CONSUMING THE OTHER: SUBVERTING DESIRE THROUGH CONSUMPTION

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of f i s San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of U)\% the requirements for £ ^ the Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Joshua Michael Miyashiro Lindo

San Francisco, California

May 2018 Copyright by Joshua Michael Miyashiro Lindo 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Consuming the Other: Subverting Desire through Consumption by Joshua Michael Miyashiro Lindo, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

Gitanjali Shahani, Ph.D. Associate Professor

Geoffrey Green, D. Professor CONSUMING THE OTHER: SUBVERTING DESIRE THROUGH CONSUMPTION

Joshua Michael Miyashiro Lindo San Francisco, California 2018

The Japanese-American post-war novel is a text of transition between both Japanese and

American identities. It chronicles the internal and external trauma of coping with living in a state of constant displacement between both Japanese and American identities as a result of internment. What did it mean to be an American of Japanese descent? Can an individual be Japanese and American at the same time? Novels such as John Okada’s No-No Boy take up these questions of identity and negotiate their complex nature through representations of orality. Scenes revolving around pleasurable stimulation of the mouth (for example eating, drinking, smoking, verbal aggressions, etc.), convey the anxieties surrounding these questions of identity and show how the Japanese-American community traverse this space.

My thesis will examine orality through oral fixations and will explain how oral fixations act as a method of coping with internment. In doing so, I aim to reveal how becoming an

American requires the individuals from non-European ethnic communities to reject their ethnic identities.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Committee Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to extend my gratitude to my professors on my advisory board - Dr. Gitanjali

Shahani and Dr. Geoffrey Green - for helping me develop my interests in food studies and psychoanalysis and for challenging me to think outside of the box. In addition, I would like to thank my graduate colleagues for the sleepless nights writing papers together, literary debates over a glass of wine, the laughs at literary jokes and absurd amount of food puns and consistent pep talks. I also want to thank my family who has always been supportive of my endeavors. More specifically, I thank my mother and my father - without your guidance and encouragement, I would not be where I am today. You both, as my father says, keep me “solid.” Lastly, I thank my grandparents for showing me that cooking and sharing food together is a form of love. Your recipes, though not on paper, will always be with me.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Digging In ...... 1

“You are what you eat”...... 2

A Matcha Made in Heaven...... 4

You Kiss Your Mother with that Mouth?...... 8

A Place at the Table...... 11

Chapter 1: Sandwiched between Binaries...... 12

Mouthing-Off...... 16

Broken Bentos...... 20

Hamburger Dreams...... 30

No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk...... 37

Eating Away the Troubles...... 45

Conclusion...... 48

Coda: All that’s Leftover...... 51

References...... 58 1

Introduction: Digging In

Food is never simply food. It consists of ingredients, requires preparation form raw to cooked, requires an individual prepare the food itself, and even includes societal rules of commensality that structure the way we eat. At the same time, food is more than its components - food is memory, food is culture, food is gendered, food is identity1. Like any other novel, article, poem, or song, food itself is a stage where our anxieties about ourselves and others materialize. Food becomes culturally codified, gendered, worshipped, taboo, accepted, and rejected. As a result, there is meaning behind the materials that we consume, digest, incorporate, and expel whether this process be one of choice of whether these foods are forced down our throats. It is this process of understanding the codes and meaning embodied in food and consumption that I will address in this thesis with a particular emphasis on food’s representation in 20th century Asian-American literature, specifically

John Okada’s novel No-No Boy.

In this thesis, I examine the nature of orality in John Okada’s No-No Boy and locate them within scenes of consumption throughout the novel. To do so, I examine the specific roles that food plays as a cultural signifier, consumption as an attempt to incorporate these signifiers and the ways in which food and consumption help individuals reconstruct their identities in the novel. More specifically, I analyze how Okada’s protagonist, Ichiro

Yamada, uses food to negotiate the trauma of Japanese internment and how this process manifests itself as an oral fixation. In delving further into this field, I hope to add to the ongoing discussion regarding food and identity formation in Freudian psychoanalysis in an

1 I would like to thank one of my mentors, Dr. Gitanjali Shahani, for helping me come to these conclusions about food and identity. 2 attempt to answer this question - is there a way to be not one, nor the other, but both Asian and American? This question, amongst others, will be the primary one guiding this project.

This introduction will briefly survey the field of food studies and will consist of four sections. The first section seeks to introduce food studies as a field and establish the connection between food and identity. It aims to address why food studies is important.

The next section connects food with ethnic identities and also with food’s importance in

Asian-American literature. More importantly, this section focuses on establishing why I chose Japanese-American literature and out of its limited selection, why I decided to analyze Okada’s No-No Boy. My third section provides an overview of orality in Freudian psychoanalysis and the Oedipus Complex with a focus on the boy’s relationship to his mother and her breast as the first source of nourishment. Lastly, my final section returns to the question of food studies as important by contemplating it as one of the most interdisciplinary approaches to academic study. In organizing my introduction into four parts, I hope to provide a more focused lens of the approach that I will take in my thesis chapter.

“You are what you eat”: Why Food Studies?

One of the many repetitive habits gained from studying the codes and meaning in food is undoubtedly a (dis)tasteful use of food puns and a fondness of overly quoted food scholars. Perhaps chief among these cliche lines is the idea that “you are what you eat,” a corruption of a line coined originally by gastronomist Jean Brillat-Savarin in his ever famous and routinely referenced quote “tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are” (Brillat-Savarin 12). Perhaps it is for a lack of newer quotes that immediately brings

Brillat-Savarin to mind or maybe it is because his quote is quintessential when referring to 3 food and identity. Brillat-Savarin’s quote implies the literal - the items we consume construct our bodies and ensure its survival and functionality. The pleasure that we derive in consuming is a result of “the actual and direct sensation of a need being satisfied,” explains Brillat-Savarin (161). But at the same time, his quote implies that foods have coded meanings beyond the physiological. Brillat-Savarin’s quote also suggests that we consider all aspects of food beyond the “what” of it. Who made the food? Where did it come from? How was it prepared? When was it created? Most importantly, why was the food made, prepared, harvested, traded, consumed? The “what” of food is simply the beginning.

Food and identity is a complicated affair that involves looking into food as representative of the identities that we desire to consume and incorporate. As Roland

Barthes argues, food is “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behavior” that help construct the way that we perceive ourselves and others, our internal and our external worlds (Barthes 171). As a system of communication, food allows us to imbue it with meanings and permits us to construct social rituals around the process of eating that regulate how we eat. What we do not necessarily consider is that these rules and behaviors exist amongst hundreds of other systems that dictate the way humans negotiate the crossing of objects from the external to the internal. Because food holds such an important role as the object traversing borders, the way that we choose to transform food into a desirable commodity reflects the individual we desire to become through consumption.

