John Okada was a little younger than my last author, Monica Sone -- she was born in 1919 and he was born in 1923 -- but they were both from Seattle, both grew up in hotels that their fathers ran, both attended the University of Washington, and both ended up in the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. They must have known each other, but there is no record of this. I assume Okada would have read Nisei Daughter, published four years before his novel.
But we don't know. Okada died very young, age 47, of a heart attack, and his wife, after trying and failing to interest UCLA in his papers, burned them all. So there are no records. His only published novel had sunk without a trace and not until 1969 was it rediscovered by a group of young Asian-Americans in Berkeley, wondering about their history, who found an old copy in a used bookstore. By the time they went looking for him, he was dead (in 1971). They got the book reprinted in 1976 and it became an instant classic, 19 years after its original publication.
I started reading No-No Boy on September 30th, and read the first chapter. I thought I'd read another chapter or two on October 1st -- then why not a few more -- and ended up finishing it around 3 am that night (I had insomnia). It's a really good book. It's gritty and depressing and three major characters die over the course of the novel, but overall it has a note of hope. It's not a downer.
No-No Boy tells the (fictional) story of Ichiro Yamada, called Itchy, who answered "no" to the two "loyalty questions" asked of Japanese Americans in the internment camps. Because of his answers, he was sent to prison for two years instead of enlisting in the military. The story begins when Itchy has been released from prison and comes home to Seattle. Almost immediately he runs into someone he used to know, a young man who answered "yes" to the questions and served in the military. He spits on Itchy and calls him a "rotten, no-good bastard." This gives us a taste of the reception Itchy will receive from many people in Seattle, especially other Japanese Americans.
I felt as though the action in the book took place over a few weeks, but looking at it now I notice that it's autumn when Itchy arrives in Seattle and by Chapter 8 it's March, so I must have missed some mention of time passing. Doesn't matter. Whether it's six months or six weeks, the book follows Itchy around as he interacts with his parents, brother, and old friends who were also no-no boys or who fought in the war, applies for jobs, drinks, smokes, and thinks about his situation. Gradually he grows up, matures, comes to a kind of understanding. By the end of the book you're pretty sure Itchy is going to be OK.
I learned some interesting things about Japanese-American society from this book. Itchy's mother doesn't believe Japan lost the war, thinks all the news is fake, like some crazy QAnon conspiracy theorist of today. She is proud of her son for being a no-no boy and doesn't want to have anything to do with veterans who fought against Japan or their families. I didn't know there were people like that, but apparently so.
No-No Boy is not an autobiographical novel -- John Okada said "yes, yes" and fought in the Pacific as a translator. That makes it even more interesting, because people like him were supposed to hate the no-no boys. Instead he was able to write this sensitive, insightful novel about what it was like for people like Itchy. He also touches on the dangers of prejudice against all groups of people, with special mention in a couple of places of prejudice against Jews and Blacks. Honestly, Okada sounds like he must have been such a nice person. The saddest thing about the book is that he only wrote one and died at age 47.
The edition I read (from 2014) has a foreword by Ruth Ozeki, an introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada, and an afterword by Frank Chin from which I pulled out this quote:
Think of being born to a people who have no culture, no literature, no writing, no writers, except in some past across an ocean.
This is a pretty good summing up of what I've encountered during this year's Classics Challenge. There is very little, if any, connection between Japanese literature and Japanese-American literature -- and life. In No-No Boy, Okada seems to be arguing that holding on to one's original country (as his mother does) is not a good idea and can even be dangerous and destructive, especially to your children. And yet, what can you do when everyone around you insists on identifying you as a "Jap"? Who are you, really? German Americans looked enough like Americans whose ancestors came from Britain to vanish into that group. Japanese Americans couldn't do that.
Well, I have one more book left in this year's Challenge, and I will probably read it in November. But this was a good one. I highly recommend No-No Boy.
This sounds really interesting and sad. I'd heard about Japanese internees who refused to believe Japan lost the war, I think it was from a book about the Texas internment camps. One of the people interviewed in the book was repatriated to Japan after the war and some of the relatives were shocked when they arrived because of the destruction, they'd been in total denial that Japan lost.
ReplyDeleteI also learned recently that Canada also had internment camps and basically lied to all the internees. They told them they'd get all their property back after the war and they never got it back.