No-No Boy tells the gripping tale of Ichiro Yamada, a young man who, like many Japanese-Americans, refuses to denounce his Japanese heritage and fight for the US Army during WWII. His decisions force him to spend four long years in an internment camp and then in prison. On his release, he struggles to reconcile the beliefs that led to his imprisonment with a radically changed post-war America. This is a powerful novel that raises timely questions of identity, heritage and assimilation.
The first Japanese American novel: a powerful, radical testament to the experiences of Japanese American draft resisters in the wake of World War II
After their forcible relocation to internment camps during World War II, Japanese Americans were expected to go on with their lives as though nothing had happened, assimilating as well as they could in a changed America. But some men resisted. They became known as "no-no boys," for twice having answered "no" on a compulsory government survey asking whether they were willing to serve in the U.S. armed forces and to swear allegiance to the United States. No-No Boy tells the story of one such draft resister, Ichiro Yamada, whose refusal to comply with the U.S. government earns him two years in prison and the disapproval of his family and community in Seattle. A touchstone of the immigrant experience in America, it dispels the "model minority" myth and asks pointed questions about assimilation, identity, and loyalty.
“Groundbreaking . . . Only fiction has the power to ask the questions that bring the past to life. [John Okada] has done that. . . . In this way, with this one book, [he] has served to rectify the world.” —
Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being“Iconic . . . Thinking back to writers like . . . John Okada, it is clear that genius is too often unrecognized in its day.” —
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer, in an op-ed for The New York Times“A daring book . . . A close literary kin to Richard Wright’s
Native Son . . . There is no other novel like it about Japanese Americans in the postwar period. . . . A cautionary tale . . . of the incarceration of immigrant families based on racial prejudice, executive privilege, and the false assertion of military necessity . . . Over a half century later, Okada’s novel challenges us once again with the question of character, asking us, as individuals and as a society, what are we made of.” —
Karen Tei Yamashita, from the Introduction