Moreover, Terry Eagleton writes that “food is just as much materialised emotion as a love lyric, though both can also be substitutes for the genuine article,” because food, like 4 signs, “expresses something but also stands in for its absence” (“Edible Ecriture”). In addition, Eagleton contends that “food is what makes up our bodies, just as words are what constitute our minds; and if body and mind are hard to distinguish, it is no wonder that eating and speaking should continually cross over in metaphorical exchange,” (“Edible

Ecriture”). In this respect then, food is a language of its own - a lexical catalogue of who we are and who we desire to become through eating. Identity, then, is one constructed not only through the passage of food from dish to digested, but also from the symbols that our food signifies. This makes the food we eat vital in that to understand the process of consumption through examining what we eat, we are able to unravel the question of who we are.

A Matcha Made in Heaven: Food Studies and Asian-American Literature

The Asian-American post-war novel is one of self-discovery and self-fashioning and this process is one often negotiated through food, orality, and consumption. Within many of these texts, the role of food (whether for its presence or lack of presence) remains a rapidly expanding field of inquiry when examining the ways in which Asian-Americans

(re)construct identity. Food in these novels acts as a reminder of a distant homeland, the representation of a past life relinquished in favor of a new beginning, and the point where one’s past life and new beginnings intersect. Sandra Gilbert contends in her phenomenal monograph The Culinary Imaginations: From Myth to Modernity that “it’s often said that we know our ethnicity and its history through the foods we inherit from our families.. .And certainly we hyphenated Americans have produced so many recipes for and of nostalgia that any memoirist must now fear her ancestral kitchen can no longer yield much more” 5

(Gilbert 168-169). In this way, food becomes substitute for the cultural histories and homes left behind when coming to America.

The mouth, however, also becomes the site where ethnic roots and national foodways intersect. It becomes a type of contact zone between ethnic foodways and national ones, cultural roots and national identity. Ashley, Hollows, Jones, and Taylor explain that “the nation is a fluid cultural construct and food is one among many agencies which participate in its construction and the continuing process of its redefinition” (Ashley,

Hollows, Jones, and Taylor 89). As a result, the zone of the mouth is the stage where all of our anxieties and desires about our ethnicity and our nation play out. It is the location where there is a culinary accord between differing tastes, the field where gastronomic wars are fought - food is utterly rejected or even indigestible, and it is the place where dietetic treaties are formed - a fusion of foods from two different lands becomes a signature national dish. This is the nature of food and orality. Orality, in a word, will be one ingredient in this thesis project. The other will be the intersection of ethnic and national identities with a particular focus on Asian-American identities as both appear in Okada’s

No-No Boy.

Although food and food references permeate literature ranging from Shakespeare’s cannibalistic Titus and Andronicus to Kurt Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick, they both hold a special place in Asian-American literature. Anita Mannur argues that food in South Asian

(and also arguably East Asian) “diasporic cultural texts” serves as a form of affirmation by marking “ethnicity for communities that live through and against the vagaries of diasporized realities, marred by racism and xenophobia” (Mannur 8). On the other hand, she also explains that food is a form of resistance as it can “disrupt the notion that cultural 6 identity is always readily available for consumption” (8). Food affirms ethnic identity, but also refutes it as well. These Asian-American texts then, chronicle the negotiation of the digestible and indigestible cultural and national identities through scenes of consumption.

More prominently, these scenes reflect the benefits and consequences of being both Asian and American, being a member of an ethnic community and a national one.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim recalls her first meal as a naturalized American citizen in her memoir Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir o f Homelands'.

“Scooping a piece of buttermilk pancake from its puddle of maple syrup at

the International House of Pancakes where I had gone to celebrate my

passage into American identity, I felt alien in a different way, as if my

ambivalence toward the United States must now extend inward to an

ambivalence toward myself’ (Lim 196).

Lim’s experience is one of many that catalogues the point where ethnic and national identities collide via food. After the impact, as Lim affirms, the “alien” of being a foreigner in America shifts “to an ambivalence toward myself.” Becoming American while retaining one’s ethnic roots requires an abjection of these ethnic roots in the face of American selfhood. It is this process of self-abjection and identity (re)formation that I examine alongside orality in the Asian-American community. However, rather than a wide survey of identity and orality in the field of Asian-American studies, I narrow my scope to an examination of the Japanese-American community.

Although there is an extensive field of Chinese-American literature by prominent

Asian-American authors (Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and Amy Tan to name a few) that explores connections between food and identity, works within smaller Asian 7 communities such as the Japanese-American community went largely unnoticed for the latter half of the twentieth-century. John Okada’s No-No Boy marks one of the first

Japanese-American novels to discuss the post-World War II experience (admittedly from a strictly male protagonist perspective) and internment. As Lawson Fudao Inada writes in the Introduction to No-No Boy, “the book had been published in 1957 and gone practically unnoticed” until its rediscovery in a Japantown bookstore in San Francisco (Okada iii.).

Inada, alongside Frank Chin, were both responsible for increasing awareness of Okada’s novel to the Asian-American community by re-introducing it to the Combined Asian-

American Resources Project for publication. Frank Chin elaborates on his experience with

Okada’s novel in his famous article “In Search of John Okada,” which has now become the Afterword section in the 1979 edition of the book. “Back in 1957 John said things Asian

Americans are afraid to think, much less say today,” writes Chin, “John Okada shows the

‘identity’ crisis [of Asian-Americans after the 1920’s] to be both totally real and absolutely fake” (Okada 254-255). The complexity of this identity crisis as both real and fake manifests itself in the Japanese-American community’s negative response to the novel’s publication.

Fu-Jen Chen observes in his bio-bibliography of Okada that at the time of publication, the novel was rejected by the Japanese-American community (Chen 286).

Rather than evoking a communal sense of pride in exposing the psychological trauma plaguing many victims of Japanese internment, the novel actually alienated the very community that Okada sought to reach. Chen explains that “silence concerning the novel reveals not only the American public’s unreadiness to face the historical fact that America once confined its own people in camps without legal reasons or procedures,” but also 8 highlights the Japanese-American community’s “unwillingness to be reminded of the psychological wound - the wrenching experiences of internment, the humiliation of the racial discrimination, and the disgrace of ‘no-no” (Chen 286). Moreover, the novel was published during an era of the Cold War where “the American public strove to construct a national consensus against communism,” and identifying as anything other than as an

American became equated with treason (286). As Okada’s protagonist in the novel suffers from trying to negotiate this very line, it is no surprise why this novel became shelved rather than celebrated or even simply read during this time period.

However, despite the novel’s renewed hype and placement into the curriculum of

Asian-American Studies classes after its rediscovery, it is still heavily overshadowed by other prominent Asian-American works such as Amy Tan’s The Kitchen G od’s Wife or

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. One of my aims with this thesis is to re­ expose Okada’s novel. Rather than examining it from a critical race studies/ethnic studies perspective or strictly a psychoanalytic one, I will be pairing food studies (through orality) and psychoanalysis to explore oral fixations within the novel. My hope is that in revealing the mechanisms behind the main character’s oral fixation, I will also reveal that we are all indeed still orally fixated and obsessed with orality, and how this obsession no longer centers itself strictly on stimulation of the mouth.

