Asian American readers will appreciate the sensitivity and integrity with which the late John Okada wrote about his own group. He heralded the beginning of an authentic Japanese American literature.
-- Gordon Hirabayashi * Pacific Affairs *
Nisei will recognize the authenticity of the idioms Okada's characters use, as well as his descriptions of the familiar Issei and Nisei mannerisms that make them come alive.
-- Bill Hosokawa * Pacific Citizen *
[This new edition] brings Okada's groundbreaking work to a new generation . . . an internee and enlisted man himself, [Okada] wrote in a raw, brutal stream of consciousness that echoes the pain and intergenerational conflict faced by those struggling to reconcile their heritage to the concept of an American dream.
-- Nancy Powell * Shelf Awareness *
It is both an important document of Japanese American and Pacific Northwest history and a compelling novel.
-- Emily Lutenski * Pacific Northwest Quarterly *
Reading No-No Boy, this week, it no longer seemed bound to its past; it felt like a prophecy, a cosmic tragedy, a message in a bottle that arrives a half century later.
-- Hua Hsu * Page-Turner *
It's incorrect to say that No-No Boy is a forgotten masterwork . . . but it isn't often acknowledged for articulating what had never been said before. The novel was a turning point in the consciousness of Japanese-Americans, and of Asian-Americans more generally-it marked the moment when identity shifted away from the homeland, away from Japan, because Japan was a country that Nisei, like Okada, never really quite knew. It was a novel that struggled to understand the entitlement that came so easily to other Americans-to explain why so few Japanese-Americans protested what had been done to them, that explored the shame of an immigrant who doesn't feel he has a place in the world.
* T: The New York Times Style Magazine *
No-No Boy may be read as a test of character, questioning the rigid binary of loyalty-yes or no-and teaching us what makes us human and complex, what constitutes character, are all the questions and cares that exist between yes and no: ethical and political choices, our best intentions, our social and cultural being, beliefs, courage, fears, failures, and compassion. More than half a century later, Okada's novel challenges us once again with the question of character, asking us, as individuals and as a society, what we are made of.
-- Karen Tei Yamashita * Atlantic *
In 2019, No-No Boy is bigger than it's ever been.
-- Vince Schleitwiler * The Margins *
I think back to John Okada, who fought in World War II even though his Japanese-American family was in an internment camp. Okada came back from the war and published No-No Boy in 1957, the first novel dealing with the little-known story of Japanese-American draft resisters. . . . Thinking back to writers like Sui Sin Far, Carlos Bulosan and John Okada, it is clear that genius is too often unrecognized in its day.
-- Viet Thanh Nguyen * New York Times *
A slow-building 1957 novel about a young Japanese-American who, after the Second World War, is searching for a way to express his psychological anguish. . . . Okada died in 1971, unaware that his book had been discovered by a younger generation.
-- Hua Hsu * The New Yorker *
It may be one of the only true classics of Japanese fiction that most Japanophiles have never heard of. No-No Boy . . . unravels the complicated, varied perspectives of Japanese-Americans in the aftermath of World War II under the shadow of the internment camps of the American northwest. . . . For the fascinating, multiple perspectives that unfold to reveal one important point in history, the novel deserves its place as a classic.
* Japan Times *
Out of the brutal struggle against racism and anger, Okada finds hope.
-- Martha Viehmann * NPR - Code Switch *
No-No Boy is not simply a forceful piece of Asian American literature, but also a realistic account of how war and social injustices affect the psychology of Japanese Americans across generations. . . . Presenting the trauma of Japanese Americans and their coping process, No-No Boy is itself and effort to break the silence and counter social amnesia.
* Inquiries Journal *
The book is still the great Japanese American tragedy, whose power and authenticity derives from the unexpressed rage of his generation that Okada pours into his characters.
-- Frank Abe * International Examiner *
The book, newly relevant today, evolves into a group portrait of immigrant parents and American children, conflicted veterans and no-no boys, those back home from the camps and those repatriated to Japan alike, all trying to move on from the same injustice.
-- Nicholas Kulish * New York Times *
No-No Boy has been at the heart of the Asian American literary canon, where it is often treated as a quasi-miraculous artifact that prophesied a literary renaissance that would only come to fruition after the author's death.
* Los Angeles Review of Books *
No-No Boy should be read as a salutary reminder of the tragic aftermath of Pearl Harbor, as the story of the distress of a young rebel torn between two societies, but also as a literary testimony to the mass political violence around human rights.
* En attendant Nadeau *
[S]eminal novel...a significant book that influenced many Asian American writers who came after Okada.
* New York Magazine *
