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No-No Boy

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About this listen

First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel's importance and popularized it as one of literature's most powerful testaments to the Asian American experience.

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys". Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle.

As Ozeki writes, Ichiro's "obsessive, tormented" voice subverts Japanese postwar "model-minority" stereotypes, showing a fractured community and one man's "threnody of guilt, rage, and blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world".

©1976 Dorothy Okada (P)2018 Tantor Americas Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Social Sciences State & Local United States World Literature Fiction Imperial Japan Japanese American
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this is an illuminating enquiry into life for Japanese Americans after ww2, butlessons are easy to drawn for multiculturalism in other places with other people. Ruth ozeki provides not so much a forward as a full dissertation to set the novel in context of background and purpose. And clearly this is a novel with a purpose and a need for telling and for being. unfortunately this is all too obvious at times, and there are rather academic passages which seem a little heavy handled compared to some of the more lyrical lines of the story. there are beautiful parts, moving parts, and parts to Lear from, certainty. however, for me these sections knitted together poorly giving a fragmented fell to the novel: it somehow felt to me like it need just a little more editing and working to fully reach its potential as a great novel. Good. Worth a read. but also just a little worthy and clunky at times

mixed: Good bits great.

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