You Kiss Your Mother with that Mouth?: Food and Psychoanalysis

Oral representations of identity proliferate Asian-American literary works. Because

Asian-American community(ies) prioritize and construct identity through orality, it is no surprise that Asian-American literature uses food to signify this process of identity construction. Food as symbol, food as sex, food as other - all of these renditions of food 9 highlight the site where these foods become consumed and incorporated: the mouth. As such, my work converges on the orality in Okada’s novel and the process of consuming for identity, however I center my argument using identity formation in Freudian psychoanalysis - namely infantile sexuality and the Oedipus Complex.

Freud’s Oedipus Complex framework is complex in itself. Freud articulates infantile sexuality (which includes the Oedipus Complex) in his An Outline of Psycho-

Analysis. Infantile sexuality, for Freud, consists of four stages: oral, anal, phallic, and genital2. The oral stage is characterized by a focus on stimulation of the mouth as an erotogenic zone (an area that makes libidinal demands on the mind), where “all psychical activity is concentrated on providing satisfaction for the needs” of it (Freud 24). Thus, the act of sucking at the mother’s breast provides pleasure to the infant as it fulfills the need for satisfaction and survival through nourishment. From this phase, the infant transitions into the anal phase, a stage characterized by satisfaction through “aggression and in the excretory function” (25). This particular phase is often referred to as the “sadistic-anal” phase as well because “sadism is an instinctual fusion of purely libidinal and purely destructive urges” that becomes manifest in the infant in the act of destroying and ejecting excrement (25). At this point, the infant transitions into the third phase of infantile sexuality and it is within this phase that the child first enters the Oedipus Complex.

The third phase of infantile sexuality is the phallic phase where boys enter the

Oedipus phase. In the Oedipal phase, “the boy begins to manipulate his penis and simultaneously has phantasies of carrying out some sort of activity with it in relation to his mother” (25). However, the boy’s father stands in opposition to this desire and as a result,

2 Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. 10 the boy desires to “take his father’s place” as his mother’s lover by killing the father (71).

This desire is cut short in response to the threat of castration imposed by the boy’s father

(any patriarchal figure) that occurs when a boy sees the lack of a penis in female genitalia

- Freud explains that the lack of a penis in women frightens the boy who associates this form of castration as a consequence of violating the patriarchal law of the father who is the law enforcer and also the castrator3. Consequently, the boy renounces this desire to possess his mother.

Once the threat of castration occurs and the boy yields his mother in wake of his father’s power and authority, the boy enters in the last phase of infantile sexuality - the genital phase. In this phase, certain libidinal “cathexes” remain while other ones become repressed by the ego. Although the final phase of infantile sexuality is the end-phase for each individual, the first three may appear in any order. Freud notes that “one may appear in addition to another, they may overlap one another, may be present alongside one another,” until the phallic stage begins cementing pleasure as a product of primarily sexual intercourse (26). Thus, an individual may enter the oral stage at the same time that he is already progressing through the phallic phase and so on.

Food and psychoanalysis are inherently linked through the oral and a child’s first source of nourishment - the mother’s breast. Although I delve into this subject in greater detail in my thesis, I will discuss it briefly to provide a background on the importance between psychoanalysis and food. Eating requires the violation of the border between self and other, external and internal. At the same time, the mother’s breast acts as the first site of nourishment, and pleasure for a child wherein the child cannot distinguish itself from its

3 Ibid 11 mother’s breast - they are one4. Thus, eating represents a return to a pre-Oedipal unification between child and mother. As I will explain in my analysis of No-No Boy, this return to a symbiotic relationship with the mother through eating comes as a result of enjoyment of foods imbued with ethnic and cultural value.

A Place at the Table: Reserving a Spot

Despite early misconceptions about the field of food studies and accusations that it was “scholarship-lite,” the field of food studies has emerged as perhaps one of the most interdisciplinary fields, incorporating work from other fields such as gender studies, critical race/ethnic studies, queer studies, psychoanalysis, etc. This overturn comes as no surprise.

As the primary object that traverses the most sacred of borders - the external and the internal - how can food be anything but significant? What we eat is what we become and this act of becoming through consumption occurs prior to associating ourselves with other markers of identity. The interdisciplinary nature of food and how it shapes our identities reminds us that food is always more than it seems. As Wenying Xu demonstrates in her monograph Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian-American Literature, “as we eat/consume identities so do we excrete/trash identities,” (Xu 169). In this same manner then, the process of identity formation revolves entirely around constructing and also deconstructing the many identities we assume. This thesis project, though the culmination of all of my current studies of food, is one inquiry into the “more” of food and its relationship to how we form our identities.

4 Ibid. See pp. 37 of my primary chapter for additional inquiry. 12

Chapter 1 - Sandwiched between Binaries: Orality and Oedipal Issues in John

Okada’s No-No Boy

"27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, whenever ordered? 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States o f

America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?” (War Relocation

Authority Application for Leave Clearance).

“Eating entails consuming, internalizing, incorporating, becoming, processing, building, strengthening, corroding, overcoming, and externalizing (excreting). Therefore,

‘Eating Identities ’ yields interesting interpretations, such as acquiring identities through eating, eating up identities, and being eaten by the identities we bear” (Xu 166-167).

Introduction

Eating is never just a matter of eating. It is an act of becoming whole, filling the gaps left behind by hunger to sustain one’s self. By “hunger,” I mean both hunger as the physiological response to a need for nourishment, but also hunger in terms of a desire for the “selves” that we lack. Identities, like the people that assume them, require a form of sustenance in order to survive. And yet, to be historically denied an identity, to be excluded from an identity based on the many other identities that define an individual, sets the stage for a drama of displacement, internalized self-loathing, and psychic trauma. In an internal battle against one’s self, an individual is compelled to fill the holes left behind by these voracious appetites created through a hatred of one’s other identities. Such was the fate of 13

Japanese-Americans in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 that was followed by Japanese internment.

The internment of thousands of individuals of Japanese ancestry not only fractured the cultural and societal conception of being “American,” but also exposed the question of what it meant to be human. In negotiating the gray areas between different cultural identities, Japanese-Americans suffered from a sense of displacement, a lack of a cultural foundation, and an internalized self-hatred resulting from a clash of contrasting cultural and national ideologies. These traumatic experiences inevitably ruptured the so-called solidarity of the Japanese-American community of the pre-war era, highlighting the differences between Japanese otherness and American selfhood.

Stan Yogi rationalizes this sense of displacement in that the “choice” between

“polarized ideas of ‘Japanese’ and ‘American” is false “because Nisei are American by birth”; adhering to this so-called “polarization” of ethnic and national identities required

“a distaste for their parents and their culture and, ultimately, a veiled self-hatred” (Yogi

65). This internalized hatred of one’s ethnic roots exacts a high psychological toll through a fracturing of identity. It is this process of reconstructing the fractured Japanese-American identity that will be the primary path of inquiry that I contemplate in John Okada’s novel

No-No Boy.

