First published in 1956, John Okada’s debut novel was essentially forgotten twice. No-No Boy was hardly read in the ’50s, then rediscovered in the ’70s (thanks in part to a 1976 SW story by Frank Chin) and republished by the University of Washington Press in 1979. The Seattle author, who died in 1971, was a WWII veteran who imagined in the novel a nisei hero as a kind of refusenik—a Japanese American who refused to pledge a loyalty oath and who refused to fight for his country. Ichiro Yamada is an embittered young man who, like his creator, is interned during the war. The experience haunts and shapes him, makes him even more of an outsider in postwar society. He’s an angry, alienated product of his times—the first Japanese-American literary antihero, comparable in a way to Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Now, after another three decades of neglect, UW Press has brought out a new edition of the book. washington.edu/uwpress

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