I've talked endlessly about how the TIME Top 100 Novels list is a lot of white dudes; I made some changes and turned it into my Classics Club List. I halfway knew early on in that goal that I wanted to read something by an East Asian author, a group that was more or less totally excluded from the original list. A friend recommended Farewell to Manzanar, which I still absolutely intend to read, but I had a hard time finding it in my libraries, and it felt a little weird to include a straight-up memoir on a list of novels.
So Adam basically dropped the perfect book in my lap, or at least the perfect title. The second shout-out and thanks go to Henny Blanco (of Dirt Nap Podcast fame), who was kind enough send me a huge dump of ebooks from my Goodreads TBR, including . . . No-No Boy!
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| Image courtesy of University of Washington Press |
The story of John Okada, the author, is kind of tragic. No-No Boy is his only novel. It was published in 1957 to a lukewarm reception at best, and so he more or less left the writing world for the rest of his short life. He died in the early 70s of a heart attack, and while he was working on another novel at the time, the documents are lost to us so it's hard to tell if he just had notes, or if he had a completed draft, or if he had something almost completely finished.
The title refers to the loyalty questionnaire Nisei Americans (American-born Japanese) were asked to swear when being called up to the draft, which consisted of a number of questions. The last two were real humdingers:
Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?
Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiances to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or other foreign government, power or organization?
Thousands of people answered "no" to both questions and ended up serving time in prison for it, and they became known as "no-nos" or "no-no boys." Okada was not one of them, but the protagonist of his novel is. No-No Boy is the story of Ichiro Yamada, a no-no boy who comes back to his life in Seattle after his prison sentence. His mother is proud of him for being a no-no boy; she thinks Japan actually won the war, and that soon she and other loyal Japanese will get to go back. Others are, unsurprisingly, furious with Ichiro, white and Nisei alike. Eventually Ichiro runs into Kenji, a fellow Nisei and a veteran who lost his leg in the European theater and who is only getting more and more ill. Kenji seems to understand Ichiro, at least better than anyone else does, and the two spend a lot of time together as Ichiro tries to figure out his new place in the world.
I'm so glad I finally got to read this. (Thanks again, Henny!) I'm not sure if I missed out on it during my American literature education because it's obscure, or because my education in particular was really spotty, or because I'm just not as well-read as I'd like to think.
There are a handful of books I review here that I really hope people will go out and read (if they haven't already). Usually it's because they're really good, but this is one I think we should read because it's important. Well, and it's also really good and worth reading regardless, but for all of the novels we have World War II veterans, it's important to remember what was happening to other Americans at the same time. No-No Boy widens that focus and broadens that perspective. I'll leave off with a quote from early on the in the novel, when Ichiro decides to pay a visit to the university where he was studying before the internment camps and then prison:
Not until the bus had traversed the business district and pointed itself toward the northeast did he realize that he was on the same bus which he used to take every morning as a university student. There had been such a time and he vividly brought to mind, with a hunger that he would never lose, the weighty volumes which he had carried against his side that the cloth of his pants became thin and frayed, and the sandwiches in a brown grocery bag and the slide rule with the leather case which hung from his belt like the sword of learning which it was, for he was going to become an engineer and it had not mattered that Japan would soon be at war with America. To be a student in America was a wonderful thing. To be a student in America studying engineering was a beautiful life. That, in itself, was worth defending from anyone and anything which dared to threaten it with change or extinction. Where was the slide rule, he asked himself, where was the shaft of exacting and thrilling discovery when I need it most? If only I had pictured it and felt it in my hands, I might well have made the right decision, for the seeing and feeling of it would have pushed out the bitterness with the greenness of the grass on the campus and the hardness of the chairs in the airy classrooms with the blackboards stretched wall-to-wall behind the professor, and the books and the sandwiches and the bus rides coming and going. I would have gone into the army for that and I would have shot and killed, and shot and killed some more, because I was happy when I was a student with the finely calculated white sword at my side. But I did not remember or I could not remember because, when one is born in America and learning to love it more and more every day without thinking it, it is not an easy thing to discover suddenly that being American is a terribly incomplete thing if one's face is not white and one's parents are Japanese of the country Japan which attacked America. It is like being pulled asunder by a whirling tornado and one does not think of a slide rule though that may be the thing which will save one.
I hope that whet your appetite! If you've read No-No Boy, I'm curious about what you think. If not (or even if you have, I guess), what are some other under-read and underappreciated classics that you think should be more famous? Why?
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