John Okada’s novel No-No Boy is, in a sense, a bildungsroman set in the aftermath of World War II that follows the journey of Ichiro Yamada as he attempts to piece together his fractured Japanese and American identities. This identity split comes as a result of his

“No-No” answers to the Loyalty Questionnaire5 that required all citizens of Japanese

5 The answers “No-No” correspond to Questions 27 and 28 of the War Relocation Authority Application for Leave Clearance quoted at the beginning on this chapter. 14

descent to renounce any political loyalties to Japan and also stipulated that Japanese men

must serve in the American military if needed. By disobeying this questionnaire then,

Ichiro is (un)lawfully imprisoned based on his ethnic roots and it is this moment that marks

the fracturing of his identity. Being Japanese becomes equated with being the enemy and

in denying the Loyalty Questionnaire’s power, Ichiro draws a defined line between himself

as Other and the rest of the American public. Although many scholars focus on No-No

Boy's psychoanalytic interpretations of the maternal, the novel is often overlooked in terms

of its exploration of Ichiro’s relationship with father figures and the role that these

relationships play in Ichiro’s attempts to negotiate his identity displacement.

This chapter will examine how identity is (re)formed via the Oedipal Complex in

John Okada’s No-No Boy and will delve into how oral fixations act as regressive modes of

negotiating trauma. To articulate the connection between oral fixation and identity

formation, I pair two theoretical lenses that discuss the nature of orality. I begin by taking- up Kyla Wazana Thompkins’s work on “critical eating studies” in Racial Indigestions:

Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. I ground this analysis of orality in psychoanalytic readings of the oral stage in identity formation as conceived by Freud in his A General

Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Drawing on these two theoretical lenses alongside Okada’s

novel, I argue that Ichiro not only regresses to a pre-Oedipal oral stage of development to

cope with trauma, but also suffers from an oral fixation that prevents him from smoothly transitioning through the Oedipal Complex. Consequently, identity formation in Okada’s

novel requires an individual to destroy (rather than reject) the maternal. The death of the mother enables the child to identify with the father via the threat of castration and resolve the complex. However, as I will demonstrate, Ichiro further complicates this model of identification with symbolically castrated father figures that are unfit for re-identification.

As a consequence, he is left displaced in a state of abjection between both his Japanese and

American identities. In constructing an unstable narrative told by a displaced protagonist,

Okada not only portrays the negative effects of internalized racism resulting from Japanese internment, but reveals that the only result of such self-loathing is death itself as a result of our inability to live outside of the binary drawn between ethnicity and nationality.

Thischapter will consist of five sections. The first section introduces the theoretical lenses that shape this project, food studies and psychoanalysis, and examines the relationship between orality and identity formation. This section also establishes how

Ichiro’s oral fixation acts as a regressive form of coping with the trauma of internment and links this oral fixation to the creation of national foodways as seen in Thompkins’s work.

My second section moves from my theoretical lenses to a close-reading of two different scenes of consumption in Okada’s novel. It discusses the denigration, and ultimate destruction, of the maternal as necessary for Ichiro to progress in Oedipal development.

My third section examines the role of stimulating Ichiro’s oral fixation via consumption and its relationship to portrayals of masculinity in the Japanese community. This section also links the importance of masculine father figures to the resolution of the Oedipal

Complex and explores how the novel complicates the Oedipal Complex’s framework. My fourth section expands Ichiro’s destruction of the maternal by discussing his substitution of the character Emi for Mrs. Yamada. This section connects forms of non-ethnic enjoyment to Ichiro’s desire to be an active subject. Lastly, my final section explores how the dissolution of both ethnic and national identities must occur prior to recreating one’s identity through the Oedipal Complex and considers where individuals from non-western 16 backgrounds locate themselves within - or outside of - these western psychoanalytic discourses that permeate our understanding of ethnic identification. When combined, these sections seek to establish that obsessions with orality are not historically or necessarily ethnically fixed; rather, Okada’s novel highlights the claim that ethnic communities are constructed, defined and even destroyed by orality and this understanding shapes the way that ethnic individuals begin reconsidering how to define themselves.

Mouthing-Off: Examining Oral Fixations and National Foodways

Prior to analyzing scenes of consumption in Okada’s novel, it is necessary that I provide an overview of the theoretical lenses I will continually refer to throughout my chapters. Freud describes the defense mechanism of regression in his A General

Introduction to Psychoanalysis as “the return of the libido to former stages of its development” as a means to “seek gratification in one of the earlier stages in its organizations,” where it is “enticed by fixations which it has left behind at these stages of development” (Freud 154 andl60-161). At this point, it is important to establish that for

Freud, the ego’s attitude in regard to maintaining “harmony in sexual organization” can influence the power of a fixation when other instincts surpass another in development

(158). Should the ego influence the fixation, “it may countenance the fixation” and the fixation itself may “become perverse or, what amounts to the same thing, infantile” (158).

If we apply this model of regression to Okada’s novel, we see that Ichiro’s lack of choice in answering the Loyalty Questionnaire propels him into an identity crisis that causes him to regress to an earlier stage of development that is characterized by the fixation of his libido onto the mouth. 17

It is no coincidence that our first scenes of the novel focus on Ichiro and the mouth.

Okada effectively paints Ichiro as a traumatized victim of external and internalized racism, but more specifically, his opening scenes revolve around Ichiro’s fixation on the oral. For example, upon entering his household, Ichiro returns to his old room and “looked around the bedroom and felt like puking. It was neat and clean and scrubbed. His mother would have seen to that” (Okada 7). Afterwards, Ichiro drinks tea with his father and “lifted the cup to his lips and let the liquid burn down his throat,” prior to locating a “pack of Camels

[cigarettes]” and smoking alongside his father (9). These moments in the novel, though seemingly unimportant, provide us with the necessary evidence to discuss the novel’s obsession with the oral in terms of what is permitted to enter the mouth (cancerous carcinogens) and what must be rejected or forced down the throat (the maternal and markers of ethnic identity). What is edible and what must be forced into our mouths? If we consider the novel’s obsession with the oral through the process of consumption, we notice that eating no longer represents - nor has it arguably ever simply represented- surviving.

Eating is becoming self through the destruction of that which is other and external to the self. Eating is existing.

Ichiro’s identity displacement positions both American and Japanese aspects of his identities in opposition to each other. Ichiro explains that “it is not enough to be American in the eyes of the law and it is not enough to be only half an American and know that it is an empty half...I am not Japanese and I am not American” (Okada 16). It is through a realization that his Japanese and American identities are inseparable, but distinctly opposed to each other that causes Ichiro’s regression. Ichiro’s displacement between his two 18 identities transform his world- his home, his family, his own identity - into the uncanny6.

Returning home “was like trying to find one’s way out of a dream that seemed real most of the time but wasn’t really real because it was still only a dream” Ichiro soliloquizes (5).

In questioning the very foundations of both his cultural and national identities as Japanese and American, Ichiro regresses to a stage of pre-Oedipal development so that his libido may locate a method of overcoming his suppressed trauma by participating in “the activities and experiences of infantile sexuality, in its [the libido’s] abandoned component impulses, its childish objects which have been given up,” namely the pleasure derived in the process of consumption and the stimulation of the mouth (Freud 162). Thus, this libidinal regression, I affirm, takes the form of an oral fixation, negotiated through consuming food, smoking, and verbal aggressions against other characters in the novel.

