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John Okada (1923-1971) was born in Seattle, Washington, and was interned during World War II at the Minidoka War Relocation Center before joining the U.S. Air Force and earning the rank of sergeant. After the war, he finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Washington and earned a master's degree from Columbia University. His first and only novel, No-No Boy, was published in 1957. Okada died of a heart attack at the age of 47, leaving behind a wife and two children. Karen Tei Yamashita was a National Book Award finalist for her novel I Hotel, which won the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a U.S. Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and a University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Brilliant . . . Spectacular and troubling and topical . . . Filled with charged moments and observations. --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air Groundbreaking . . . Only fiction has the power to ask the questions that bring the past to life. [John Okada] has done that. . . . In this way, with this one book, [he] has served to rectify the world. --Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being Iconic . . . Thinking back to writers like . . . John Okada, it is clear that genius is too often unrecognized in its day. --Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, in an op-ed for The New York Times A daring book . . . A close literary kin to Richard Wright's Native Son . . . There is no other novel like it about Japanese Americans in the postwar period. . . . A cautionary tale . . . of the incarceration of immigrant families based on racial prejudice, executive privilege, and the false assertion of military necessity . . . Over a half century later, Okada's novel challenges us once again with the question of character, asking us, as individuals and as a society, what are we made of. --Karen Tei Yamashita, from the Introduction
