Studies in American Fiction

This may sound unbelievable, but I'd never realized, until I read your novel, that a Japanese American could be angry. Mad with rage, or just plain crazy! I thought the Japanese American emotional palette comprised more neutral shades: resignation, obedience, forbearance, sadness, nostalgia, regret.

Ruth Ozeki, foreword to No-No Boy

Not to fit, or to fail to inhabit a norm, can often mean being charged with willfulness, whatever you say or do.

Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects

John Okada's No-No Boy seems filled with muted emotions, such as sadness, resignation, and regret, but why does Ruth Ozeki, in the foreword to the book, call it "mad with rage" or "just plain crazy"? Upon returning from federal prison, Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese American no-no boy (that is, a young Japanese American male internee who answered "no" to questions on the Leave Clearance Application form, also known as the loyalty questionnaire), does not fight against the injustice of the loyalty questions he was made to answer or claim his constitutional rights to equality. Instead, he struggles with depressive thoughts and blames his mother for his "mistake" of refusing to enlist in the American army. Several Issei (first-generation Japanese American) characters in the novel isolate themselves from mainstream society, while some Nisei (second-generation [End Page 219] Japanese American) veteran characters express their frustrations by blaming no-no boys. Owing to these aspect of the novel, recent critics have debated whether the novel's ending embraces assimilationism or subversiveness. Rather than taking a side in this debate, in this essay I build on Jinqi Ling's insight that the irresolution of the novel yields new interpretive potential, offering a window into the affective sphere of Japanese Americans in postwar Seattle. In what follows, I first analyze the characters' emotions by drawing on models of racial melancholia developed by scholars such as Anne Anlin Cheng, David Eng, and Shinhee Han. Then I take up Ichiro's understated gesture of silent resistance, linking it with Sara Ahmed's notion of the affect alien. I argue that Ichiro rejects both his mother and later his friends, characters who represent the tug he feels between his Japanese American identity and his American identity, respectively. While much of the novel dwells on Ichiro's divided sense of self, I read his inaction in the final scene of the novel as representing his transformation into an affect alien, which helps illustrate my interpretation of racial melancholia as a potentially positive emotion that facilitates agency against white-dominated society.

Set in Seattle, Washington, in 1946, No-No Boy records Ichiro Yamada's existential crisis upon his return from two years in camp and two years in federal prison. Calling himself a traitor, Ichiro suffers from the shame he feels for having refused to serve in the American army, which leads him to isolate himself from his family and the already fractured Japanese American community. In particular, the novel depicts Ichiro's conflict of identity through his friendship with Kenji Kanno, a disabled Nisei veteran, and his deteriorating relationship with his chauvinistic Issei mother. The deaths of the two symbolic figures at the end of the novel prompt Ichiro to renegotiate his identity, the result of which is that he comes to see "a glimmer of hope" in certain elements of postwar American society and culture.¹

Not only Ichiro but most of the characters in the novel display what Cheng, Eng, and Han term "racial melancholia," which is not an individual pathological state but a "collective psychic condition" linked to group identities and identifications in "the complex and circular task of negotiating grief."² Eng and Han use the Freudian model of mourning and melancholia to elucidate the psychic state of Generation X Asian Americans. They understand mourning as a finite and relatively healthy process in which subjects gradually let go of their lost object and form new attachments but see melancholia as an unresolved process in which subjects deny their loss and thus internalize or devour their lost object, which hinders them from moving on...