However, it is primarily within the novel’s scenes of consumption that we witness Ichiro’s identity crisis unfold. Yet how is it possible that the process of consumption can stimulate the mouth in order to satisfy Ichiro’s oral fixation? I turn to Thompkins’s examination of national foodways and its relationship to orality in order to situate Ichiro’s oral fixation at the end of a desire to incorporate a national identity via consumption.

In her monograph Racial Indigestions, Thompkins chronicles how the black body is presented for consumption by establishing a connection between race and food through her analysis of how food practices and representations come to characterize our desire to control our own sense of being. In consuming food, individuals participate in a

“paradoxical and historically specific attempt to regulate embodiment,” by commodifying

6 Freud characterizes the uncanny as a “species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known,” and was repressed by the ego, and that occurs “when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred” (Freud 124 and 150). 19 nationality through food; these “nationalist foodways - and the objects fetishized therein,”

Thompkins contends, “become allegories through which the expanding nation and its attendant anxieties play out” (Thompkins 4). However, Thompkins centralizes her argument on, what she terms, “critical eating studies” and asserts that:

“By reading orificially, critical eating studies theorizes a flexible and

circular relation between the self and the social world in order to imagine a

dialogic in which we - reader and text, self and other, animal and human -

recognize our bodies as vulnerable to each other in ways that are terrible -

that is, full of terror - and, at other times, politically productive” (2).

In examining the relationship between the ways in which antebellum American-society consumed, what they consumed, and why they consumed it, Thompkins observes how food becomes a commodified symbol for race. “Eating threatened the foundational fantasy of a contained, autonomous self,” writes Thompkins, “blurring the line between subject and object as food turned into tissue, muscle, and nerve and then provided the energy that drives them all” (2). In a period where national borders continued to expand, the expansion of the nation mirrored the construction of a national identity. The anxieties associated with crossing borders as a result of this expansion became manifested, first and foremost, in the mouth, for food seemed to “imply a reassuring materiality of self that exists prior to, and as a condition of, discourse” (2). Thus, Thompkins’s critical eating studies redirects food studies from the traditional examination of food as pure symbol towards an inquiry on the modes of consumption and how the process of consumption establishes a binary between national/foreign and self/other that is violated when we eat. 20

I draw on this argument primarily because her work is one of the first investigations into the creation of a national foodway via her examinations of food (Thompkins traces the establishment of bread as a national foodway), state, and body. However, whereas

Thompkins ties her analysis of nationalist foodways as representative of our desire to

“regulate embodiment” through an examination of the black body as food, I place

Thompkins’s argument in conversation with Freud to explore how ethnic and national identities frustrate and consume each other. More specifically, I consider how Ichiro’s oral fixation is not merely a coping mechanism for trauma, but also a means of negotiating his dual identities collapsing in on each other. My next section will discuss how the maternal and rice as symbol for Japanese nationality are portrayed by Ichiro’s mother, Mrs.

Yamada, and how both the maternal and Japanese-ness must be destroyed prior to progressing in Oedipal development.

Broken Bentos: Denigrating the Maternal through Consumption

Ichiro’s rejection of his cultural foodways is an attack on the very foundations of his own identity as a direct response to trauma endured during imprisonment. In our introduction to him, Ichiro returns home after two years in an internment camp followed by an additional two years in prison and feels “like an intruder in a world to which he had no claim. It was just enough that he should feel this way, for, of his own free will, he had stood before the judge and said that he would not go in the army. At that time there was no other choice for him” (Okada 1). Ichiro’s imprisonment despite his lack of choice in answering the Loyalty Questionnaire fractures his stable sense of self, thereby forcing him to cope with this traumatic moment through regression. To understand the full extent of

Ichiro’s neurotic behavior, I examine two scenes of consumption that signify how both 21 cultural and national identities consume, but also are consumed by one another: Ichiro’s first lunch home with his mother and father and a breakfast prepared by Mr. Yamada the morning after Ichiro returns home.

Ichiro’s contempt for his mother runs rampant through the narrative. Instead of a welcoming home environment, Ichiro, as well as the reader, is greeted with a home divided by polarized definitions of Japanese and American. Rather than a home where “mothers and fathers and sons and daughters rushed into hungry arms after week-end separations,”

Ichiro is received by his mother, “a small, flat-chested shapeless woman who wore her hair pulled back into a tight bun” who believes Japan won the war and who “killed me [Ichiro] with her meannesss and hatred” (Okada 11-12). Mrs. Okada’s meal choice for Ichiro’s homecoming aptly reflects the sterile description and her Japanese identity. In the first scene, Ichiro’s mother prepares a lunch to welcome her son home from prison, the meal consisting of “eggs, fried with soy sauce, sliced cold meat, boiled cabbage, and tea and rice. They all ate in silence, not even disturbed once” (12). The meal itself is strictly ethnic, highlighted by Mrs. Yamada’s choice of simplistic dishes accompanied by traditional tea and rice. Okada’s choice of rice for Mrs. Yamada’s food scene is important to note when paired alongside rice’s importance to the Japanese identity .

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney connects rice’s importance as a metaphor for the Japanese self in her study Rice as Self. She explains that “the Japanese have repeatedly reconceptualized themselves in relation to other peoples.. .by using rice as a metaphor for themselves” where rice comes to signify entry into the cultural “we” of “rice as our food” that permeates the stereotype associated with Japanese and rice (Ohnuki-Tierney 4).

Similar to Thompkins’s conception of bread as a gastronomical marker of an American 22 identity, so too does rice come to represent Japanese identities and when brought into conflict with the American national foodways, the marker of the foreign other. However,

Ohnuki-Tierney places rice’s importance at the intersection of both nationality and the maternal:

“The importance of rice for an individual Japanese begins early in life. Rice

gruel was a substitute for breast milk, symbolically linking rice to the most

basic human relationship-the bond between mother and offspring” (94).

Thus, the child’s first distinctions of itself and the mother as other comes in the form of rice and in consuming rice as substitute for the mother’s milk (and subsequently the mother herself), rice comes to represent the maternal as well. In Okada’s novel, Ohnuki-Tierney’s conclusions of rice as a symbol for the Japanese identity become manifested in Mrs.

Yamada’s decision to include rice in her homecoming meal and it is Ichiro’s reactions to consuming this meal that highlight his desire to disconnect himself from his ethnic roots.

