No-No Boy

Sitting next to the window and glimpsing the people and houses and automobiles, he gradually felt more at ease.

People forgot and, in forgetting, forgave.

Looking out the window, he saw the cat still searching in the trash can. He chuckled, disappointed because Freddie offered no hope, but at the same time relieved to be assured that he was not the only one floundering in heavy seas.

was in the engaging pleasantness of the father which was not really pleasantness but a deep understanding which had emerged from resignation to a loss which only a parent knows and suffers

I remember a lot of people and a lot of things now as I walk confidently through the night over a small span of concrete which is part of the sidewalks which are part of the city which is part of the state and the country and the nation that is America.

The street had about it the air of a carnival without quite succeeding at becoming one.

The dense emotional textures of a time, the layered, nuanced feelings of an age, these are the vital bits of information that drop quickly away. Only fiction has the power to ask the questions that bring the past to life and to record it in all its vibrant confusion and complexity.

This is a story which has never been told in fiction and only in fiction can the hopes and fears and joys and sorrows of people be adequately recorded.

This is the gritty, postwar world of rifts and schisms that you paint so brilliantly.

Nisei, born in America of Japanese parents