Episode 77: No-No Boy

It’s a drizzly day in Seattle in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), and we’re feeling the mood. No-No Boy is about Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American man who refused military service after being drafted from an internment camp and was imprisoned for it. He careens around Seattle and Portland, turning down jobs (always a good instinct) and connecting and disconnecting from his friends and family (including his rather… conspiratorially-minded mother.) We discuss war-era masculinity, citizenship, and racialization. We get into the absolutely wild publication history of this novel, which was (re)found, (re)published, and then published without the estate’s permission.

We read the University of Washington Press edition with forward by Ruth Ozeki, introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada, and afterward by Frank Chin. We recommend King-Kok Cheung’s Articulate Silences as a foundational work in Asian-American literary studies, and Jeffrey Santa Ana’s Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion for a recent study of Asian-American literature/affect studies.

*Note to our listeners -- Katie is off this episode. She’ll be back next week.

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