Ichiro’s disdain for his mother’s Japanese cooking signifies an attack on the maternal by turning its manifestations into the abject; Wenying Xu cites Kristeva’s Powers o f Horror in her own monograph Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American

Literature to explain that “in becoming subject, however, the child must break away from the maternal in order to enter the symbolic order of language,” that Kristeva claims

“requires the abjection of the semiotic and the maternal, for the semiotic fundamentally disrupts and frustrates the symbolic order” (Xu 20). As such, the abject for Kristeva as well as Xu’s citation of the abject represents that which we cast off and in the case of food studies, that which we identify as disgusting and undesirable for consumption or incorporation. 23

Moreover, Xu connects Kristeva’s analysis of the maternal with Zizek’s concept of

“enjoyment manifested in the way a community cooks and eats,” in that both enjoyment and the maternal, “whose manifestations include food practices and rituals” occupy the same “semiotic space” (19-21). Food practices exist as manifestations of the maternal in that “the maternal and by extension the feminine [herein feminine denotes the relationship between caregiver and infant] are associated with food as well as filth” and as enjoyment also inhabits the same realm, enjoyment of these food practices becomes reflective of the maternal (20). Okada provides the key link to this scene by revealing that in scenes involving rice within the novel, Ichiro must “dutifully consume” the meal instead of enjoying it and it is this detail about dutifully consuming rather than desiring to consume that signifies Ichiro’s disjoined identification with the Japanese self (Okada 12). Rice (and symbolically the Japanese identity itself) has become the abject for Ichiro wherein the inability to enjoy one’s ethnic foodways also signals a refusal to identify with that culture itself.

Furthermore, Mrs. Yamada’s food manifestations not only come to represent her

Japanese identity, but also her madness derived from an irrational sense of Japanese pride and inability to accept Japan’s defeat in World War II. Mrs. Yamada remains trapped in

“the dishonest, warped, and uncompromising world in which defeated people...walked perilous tightropes and could not and would not look about them for having to keep their eyes fastened to the taut, thin support” of delusional ethnic pride (24). Ichiro’s failure to enjoy his mother’s food signifies his refusal to claim himself as Japanese and identify with this his mother. At the same time, his refusal exposes his desire to cast-off the Japanese identity of his mother that has become corrupted by her madness. Indeed, when the ability 24 to enjoy food is stripped away from the consumer, access to the maternal is also denied as a result of both inhabiting the same semiotic realm. As a result, Ichiro “cannot form his identity by looking at himself from the place of his mother because she is shattered like a mirror by her madness” (Xu 23). In dutifully consuming his mother’s food then, not only is Ichiro unable to enjoy the process of consuming, but he also denies himself access to the cultural signifiers embodied by her food because the foods prepared by his mother represent the very Japanese nationalistic identity that branded him as an enemy of the state.

Ichiro’s denigration of the maternal is significant when we pair the role of the maternal and the resolution of the Oedipus Complex and Ichiro’s oral fixation. Recalling

Freud’s work on the Oedipus Complex, the mother’s breast acts as “the first object of the oral component of the sexual impulse.. .which satisfies the hunger of the infant,” where the infant does not distinguish the two different bodies of mother and child; as a result, “we call the mother the first object of love” because it provides pleasure through nourishment

(Freud 147-148). Freud paints the relationship between child and mother as a single unit connected through the child’s inability to recognize the mother’s breast as external to its own body until the breast is no longer present - at which time the mother becomes the first love-object for the child. And yet this aspect of a loving union between child and mother is absent in Ichiro’s relationship with his mother.

As Fu-Jen Chen observes in “A Lacanian reading of No-No Boy and Obasan:

Traumatic Thing and Transformation into Subjects of Jouissance,” Ichiro’s “half Japanese and half American” speech at the beginning of the novel “suggests an unforgettable union between Ichiro and his mother in the pre-Oedipal phase” that Ichiro desires to reconnect 25 with due to his displacement (Chen 111). Ichiro laments this lack of wholesomeness in a reference to the famous Japanese folktale of Momotaro during this speech:

“I was that boy in the peach and you were the old woman and we were

Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese

thoughts because it was all right then to be Japanese and feel and think all

the things that Japanese do even if we lived in America. Then there came a

time when I was only half Japanese because one is not born in America and

raised in America and taught in America.. .without becoming American

and loving it. But I did not love enough, for you were still half my mother

and I was thereby still half Japanese and when the war came and they

told me to fight for America, I was not strong enough to fight you and I was

not strong enough to fight the bitterness which made the half of me which

was you bigger than the half of me which was America and really the whole

of me that I could not see or feel. Now I know the truth when it is too late

and the half of me which was you is no longer there” (Okada 16).

Ichiro’s desire to be complete - manifested in either a Japanese or American identity - cause him to try and reconstruct the moment when “we were Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts” which for Chen, denotes a pre-Oedipal relationship between the two wherein the two halves of Ichiro’s identity represented the

“whole of me [Ichiro]” (16). Interestingly enough, Ichiro does not contemplate the possibility of a joint Japanese-American identity at all.

Correspondingly, Ichiro’s desire to return to a pre-Oedipal relationship with his mother not only explains Ichiro’s regression to the oral stage of the Oedipus Complex, but 26 also reveals Ichiro’s oral fixation as a search for nourishment from his mother - the union between the child and the mother’s breast created initially out of the child’s need for nourishment. It is the fact that Ichiro “did not love [America] enough” to reject his mother in favor of accepting America that displaces him; a rejection of Mrs. Yamada translates to a rejection of Ichiro’s Japanese roots. For this reason, Ichiro seeks nourishment from his mother as a means of reaffirming his existence. In the post-Oedipal realm, this type of maternal nourishment comes in the form of rice for Japanese individuals.

However, Mrs. Yamada fails to meet the criteria to “satisfy” Ichiro’s hunger for a definition of his own identity. Her failure both as a proper caregiver and representation of the maternal is reflected in Okada’s painful portrayal of Mrs. Yamada’s psychotic breakdown after receiving a letter from her sister that reveals the truth of Japan’s defeat:

“Inevitably, he [Kenji, Ichiro’s best friend] saw Ichiro’s mother and it gave

him an odd sensation as he watched her methodically empty a case of

evaporated milk and line the cans with painful precision on the shelf...It

was a long wait, for she grasped only a single can with both hands each time

she stooped to reach into the box. Finally, she finished and stood as if

examining her handiwork. Kenji rapped briskly on the door, but she took no

notice. Instead, she reached out and suddenly with her arms and swept the

cans to the floor” (Okada 136-137).

Xu points out that Okada “robs the mother figure not only of femininity but also of motherhood, dehumanizing her into a cold, hard, and hateful vessel of fanatic nationalism,” and cites Bryn Gribben’s analysis of the scene’s focus on evaporated milk as a metaphor portraying “how the mother is constructed as a lack even if she has something to 27 provide...an evaporation of nourishment” (Xu 24). In response, as both scholars note in their own respective analysis, Mrs. Yamada must die “in order for the son to grow and become a man” (24). In respect to Freud’s Oedipus Complex, then, the maternal must be destroyed rather than simply rejected in order for the child to identify with the father and progress into post-Oedipal development. However, the problem of Ichiro’s father and his lack of patriarchal power adds another layer of complications to Ichiro’s journey towards re-identification.

