772 The American Century: Literature since 1945American than most Americans because he had crept to the brink of death for
America, and the other who was neither Japanese nor American because he had
failed to recognize the gift of his birthright when recognition meant everything.”
Kenji offers Ichiro the chance of intimacy, the opportunity to break out of the
descending spiral of his own hopelessness – not least, when Ichiro is required to
witness and share in Kenji’s suffering and dying. A similar chance, to break out and
perhaps believe in “the great compassionate stream of life that is America,” is offered
by the woman to whom Kenji introduces him. Emi, whose father was repatriated to
Japan and whose husband, a Japanese-American soldier, has left her for a second
tour of military duty and will never return, is freely compassionate and loving.
Together with Kenji, she is vital to the protagonist’s sometimes fainthearted “quest
for completeness.” That quest is never completed, to the extent that the narrative
circles back on itself, with Ichiro, at the end, still in motion. But, at least, there is the
sense, as the book goes on, that this is a quest, not just a wandering but a seeking.
Ichiro extends his sympathies to a former enemy injured in a barroom brawl; his
frozen emotional state starts to thaw; and his story closes, for us, on a carefully
nuanced note of hope. “He walked along, thinking, searching, thinking and probing,”
the book concludes, “and, in the darkness of the alley of the community that was a
tiny bit of America, he chased that faint and elusive promise as it continued to take
shape in mind and in heart.” The No-No Boy is a subtle story. It catches, for instance,
the intricate network of tensions obtaining between several racial groups, not just
Anglo and Japanese, and, within the Japanese-American community, between those
born in Japan and those born in America. So the conclusion is not simply affirmative.
What it is, is quietly reflective, delicately shaded: Ichiro leaves the story journeying
toward redemption, the elusive promise of a recovery that is both personal and
cultural. In that sense, he resembles the protagonist of Invisible Man, and so many
other American novels that have at their core the dilemma of divided identity. He is
an underground man, the conscience of a particular people and a nation, seeking a
place where he can be truly himself.
Janice Mirikitani (1942–) also experienced internment as a very young girl. It is
an experience that supplies material for many of her poems. So do her memories of
her mother and father, who were interned along with her. “Your tears, mama, / have
nourished us. / Your children /,” Mirikitani confesses in “Desert Flowers” (1978),
“like pollen / scattered in the wind.” “He came over the ocean / carrying Mt. Fuji / on
his back,” she recalls in “For My Father (1978), “hacked through the brush of deserts /
and made them grow / strawberries.” In “Breaking Silence” (1987) she even uses
excerpts from her mother’s testimony to the Commission on Wartime Relocation
and Internment. The quotations are inserted between stanzas, using Mirikitani’s
characteristically loose, idiomatic line, that celebrate her mother’s courage – and her
resistance to the traditional imperatives of female submission and silence. That
resistance is shared by the daughter. In “Recipe” (1987) Mirikitani mocks the absurd
convention of Asian-American women trying to conform to Western ideals of
appearance. Elsewhere, in “Bitches Don’t Wait” (1978), for instance, she uses
explicitly sexual material to defy the assumption that, as an Asian-American female,GGray_c05.indd 772ray_c 05 .indd 772 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM