죤 오카다의 『노노보이』에 나타난 일본계 미국인의 어두운 자화상: 아시아계 미국문학의 특수성에 대한 한 고찰 = The Portrait of A Japanese American In No-No Boy by John Okada

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

John Okada is known to have heralded the beginning of an authentic Japanese American Literature by writing his only and posthumously published novel No-No Boy. In No-No Boy, Okada represents the lives of Japanese Americans after the notorious internment experiences during the World War Two. While sharing the same motif of internment with Nisei Daughters by Monica Sone, another Japanese American novel, the public reception of the two has been quite different. While the latter has been widely circulated and read by the public, the former had been buried until Frank Chin, the editor of Aieeeee!, an Asian American anthology, discovered and published it in 1976. Hence, Okada died believing that Asian America had rejected his work. As Ichiro, the protagonist, is portrayed as a Nisei-- the second generation Japanese American--, the text is mostly about the Nisei. However, there also appear the scraps of the lives of Isei as well as the generational gap between Isei and Nisei. Thus, the text becomes one of the most rare and genuine representations of Japanese Americans during and right after the World War Two. This paper analyzes the psychological conflicts, emotional bitterness and sense of betrayal the Nisei had to suffer as hybrid beings through three Nisei characters. Being born as Americans in the American territory with the Japanese ancestry, they are hybrid beings whose identities are threatened and challenged when the two nations, Japan and America that comprise their hybridity are in war. Ichiro, the protagonist contests the irrationality of the American government by rejecting to serve in the military and chooses to be imprisoned. Even after the war is over, having lost his innocence and beliefs, Ichiro lives as an eternal outsider in the American society. Another character, Kenji chooses the other road untrodden by Ichiro. He strived to prove that he is more American than most Americans by serving in the military and sacrificing his one leg in the war. Kenji, however, also realizes that there is no place for him in America. The third character, Freddie, manages to survive by sticking to mere survival on the belief that the only way to keep his sanity would be to live without thinking only to fail. However, the three also have a commonality. They all long for a world where there is no racial discrimination. All of them are discontented regardless of the choices they made, and they commonly express their angers toward the historical fault. Differently from Sone`s text, where the protagonist swallows the sorrow and strives to fit into the society, No-No Boy may be a text full of anger and bitterness. No-No Boy deserves to be read and discussed more as the importance of hybrid beings, unhomed beings and borderlanders begin to be underscored as a way to ease and overcome the rigidity of binary oppositions as a literary critic Homi Bhabha puts it.