Recovering a Lost Novel of Japanese American Resistance - 猫咪社区! Magazine Solutions Journalism

The publishing history of 鈥淣o-No Boy鈥� shows how writers shifted the narrative about internment and draft resistance.

Who owns an important novel after the author is dead? Copyright law ideally protects publishers, writers, and their heirs, but the law has limits 鈥攁nd loopholes.

That issue was recently raised between Penguin Classics and the original and current U.S. publishers of No-No Boy, the 1956 novel by John Okada that describes a Japanese American community after the internment of WWII.

The realities of the racism and trauma experienced by Japanese Americans who had been evacuated to concentration camps or imprisoned for refusing the draft were almost forbidden subjects when Okada wrote his novel a decade after the war. After searching in vain for a U.S. publisher, he settled on an English-language publisher in Japan.

No-No Boy got some positive reviews, but surprisingly little attention for such a groundbreaking work. It was the first post-war novel by a Japanese American writer about internment and the government鈥檚 double imposition of a loyalty oath and the draft. Okada was ahead of his time. He worked on a second novel over the following years but did not live to see the times finally catch up with him.

In the 1970s, a group of Asian American writers searched used bookstores for their literary heritage and discovered No-No Boy. They championed it and 聽as CARP (Combined Asian-American Resources Project). They brought No-No Boy to larger audience and then passed it on to the University of Washington Press.

Forty years later, John Okada鈥檚 novel is a classic that has never been out of print and is widely taught in literature and history courses. In this excerpt from John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy, Shawn Wong describes how he and other CARP members quickly recognized the worth of Okada鈥檚 novel. Eventually, because of their advocacy, the publishing and academic establishment did too.

No-No Boy is at the very foundation of what I know about Asian American literature. It鈥檚 a big part of my reason for becoming a writer and a teacher.

To understand how important it was requires a look at the state of Asian America in the 1960s. There was no Asian American studies. I was the only Asian American writer that I knew in the entire world, but it dawned on me, in 1969 at age 20, that there must be others out there. I started looking, and I found a lot of bad books: Charlie Chan books, Fu Manchu books, tour guides, restaurant guides, cookbooks filled with stereotypes, from non-Chinese writers, or non-Asian writers posing as Asian writers.

My teacher, Kay Boyle, mentioned that one of her creative writing graduate students was Jeffery Chan at San Francisco State. He was also an unpublished writer. I got in touch, and Jeffery said, 鈥淥h, you live in Berkeley, there鈥檚 this guy named Frank Chin who lives right down the street from you.鈥� I called Frank and said, 鈥淚 understand you are a writer and you鈥檝e actually published something. I鈥檇 like to meet you.鈥�

And so between the three of us, we started a quest to find other books. We trolled the used bookstores on Telegraph Avenue and found an anthology of Fresno poets; on the cover was a group photo of 20 poets, one of whom looked Asian. It turned out to be Lawson Inada.

And so the four of us, we figured we couldn鈥檛 be the only Asian American writers in the world. There must have been someone who came before. We bought all the books we could find鈥攖hey were only 25 or 50 cents鈥攁nd No-No Boy was one of them. Being writers, we judge a book by its cover, so we鈥檇 look at the cover and go, 鈥淥h, what鈥檚 this book about?鈥� Here鈥檚 this guy covering his face, in the barbed wire, and the title is 鈥渘o-no.鈥� And I鈥檓 thinking this book is about denying somebody is Asian. But as you start reading it, you realize very quickly it鈥檚 a book about Japanese America, and it wasn鈥檛 about Japan, and it was such a relief to start reading a book that was expressing a sensibility we were still trying to define as fellow writers. It was one of those books that you don鈥檛 believe you鈥檙e actually reading it when you鈥檙e reading it.

No-No Boy resonated so much with the things I was trying to figure out as a young undergraduate at Berkeley. I was of draft age during the Vietnam War. The book was about making those decisions: Should I go into the army and potentially fight a war I thought was unjust, or should I go to prison?

