The American Century: Literature since 1945 771Japanese-Americans. She is insistent, too, on her own Americanness. “I was a Yankee,”
she declares proudly early on in the narrative; “this America,” she insists much later
on, “where I was born, surrounded by people of different extractions, was still my
home.” Yet Sone also admits that she experienced racial prejudice and oppression on
a regular basis, which continually, painfully reminded her of her “Asianness.” And, as
these remembered experiences accumulate, the tone becomes notably more subdued,
awkwardly self-conscious. She may claim, in her closing statement, that her Japanese
and American selves “were now blended into one,” but this seems more a matter of
wish than fulfillment. What the book expresses, really, is a desire for the several
forms of reconciliation it pursues rather than their achievement.
The most remarkable book to come out of the Japanese-American experience of
the war, however, is The No-No Boy (1957) by John Okada (1923–1971). It is also a
milestone, one of the first Japanese-American novels. The “no-no boy” of the title is
a 25-year-old Japanese-American, Ichiro Yamada. In 1943 all internees were given a
“loyalty questionnaire” containing two unsettling questions: whether or not the
internee would be willing to serve in the American military and whether or not they
would deny allegiance to Japan. Ichiro, we learn, has answered “no-no” to these two
questions; and when we meet him, at the beginning of the novel, he has just returned
to Seattle, where his family lives, after two years in the internment camp and –
following his refusal to be drafted – a further two years in a federal prison. He is no
hero, but an alienated, disaffected stranger in his own land, doubly marginalized and
conflicted because he rejects his Japanese as well as his American identity. Feeling
“like an intruder in a world to which he had no claim,” he exists in a state of
hopelessness (a word that Okada recapitulates throughout the novel). “I wish with
all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American,” Ichiro reflects; “I am
neither.” His family, similarly conflicted, offers no refuge. On the basic level of
communication, there is division and confusion, since his parents “spoke virtually
no English” while “the children, like Ichiro, spoke almost no Japanese.” His father, a
submissive, feminized reversal of traditional Japanese notions of patriarchy, seeks
comfort and oblivion in drink, while his mother is so disoriented by the war and
internment that she firmly believes Japan was victorious and that ships will soon be
arriving to take them home. Ichiro rejects the mythmaking of his mother, together
with “her stories about gallant and fierce warriors” drawn from traditional Japanese
lore. He cannot, and will not, embrace the foundation narratives – and, more
specifically, the warrior values – of either America or Japan. So he becomes a
wanderer, literally and figuratively. In an odyssey that begins and ends on the streets
of Seattle, Ichiro appears to parody those legends of heroic mobility enshrined in
both American and Japanese legends of pioneers and samurai. To use a trope that
Okada weaves through the narrative, he is a traveler without a map.
What compel The No-No Boy in new directions, gradually, are the relationships
Ichiro has with his friend Kenji and his lover Emi. Kenji is his foil and desired double.
Kenji, a decorated and wounded war hero, is idolized, whereas Ichiro is despised;
his family is brought together by the war, while the family of Ichiro is torn apart.
“They were two extremes,” the narrator observes, “the Japanese who was moreGGray_c05.indd 771ray_c 05 .indd 771 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM