewers who criticized this book as "preachy" - in fact, Okada seems to go out of his way to avoid expressing personal opinions on how the reader should feel about the events described. Never did I feel he was driving home a moral lesson or other.

The framework of the discovery of the novel - as explained in the forward by Frank Chin - is another tragic and dramatic story in itself. Chin's white-hot rage at the loss of Okada's research and papers fairly bristles off the page. The forward is a passionate essay about the birth of Asian-American literature and is worth a read on its own.

There has been virtually nothing written about the experience of Japanese-Americans in WW2 and certainly nothing written about the experiences of the "No-No Boys," the men who resisted the draft while imprisoned in American concentration camps. John Okada has written a powerful novel--his only novel--about both these experiences. In doing so he grapples with the whole question of the American identity and the issue of belonging in American. If men who served their country in war, as Kenji, one of the main characters, cannot find a place to belong in American, how can Ichiro, the main character, find a place when he has gone to prison for not fighting? We discover in the novel how both Kenji and Ichiro are equally outsiders in a country that rewards white skin and Eupopean names over brown skin and Japanese names. The novel offers no easy answers, no simple solutions, and the questions it poses still resonate after forty years. A great, unheralded novel

I have read many books dealing with the Japanese internment during WWII and the aftermath, but this book was the first I have seen that tells a very different story. Beautifully written, the author tells of the conflicts and guilt of a young man who refuses to serve in the US military during the war while his family was being held in an internment camp. After spending two years in jail for the refusal, he returns to the Japanese community in Seattle and struggles to reconcile his dual identify as Japanese and as an American.

This book is worthwhile simply as a great story and enjoyable read. That makes the subject matter even more impressive, because it tackles several intertwined themes on a dark period in U.S. history for many reasons. First, it humanizes ordinary Japanese-Americans who were swept up in the WWII hysteria and had their lives shattered. You follow a young man as he struggles witht the difficult decision of whether to enlist in the U.S. army, which would spare him internment in the concentration camps out West. It's a lose-lose situation, because either choice is painful and has harsh consequences.

An interesting side theme that often doesn't get discussed is the portrayal of the fiercely pro-Japanese mother who never wavers in her belief that Japanese warships will appear on the West Coast and liberate her family and the rest of her Japanese brethren. This is interesting because while it certainly doesn't soften what the U.S. did to those groups during the war, it does help explain somewhat one of the justifications used to whip people up into an anti-Japanese frenzy. The Japanese residents of the West Coast were unlike European immigrant communities on the East Coast in that many Japanese desperately longed to return home and saw living in the U.S. as a temporary solution to economic woes. Coupled with the fact that in the early part of the war the U.S. was in real danger of losing to the Japanese and facing attacks on the West Coast, the mistrust and resentment of Japanese living here was much greater than the feelings toward German and Italian immigrants at the time. Again it doesn't justify U.S. actions during the span of this book, but neither do blanket labels of racism get to the root causes of why these camps were established.

Overall, this is a powerful book that could be enjoyed as a fictionalized story or a non-fiction history.

Set during WWII, No-No Boy explores the experiences of several Japanese-Americans struggling with the problems of identity and belonging. The novel focuses on Ichiro, an American-born Japanese, who refused to be drafted by the US. Now, after being released from prison, Ichiro tries to find his place in a country that placed Japanese Americans in concentration camps, yet simulataneously enlisted them. Ichiro, like many of the characters, has conflicts about being Japanese and being American. His mother, a native of Japan, tried to make him completely Japanese, but having grown up in America, he realizes parts of him would necessarily be American. He is both Japanese and American, but having rejected aspects of both cultures, he is also neither. Ichiro must come to terms with his decisions and reconcile his separate selves into one identity. Over the course of the novel, he meets many other characters- Asian Americans and Caucasians- all of whom have different ideas of how Asian Americans can fit in the US. Each character offers a unique path: from Ichiro's own brother, who is so desperate to be American that he completely rejects his Japanese heritage; to Emi, who believes that Ichiro must learn to forgive the US; to Kenji, who believes that no matter what, Japanese Americans will never be accepted, and so dreams of a world in which race is no longer an issue. Every character affects Ichiro's perception of the world, but in the end, he must forge his own path.
The novel is well-written with a beautiful, haunting style, and the most powerful scenes are the introspective ones. The novel is relatively dark in tone, but there is hope, even in some of the most desolate of characters. Although the last chapter was perhaps not the best way to end the novel, it was nevertheless thankfully not a "happily ever after" cop-out.
The best part of the novel is its diversity of characters. Their unique voices demonstrate that while it is tempting to lump similar people together, whether based on a common race or common problem, they are still individuals. This is not a novel about "the Japanese experience in World War II." It is a novel about one person's experience, and the experiences of those around him, and how he begins to form his own identity.

