NO-NO BOY is this a worth reading why - Book Report/Review Example

is a Japanese American stigmatized by the state-sanctioned measures against his community, No-No Boy makes for involved reading for all those interested in the issues of ethnic relations marred by the war-induced hostility, in general, and in the history of Japanese-American – U.S. Government relations, in particular. The main idea that the author seems to be trying to impress upon the reader is that the questions of loyalty and individual identity are far harder to solve than it is generally thought.

The protagonist of No-No Boy, the young man named Ichiro Yamada, is in no way a partisan of the defeated Japanese Empire; yet, he feels resentful at the injustices caused by the Government’s mass deportation and camp incarceration of the Japanese-Americans. Like the other second-generation Japanese-Americans, Ichiro faces an uneasy perspective of having to adapt to the post-WW II reality, while feeling a dubious loyalty to the government that subjected the West Coast Japanese-American community to camps displacement.

No-No Boy is constructed as the third-person narrative of the historical events taking place mainly in the immediate aftermath of WW II, with the protagonist and several other characters offering their perspectives on the processes unfolding around them. Such a mode of presentation enables the author to avoid the perils of subjectivism that a first-person narrative implies, broadening the perspective of the novel. On the other hand, the emphasis on the protagonist’s experiences may leave out the issues and factors that exceed the individual level of the narration, but this is a necessary loss to be endured here.

The plot presented by Okada is superficially simple and concise. The narrative opens with the return of Ichiro to the house of his parents in Seattle, the house he had never had a chance to see due to the four-year internment and imprisonment. Ichiro had to endure all of this due to his refusal to answer affirmatively to two points in the