Classic Japanese-American novel No-No Boy caught up in copyright dispute
- A new edition of the novel was published by Penguin Classics in May. Company says the book is in the public domain in the US
- However, a University of Washington professor says the book is still under copyright and Penguin has disregarded its legacy
Widely recognised as the first Japanese-American novel, John Okada’s No-No Boy, about a Japanese-American man struggling to find his place in the United States and in his community in the years after the second world war, is a historic work of literature. But the book wasn’t always celebrated.
A new edition of No-No Boy, published by Penguin Classics in May in honour of Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the US, has recently brought the book’s complicated publication history into the spotlight and has raised questions regarding its ownership.
On May 31, University of Washington professor Shawn Wong took to Facebook to call out the publisher in a post that claimed he helped register the copyright of No-No Boy on behalf of Okada’s widow, Dorothy Okada, when publishing a 1976 edition of the novel. The post included a photo of the US copyright.
Penguin says according to its research, No-No Boy is in the public domain in the US.
“We fully investigate the copyright status of any work that is going into our classics programme,” says Penguin spokesman Yuki Hirose. “According to US Copyright Office records, the 1957 edition was never registered and therefore is not afforded copyright protection in the US.”
Set in the aftermath of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war, No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada after his release from prison for refusing to serve in the US military.
When the novel was initially published in 1957, it was rejected by a Japanese-American community that was still reeling from the social upheaval caused by internment and sensitive to how the community was portrayed.
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It wasn’t until the 1970s that Okada’s book was rediscovered thanks to a group of Asian-American writers looking to shed light on forgotten and neglected Asian-American works.
Wong said that in 1971, “my friends and I found a used copy of No-No Boy for 50 cents at a used book store. No one knew anything about it. Nobody had ever heard about it.”
Still a college student at the time, Wong and his friends sought out Okada to interview him about the book, only to discover that the Japanese-American author had died of a heart attack just months before, his book still lost in obscurity.
Because of this, Wong, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin and Lawson Fusao Inada tried to bring the book into the limelight. And when they could not find a publisher willing to reissue No-No Boy when it went out of print, they worked to publish it themselves under the Combined Asian-American Resources Project (CARP) banner in 1976.
Wong says the only reason CARP was able to pay for the cost of printing was because all 3,000 copies of the first printing sold out through pre-orders by mail, thanks to a column in The Pacific Citizen, a Japanese-American newspaper. Ninety per cent of these buyers were Japanese-American, according to Wong.
The publishing rights, Wong says, were transferred in 1979 to the University of Washington Press, which has sold 157,000 copies of the book during the past 40 years and has paid royalties to the Okada family. No-No Boy has not gone out of print since 1976.
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“Penguin’s edition not only tramples on my copyright for the Okadas but also sidesteps paying royalties to the Okadas because they claim the book is in the public domain, which is so, so morally wrong,” Wong says.
Wong says the publication history behind No-No Boy is an important part of Asian-American history and that Penguin has disregarded that part of its legacy. He also is disappointed that the publisher had not consulted Okada’s family before releasing its edition.
