Transpacific Fascism in John Okada’s No-No Boy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay urges a reconsideration of John Okada’s No-No Boy as a transpacific text which engages with the erased history of Japanese America’s entanglements with fascism, particularly by situating the novel in relation to Japanese writers such as Tosaka Jun, Uno Kōzō, and Mishima Yukio. Rather than classifying No-No Boy as a fascist or anti-fascist text, an aesthetic conception of fascism demonstrates how this distinction is increasingly obscured by Cold War geopolitics. In its attempt to critique fascism, No-No Boy finds itself mobilizing ableist and liberal discourses for which the expulsion of the fascist as an unhealthy and deviant element of the national body ironically restores an idealized and militaristic nation-state.