No-No Boy

A really incredible book that stems from a dark portion of history. No-No Boy is maybe the angriest book I've ever read and has one of the strongest authorial voices; it's a shame Okada never had another book published (apparently he wrote more, but his widow burned them), because he had what writing needs, he was just a bit too early, and maybe a bit too angry for when this book was published. The scars of the second world war, the scars of the ways people of Japanese ancestry who lived in America were treated, were all still too fresh when this book came out. The other issue is the book seems to reel against American exceptionalism, and the national narrative that America saved democracy, saved the world. And if America saved the world, then anyone who refused to fight was a coward and a monster, a criminal: even if they had been asked to fight while prisoners in concentration camps, while American citizens denied the fundamental rights and privileges thereof, even if they had been born here, had never seen Japan, didn't speak the language, didn't know the customs, and only carried with them a tenuous connection to that place through parents who left that place to come to America.

In a modern world, where institutional racism is being dragged out into the open for public discussion, a book about a young man who was victimized by his own government because of his ancestry is an important book to read. But it's not just important, it's more than that; No-No Boy is a great book, and it's one that needs to be more widely read.