![]() The characters are complicated in interesting ways. ![]() I was expecting something polemical and discovered something far more subtle. As Ozeki writes in her foreword, 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." This novel was just reprinted last year by U Washington Press, with a foreword by Ruth Ozeki-it's worth getting a copy of the new edition just to read her essay about Okada and about the immediate post-WWII realities of Japanese American life. It was a time when white readers weren't ready to read the truth, and when Japanese-Americans were trying to move on. ![]() No-No Boy was searingly wrong for its time: in 1956 John Okada wrote a novel about a Japanese American man who went to prison instead of fighting for a country that had sent his family to an internment camp. ![]()
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