In this second scene of consumption, Mr. Yamada prepares a breakfast for Ichiro after he wakes, the scene itself taking place the next day after his return home. Mr. Yamada

“stood beside the stove with frying pan in hand” and prepared the following meal: “The eggs were done the way he [Ichiro] liked them, sunny side up with the edges slightly browned. He felt grateful to his father for remembering” (Okada. 40). Contrary to Ichiro’s homecoming lunch, Mr. Yamada’s preparation of the eggs as “sunny side up with the edges slightly browned” caters to Ichiro’ preferences and rather than the meal being consumed in silence, Mr. Yamada’s food creates a space that allows Ichiro to externalize his internal aggressions towards his mother - “I’m crazy as you are,” Ichiro screams and continues

“see in the mirror the madness of the mother which is the madness of the son” (43). If Mrs.

Yamada’s madness becomes embodied and represented in the foods she prepares, then

Ichiro should theoretically be able to identify with his father by enjoying his father’s meals.

Problematically, Okada’s use of the gender role reversal complicates this model in that the reader is drawn to Mr. Yamada’s patriarchal inabilities through his identification within the domestic realm of the kitchen, his choice of ingredients, and his own submissiveness to his wife. 28

Kristeva argues that the maternal must become abject by the child in order for the child to successfully move into the realm of the symbolic, however Okada’s protagonist complicates the traditional model of abjection theory7. As Wenxin Li explains, “one of the consequences of internment is that the father’s absolute power and authority in the traditional Japanese household was greatly eroded” which, for Ichiro, also included a

“complete gender role reversal” between his father and mother (Li 86). Xu adds that “the

Japanese father, emasculated and decultured by U.S. racism, is no longer in Ichiro’s mind the unquestioned lawgiver, the unified symbolic order” (Xu 23). Ichiro himself even laments that “Pa’s okay, but he’s a nobody. He’s a goddamn, fat, grinning, spineless nobody. Ma is the rock that’s always hammering, pounding...in her unobtrusive, determined, fanatical way until there’s nothing left to call one’s self’ (Okada 12).

Consequently, the Yamada family’s gender reversal and weakened patriarchal authority only keep Ichiro sustained in a limbo between semiotic and symbolic. It is Ichiro’s anxiety of not being one nor the other, but being in a state of abjection himself, that then comes to embed itself within the food that both of Ichiro’s parents prepare for him - namely with the inclusion of rice and/or meat.

The preparation and inclusion of rice in the meal marks the meal as Japanese, however, a noticeable factor yet to be explored is the representation of meat in these food scenes. Although both culinary scenes portray eggs cooked in different ways, notably missing from Mr. Yamada’s food scene is the inclusion of rice (again, indicative, of the

Japanese self) and the preparation of meat and it is this absence of meat that especially

7 Wenying Xu cites Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and explains that the child must renounce the semiotic and maternal because both exist outside the confines of structured rules and systems including social constructs of identity (Xu 20). 29 marks Mr. Yamada’s failure as a patriarchal figure. Why is the portrayal of meat important towards Mr. Yamada’s representation as the patriarchal figure of the household and how does the lack of meat in the second scene hinder Ichiro’s journey towards identification with his father? According to Carol J. Adams, the consumption of meat reflects “male- identified appetitive desires” and the idea that “’meat’ is ‘real food for real people’” where

“the implications are obvious. We want to be included; we want to be real people...to resist the eating of animals causes one to be excluded from the culturally constructed ‘we’ and to announce one’s difference” (Adams 67). Adams explains that to exclude meat from one’s diet signifies their withdrawal from the social structures encompassing the representation of one’s masculinity. To eat meat is to be masculine. Thus, Mr. Yamada’s exclusion of meat from his cooking during the second scene not only reflects his identification with the domestic realm of the kitchen, but also mirrors his own de- masculinization as a result of his submissive nature towards his wife and the psychological damage inflicted on Nisei fathers in the post-war era.

While these two scenes of consumption examine Ichiro’s interactions within the home between his father and mother, they do not extend past Okada’s portrayal of a hostile home where Japanese and American identities tear at each other for dominance. In a space where the maternal is the enemy and the paternal is emasculated, Ichiro’s progression towards resolving the Oedipus Complex halts at the oral stage wherein his fixation on stimulation of the mouth prevents him from progressing. To remedy his identity crisis,

Ichiro searches outside of the home for external representations of both paternal and maternal, masculine and feminine, active and passive; in extending his journey for identification into different locations outside of the home, Ichiro ultimately seeks models 30 of identification that defy the polarized definitions of Japanese and American at home.

These individuals come in the form of one of his friends prior to his internment, Kenji, and his short-term love interest within the novel, Emi. My next section will discuss Kenji’s role in aiding Ichiro’s re-identification through food and Kenji’s role in Ichiro’s Oedipal development.

Hamburger Dreams: Eating Against the Threat of Castration

Because foods representing Japanese identity and foods prepared by emasculated patriarchal figures prove unsatisfactory for Ichiro, Okada’s displaced protagonist must seek foods prepared outside of his home that represent the ideal models he requires to resolve his regression in Oedipal development. One ideal character that provides Ichiro with a chance at resolving his Oedipal Crisis is Kenji, Ichiro’s old friend and confidant. Kenji’s approaches Ichiro while he is “halfway through his second hamburger, sitting on the stool at the counter [of a diner]” (Okada 57). “Join me, Ken. We can talk,” Ichiro beckons to

Kenji while “displaying his hamburger” (58). Ichiro’s purposeful display of his second hamburger clearly defines Ichiro’s meal preferences in comparison to his meals at home.

Whereas his mother prepares meals steeped in Japanese-ness (rice, tea, sliced meat, etc.) and his father creates dishes lacking masculine properties (sunny-side up eggs), the diner provides Ichiro with an Americanized space where he can consume American foods that lack rice and include meat.

Within the space of the diner, Ichiro consumes hamburger buns instead of rice and a hamburger instead of sliced, cold meat or simply eggs. In this scene, we witness what

Thompkins describes as a scene of “queer alimentarity,” wherein Ichiro links “oral pleasure and other forms of nonnormative desire,” namely the desire to be subject or to exist to 31 pleasurable stimulation of the mouth; in these scenes outside of the home, “the mouth can perhaps function as a passage for these desires because of its oblique relationship to normative, genitally focused heterosexuality: not sexually reproductive but rather central to the reproduction of the owners body, the mouth is an erotic space, one into which may be put articles that represent both the same sex and/or different races” (Thompkins 5 and

100). However, whereas Thompkins ties the mouth and desire to the replication of the consumers body via the consumption of foods representative of both same sex and/or races,

I consider her claim in terms of Freud’s Oedipus Complex and same-sex companionship.

Ichiro’s invitation to Kenji opens up a space for dialogue wherein Ichiro is able to verbally externalize his internal identity crisis by discussing Kenji’s military service and

Ichiro’s own internment. Prior to Kenji’s arrival, Ichiro departs his old university after meeting an old professor, Ichiro’s inner monologue interrupting the narrative: “It is I

[Ichiro] who reduces conversation to the inconsequential” Ichiro bemoans because

Professor Brown, his American, white-male professor, embodies “that life which I [Ichiro] have forfeited and, forfeiting it, have lost the right to see and hear and become excited over things which are of that wonderful past” (Okada 57). The result of this encounter with

Professor Brown leaves Ichiro “empty and quietly sad and hungry” (57). And yet, upon

Kenji’s entrance into the diner, Ichiro forgoes his claim that he “reduces conversation to the inconsequential” by discussing his internment with Kenji.

