They brought No-No Boy to larger audience and then passed it on to the University of Washington Press. They championed it and republished it on a shoestring budget as CARP (Combined Asian-American Resources Project). In the 1970s, a group of Asian American writers searched used bookstores for their literary heritage and discovered No-No Boy. He worked on a second novel over the following years but did not live to see the times finally catch up with him. It was the first post-war novel by a Japanese American writer about internment and the government’s double imposition of a loyalty oath and the draft. 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. 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. That issue was recently raised in a copyright dispute between Penguin Classics and the original and current US publishers of No-No Boy, the 1956 novel by John Okada that describes a Japanese American community after the internment of WWII. Who owns an important novel after the author is dead? Copyright law ideally protects publishers, writers, and their heirs, but the law has limits -and loopholes.

The publishing history of No-No Boy shows how writers shifted the narrative about internment and draft resistance. Eventually, because of their advocacy, the publishing and academic establishment did too. In this excerpt from John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy, Shawn Wong describes how he and others quickly recognized the worth of Okada’s novel.

No-No Boy by John Okada