In Okada’s book No-No Boy and Yamamto’s story The Legend of Miss Sasagawara two central female characters are represented through the lens of “madness”. It is important to note that The Legend of Miss Sasagawara is set during the years of Japanese internment (during World War II), whereas No-No Boy is located in the years after the period of Japanese internment. Juxtaposing the two stories, this posting will attempt to understand and examine the trope of madness that the two authors use in their storytelling strategies.
In The Legend of Miss Sasagawara, Miss Sasagawara is perceived as mad by the other inhabitants of the camp. While the others go about imitating their lives before their internment, performing a sense of normality in the face of total despair, Miss Sasagawara internalizes the trauma of being placed within camps. The other characters in the story go about business as normal – seeking employment, setting up house, acquiring and farming the land – all acts of pretense that situates these Japanese as loyal subjects to the American nation. By being good subjects, they perform their patriotism to America. Being patriotic means that they do not challenge the “system”, living life, waiting for the war to be over and during that time, proving their ability to be good American citizens. Miss Sasagawara’s refusal to be part of this deception, casts her as an outsider. Struck by the trauma of internment, a system predicated on relocations, constructing the Japanese as unreliable and untrustworthy citizens, Miss Sasagawara can be read as the only subject who is fully aware of the enormity of the situation and who is strong enough to psychologically face up to the realities of life for Japanese Americans during this time. At one stage she tries to normalize an abnormal situation (the internment camps resonate strongly with Nazi Germany’s concentration camps), training the children to put on a dance for the Christmas party. However, she is represented as breaking down afterwards, slipping into a state of depression. Life in the internment camps was not normal and because she is unable to buy into this deception she is constructed as pathological and problematic. She is the “other” – medicated and confined to an asylum.
I think it is helpful to challenge the commonsense reading of Miss Sasagawara as “mad” and “pathogical”, and rather to position her as the only sane person in the camp. She is the only one who is remotely in touch with reality. The other inhabitants seem to repress the trauma of internment and how this constantly reproduces the Japanese as “other” and inassimilable, producing a subject that can never be truly American, despising his/her ethnic Japaneseness because it always marks him/her as different. The trauma of the ambiguities of diasporic identity, minority marginalization and not belonging are reaffirmed through internment.
In No-No Boy, Ichiro’s mother is represented as the “mad” women. Her representation is more complex and is directly linked to her inability to acculturate and assimilate in America. Throughout the text she is represented as displaced, dreaming of her eventual return to Japan, where she can prove her success by buying a big house in her village. There is no hope for her return to her Japan, there are no ships coming to take her home, so instead she fabricates a world in which Japan didn’t loose the war, where the ships are on their way and Japan is waiting to welcome them back. Japan wouldn’t betray her as America has, their loyalty and allegiance is strongly rooted in a mythical homeland that would construct the subject as whole once again, upon returning to the point of origin. Through Ichiro’s eyes his mother Japanese-ness, her desire to return, her resistance to acculturation and assimilation is the origin of her sickness.
… for he saw that the sickness of the soul that was Japanese once and forever was beginning to destroy her mind… Did it matter so much that events had ruined the plans which she cherished and turned the once very possible dreams into a madness which was madness only in view of the changed status of Japanese in America? (pg. 104).
The war and internment complicated the positioning of Japanese in America. Some Japanese men - husbands, sons and brothers - went as good American citizens to fight against Japan. They fought a war to prove their American-ness, while at the same time their communities were placed in camps, because they were citizen who could not be trusted. Ichiro is in an ambiguous place, caught between his mother (who represents a mythical Japan) and his American citizenship.
They were two extremes, the Japanese who was more American than most Americans because he had crept to the brink of death for America, and the other who was neither Japanese nor American because he had failed to recognize the gift of his birthright when recognition meant everything (pg. 73).
For Ichiro’s mother, the inability to return has placed her in a continuous state of exile. It is this reality that is too much for her to negotiate, that drives her “mad”. She cannot psychologically reconcile the manner in which events had unfolded in America during her lifetime. With the promise of economic freedom she travelled to American to make a fortune, to live the American dream, always hoping to return to Japan. The internment in camps proved the inhumanity of America and highlighted the alien position of Japanese in America. America has let them down – constructing the Japanese as perpetually other. So she holds onto the hope of return to Japan, a space she can be accepted fully without any question. However, after the war Japan had changed, this is something that drove her further into the realm of madness, eventually ending in her death by suicide when it finally hits her that Japan lost the war, America had won and there would be no return to Japan.
The two stories treat the representation of madness differently, one reflecting strongly on the state of the mind during the internment period (and denial of this trauma by many), and the other reflecting on the trauma after internment which places Japanese Americans in a liminal position, having constantly negotiate a split identity. Ichiro’s mother, unable to do this, goes mad and then dies. Her death frees her son and husband from her mythical Japan, allowing them to begin the processes of acculturation and assimilation.
These two stories emphasize the importance of women to diasporic communities. Women are reproducers of the nation, race and ethnicity and are often represented as holding such communities together. However in No-No Boy the mother and her allegiance to a mythical Japan, fragments the community and threatens assimilation into American society. In order for successful assimilation to occur, she has to be removed. However Okada offers a complex representation and critique of American history that gives us a glimpse into the psyche of a Japanese community during a particular historic moment. Madness in these stories is related to exile and trauma. More importantly, the stories reflect on the madness of the worlds that the characters inhabit.
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