Many modern Americans are unaware that their own nation interned the entire Japanese population following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. Scattered literature has emerged to give an account of that period in history. In 1957, John Okada published No-No Boy, a lucid, fictional account of a young Japanese American citizen trying to find his place in society after serving time for a rash refusal to serve in the armed forces as proof of his patriotic loyalty. Okada's story, lost and then rediscovered in the mid-seventies, opens a door to understanding the difficulties of Japanese American reintegration into post-war America.
Okada portrays the struggles of Ichiro, a young man caught in a no-man's land between two cultures, despising his own stubborn and confused Japanese family, yet rejected as unpatriotic and unmanly by his own group of American-born friends. Ichiro cannot forgive himself for heeding his deluded Japanese mother and saying no to the draft, and he cannot receive forgiveness from those who offer it to him. He is in a crisis of identity and belonging.
In No-No Boy, Okada explores what it meant to be "American" to the Japanese Americans whose loyalty was put to the test. The beauty of his work is that it engenders forgiveness on several levels-by Japanese Americans towards America for the disruption of their lives during the unrealistic internment, and by America towards its Japanese American citizens for their confused response to the land and people that they considered themselves a part of. In Ichiro's case, it also meant self-forgiveness.
Okada's representation of two-way forgiveness gives permission to his character Ichiro to walk in forgiveness, thereby speeding the process of Ichiro's reintegration into society. This is portrayed beautifully throughout the story, and especially in the moving words of Ichiro's woman friend, Emi:
"In any other country they would have shot you for what you did. But this country is different. They made a mistake when they doubted you. They made a mistake when they made you do what you did and they admit it by letting you run around loose. Try, if you can, to be equally big and forgive them and be grateful to them and prove to them that you can be an
American worthy of the frailties of the country as well as its strengths."
Okada continues this thread of thinking throughout the story through characters like Mr. Carrick, a white, potential employer, and Ichiro's war-hero friend, Kenji. In the end, "in the darkness of the alley of the community that was a tiny bit of America," Ichiro "chased that faint and elusive insinuation of promise" that would restore his Americanism and his hope for a future.
In a world that is long on bitterness and revenge, No-No Boy packs a message of healing and ability to move beyond misunderstandings and errors. Although he only published one book before his untimely death, Okada left to us a novel written in the language of encouragement and forgiveness so necessary to a cynical world. Okada's approach is that of a peacemaker, and he reaches out through No-No Boy to remind us that we have a choice in how we feel about and treat one another in difficult times.

I think the historical signifigance of this novel is enormous. It's a 'first-'hand' account of being Japanese-American during WWII. As an Asian-American and avid student of American history and politics, I found Okada's description of the time to be invaluable. Deconstructing his novel from a modern perspective, however, I do have one big gripe. The tone of the novel is restrained. I can sense the anger and somtimes read allusions into the rage, resentment, and sadness the protaganist Ichiro feels about the situation he is in. He also seems to give a lot of excuses and almost apologize for his unhappiness at times. Considering the time and racial climate in which Okada wrote, it's understandable that he tailored his work to be acceptable to a wide audience. And I'm also not surprised that Okada was reluctant to fully vent his anger at a country that still held so much power over, and animosity towards, him. However, those are not the only reasons. I think this is a real problem in Asian-American literature even today. Instead of self-censoring, mitigating, prettifying, or even apologizing for very natural and necessary feelings and sentiments (like Okada does in 'No-No Boy'), minority authors should fully unleash their voices. Otherwise the integrity of the work suffers and the work is does not completely realize its potential. There is a critical element missing. Having said that, I would still strongly recommend 'No-No Boy' to anyone who is interested in America: it's history, it's government, and it's people.