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My 2016 review: John Okada's 1957 novel was very hard to find, but now I feel very close to him. Okada was the writer who first captured the complex, nuanced, and disturbing emotions of Americans forced to question their American identities -- the WWII Nisei (American born children of Japanese immigrants) who were imprisoned in barbed wire "camps" after Pearl Harbor, then given "the choice" to disavow their cultural heritage, and fight as US soldiers. Okada's No-No Boy character is based on the experiences of American boys who refused to be drafted while their families were imprisoned, and were subsequently put into federal prison. John Okada himself was a WWII veteran of the US Army, but he was courageous enough to write about the terrible emotional and spiritual price paid by Americans thrown into impossible situations by the country they love. A valuable story for our times.
My 2022 review: Rereading John Okada’s No No Boy is like waking from a dream. When I first read Okada’s novel, I couldn’t relate to Okada’s protagonist, a young Nisei man Ichiro who was imprisoned for refusing to fight for his country during WWII. My parents immigrated from Japan after WWII. So the issues Okada’s novel deals with - Ichiro’s troubles adjusting back to civilian life after the double shame of incarceration for his race, and then his No-No status had nothing to do with me. Right? Wrong.
Shortly before my father died in 2015, I learned we had relatives who were born and grew up in California before the war. I was not the first Nisei in the family as I had believed all my life. Dad had kept them and this part of his life secret from me. Only later did I learn the ugly truth. Now I know my father probably did this to try to shield me (and himself) from the trauma of the war years. I discovered that not only were my California relatives incarcerated in Manzanar, a Nisei relative was trapped in Tokyo during the war. I learned these relatives were so traumatized, one renounced his American citizenship and another broke down and probably killed himself.
I was born the year No No Boy was published - 1957. No one appreciated the significance of John Okada’s novel at the time. It went out of print and Okada died without any real recognition. But his words ring true and clear for me now as I deal with similar issues in the writing of my first novel. How does an American of an “enemy race� reconcile their mixed feelings for America and their ancestors� homeland? And how do they forgive themselves as well as forgive those in their own community for the hatred, racism and fear that infects everyone during war? Whites, blacks, Jews, and Japanese-Americans are all part of the story. Okada is able to use story to show the complex emotions of Ichiro the No-No boy, Ken a fatally injured vet, and Ichiro’s mentally unbalanced mother who isolated herself from her sons and her community.
I live now in Seattle, Okada’s hometown and the setting of No No Boy. Okada’s details about the setting as well as his characters shine like a beacon as I struggle to tell my own story of Nisei relatives during WWII. I’m amazed and awed by Okada’s insights into the complicated psychological state of the Japanese American community so soon after the war was over. Okada pulls no punches in his depictions of conflict within the Japanese American community. At the same time, No-No Boy’s message is not one of bitterness or hatred, but rather one of love and acceptance of all of our flaws, as a nation and a people.