We wrote to Charles Tuttle, who had published it in Japan. We soon discovered it was published in 1957 in a hardcover edition of 1,500 copies, and 15 years later it was still in print. That meant less than one hundred copies had sold per year. It was $3 in hardcover, so we started buying copies, just to give to people: 鈥淩ead this book, it鈥檚 a really great book.鈥�

We wanted to meet the author. We called Dorothy Okada, John Okada鈥檚 widow, and that鈥檚 when she told us, 鈥淵ou鈥檙e too late. John Okada is dead.鈥� He had died only a few months before鈥攚e just missed meeting him鈥攂ut the four of us wanted to find out more about the person behind the book. The letters Tuttle sent to us revealed that Okada had written a second novel about the Issei [first-generation Japanese Americans].

We went down to Los Angeles to meet Dorothy. We asked, of course, about the novel. She informed us that she had offered the papers to UCLA鈥攁ll of John Okada鈥檚 papers鈥攂ut UCLA had never heard of him and turned the offer down, so she burned all of his papers. As writers, we were sitting there looking at her, stunned that anybody would burn somebody鈥檚 creative work. I don鈥檛 think we even knew what to say next.

Republishing the Novel

The four of us thought this book should be republished when it finally went out of print. And we thought, well, the book takes place in Seattle: let鈥檚 see if we can get the University of Washington Press to reprint it. We got a letter campaign going in 1975, congressmen and senators, people from the Japanese American community, writing to the University of Washington Press saying this was Japanese America鈥檚 only known novel. The Press turned us down, but then made us a curious offer, saying, if you give us $5,000, we鈥檒l publish it for you.

The four of us were not MBA geniuses, but we realized that we could give ourselves $5,000 and publish the book ourselves. We had our own organization called CARP, the Combined Asian-American Resources Project, which we鈥檇 just invented. We got the book typeset. We asked our friend Robert Onodera to design the cover, and went to press. We had raised only about half of the money needed to print the book, but we went to press anyway, knowing that when the book came off the press we鈥檇 have to pay the balance. It was going to take a couple of thousand dollars, so we contacted the Pacific Citizen newspaper, the national newspaper read by all Japanese Americans at the time, and told them we were publishing this book whose time had come, and we would offer $2 off to anyone who would order it in advance. The Pacific Citizen ran basically a free ad for us, and the orders started pouring in.

The first orders came from only Japanese American people. It was a book that Japanese America had always heard of, but nobody had read it. The community decided that it was time to read it. There were baby boomers like me who were trying to rediscover our personal histories.

The first printing was 3,000 copies, and they were all sold before the book came off the press, so we were able to pay the bill and even go into a second printing thanks to the money we had raised. It was one of the first books to become a staple in the early Asian American studies classes. The Seattle Times鈥� Mayumi Tsutakawa interviewed me and published a story about how we got turned down by the University of Washington Press.

The next day I get a phone call from the Press saying, 鈥淢r. Wong, we read the article, and we鈥檇 like to meet with you.鈥� I walk into the conference room, and there鈥檚 the entire staff sitting around the table, about 20 people, and Don Ellegood, the executive director, gets up and says, 鈥� The first thing I鈥檇 like to do is apologize on behalf of the Press. This is a book that we should have published. Your story of publishing it and selling it by mail is a stroke of genius, and we want to publish it now.鈥�

I was so mad! I had to personally package and mail out every one of those books myself, not to mention haul up the second printing from the Bay Area. So I go on this little lecture about how there were other books in Asian American literature that needed to be reprinted, and why don鈥檛 you reprint some of those? And the interesting thing is, they ask, 鈥淲hat are the titles?鈥� So I start mentioning Yokohama, California by Toshio Mori, Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu, and so on. And the UW Press started publishing them, faithfully, one after the other. Years later I finally said to them, 鈥淥K, you can have No-No Boy. We鈥檙e out of the publishing business.鈥�

And the final episode of the story is that the book has sold its 150,000th copy at the University of Washington Press. Its time had definitely come.

This excerpt from 鈥淩epublishing and Teaching No-No Boy鈥� by Shawn Wong, from John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy, edited by Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, and Floyd Cheung, appears by permission of the publisher, University of Washington Press (2018).

Shawn Wong is author of the novels 鈥淗omebase鈥� and 鈥淎merican Knees,鈥� and co-editor of 鈥淎iiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers鈥� and 鈥淭he Big Aiiieeeee!鈥� He is a professor of English at the University of Washington.