The foodscape of the diner coupled with Ichiro’s consumption of the hamburger, I argue, enables this event to occur. The hamburger then, symbolizes America’s national foodway and when coupled with Adam’s argument of meat as gendered masculine, we see that Ichiro’s consumption of these hamburgers reflects a desire to incorporate American- 32 ness and masculinity into his own identity - a component consistently missing from his parents’ dishes. Conversely, while Thompkins ties “the sensual pleasure allowed to the tongue” through “the representation of transgressive desires...metaphorically associated with the mouth,” to “the era’s reproductive-oriented norms” of antebellum American

society, I connect these same representations of desires through the pleasure of oral

stimulation to representations of post-World War II American masculinity (and threats to masculinity) through a food scene involving Kenji and his family - Kenji’s last supper.

In the middle of Okada’s novel, we receive our first glimpse of Kenji’s home life in what is well-known as the “last-supper” scene. Prior to the meal itself, Kenji’s father returns home from purchasing groceries for his son’s homecoming. Kenji’s father remarks that “there was nothing as satisfying as sitting at a well-laden table with one’s family,” to enjoy American dishes such as “a fine roasting chicken” coupled with lemon meringue pie,

“coffee, milk, pop, and cookies and ice cream” that the family sits down to eat during dinner (128-130). Contrary to Ichiro’s food scenes at home, Kenji’s family revels in the commensality of the American dinner table - the food scene notably lacks the inclusion of rice. Based on food choices alone, “one would never know that the clan’s patriarch is

Japanese; the family has thoroughly adopted the behavior and values of the American middle class of that era,” explains Stan Yogi; however, Okada forces us to recognize that this successful story of assimilation into the American middle class requires the sacrifice

of Kenji’s amputated leg, a wound which continues to eat away at Kenji’s already

deteriorating health (Yogi 70). Most critics of No-No Boy appear satisfied with associating

Kenji’s deteriorating leg with a fatal reminder of how “respectability and acceptance in

American society” were predicated on Kenji’s decision “to enlist but are now a constant 33 reminder of his ill-fated, under-appreciated service,” (Li 88). Although I agree with Li’s claim, I affirm that Kenji’s amputated leg requires further psychoanalytic examination.

There is no doubt that Kenji’s amputated leg signifies the cost of assimilating into a post-World War II American society - it is a physical representation of Kenji’s willingness to fracture his Japanese-American identity in favor of one that is solely

American. Ichiro admits that he “felt a strange exhilaration” when riding in Kenji’s new

Oldsmobile and is fixated on Kenji’s stump “because the leg that wasn’t there had been amputated in a field hospital, which meant that Kenji was a veteran of the army of America and had every right to laugh and love and hope” in comparison to Ichiro “who was strong and perfect but only an empty shell” (Okada 60-62). It would seem as if the cost of being an American requires an individual to sacrifice themselves, in Kenji’s case, his rotten leg

“eating itself away until it would consume the man himself’ (63). Through Kenji’s amputation, then, Okada portrays a vital consequence of being American: American identity requires the sacrifice, or rather the castration of ethnic individuals. In this respect then, Kenji’s amputated leg simultaneously symbolizes a vital component in psychoanalysis - the representation of the castrated phallus, severed in this case, by the requirements of an American identity. As such, Ichiro’s envy of Kenji’s American identity reflects his desire to possess that which he lacks - a sense of existence. Ichiro’s oral fixation acts as a method of reaffirming his existence with the repetitive act of consumption representing an act of incorporating and an act of becoming.

Considering Kenji’s amputated leg as a symbol for the castrated phallus harkens back to the Oedipus Complex and provides us with a method of resolution: the threat of castration. Freud characterizes the threat of castration as “the reaction to sexual 34 intimidation or restriction, ascribed to the father, or early infantile sexuality” that occurs when a young boy recognizes a lack of phallic possession in a female and that the child thereafter “imaginatively constructs...from suggestions, from the knowledge that auto­ erotic satisfaction is forbidden” (Freud 96). Moreover, the threat of castration acts as the child’s most traumatic experience that triggers the resolution of the Oedipal Crisis through identification with the father. Yet failure to identify with the father (the disciplinary figure that threatens to castrate the child) problematizes this process.

As we have already examined, Ichiro’s father proves inefficient as an appropriate patriarchal form of re-identification due to the gender role reversal with his wife. However,

Kenji’s “older brother” and mentor-like position as Ichiro’s friend provides Ichiro with a chance to re-identify - that is, with the exception that Kenji’s amputated leg causes Ichiro’s efforts to fail. For Ichiro, the sight of Kenji’s castrated limb does not induce the trauma necessary to resolve the Oedipus Complex. Rather, Ichiro envies Kenji’s amputation:

“Give me the eleven inches which are beginning to hurt again and bring

ever close the fear of approaching death, and give me with it the fullness of

yourself which is also yours because you where man enough to wish the

thing which destroyed your leg and, perhaps, you with it but, at the same

time, made it so that you can put your one good foot in the dirt of America

and know that the wet coolness of it is yours beyond a single doubt” (Okada

64).

Although the passage above does catalogue Ichiro’s envy of Kenji’s castrated limb, it also denotes Ichiro’s desire to be castrated like Kenji. One may even read this desire as a desire to have a penis to castrate like Kenji. Both methods of reading paint Ichiro’s desire as a 35 complicated desire to become Kenji; his statement “give me the eleven inches which are beginning to hurt again,” is a plea to obtain “the fullness of yourself’ embodied by the concept of “being man enough to wish” (64). To be castrated like Kenji requires Ichiro to be “man enough” to choose, and in this plea, Ichiro connects choice with fullness of identity, masculinity, and selfhood.

However, it should be well noted that a desire to become Kenji, as I am arguing, does not necessarily reflect a homosexual desire, but rather a homoerotic one characterized by pleasure through the act of incorporating another male character; the only issue, of course, is that this character is also stripped of his masculinity like Mr. Yamada. I digress to Thompkins’s queer alimentarity. Ichiro negotiates this underlying desire through his oral fixation by fetishizing his choice of food: he experiences pleasure when consuming a hamburger so much so that he eats another prior to Kenji’s arrival at the diner; Ichiro dutifully consumes his mother’s meals as if the act of consumption is a chore. It is through the pleasurable act of consumption that Ichiro desires to incorporate figures like Kenji.

That is to say that Ichiro’s desire to “eat” Kenji reflects a deeper desire to possess the ability to choose - like Kenji - for it is through the power of choice that Ichiro views his path towards masculinity, an American identity, and subsequently, the resolution of his identity crisis. Although Kenji is castrated due to his military service, Kenji retains the freedom of choice due to his sacrifice and it is this freedom that Ichiro lacks and desires. As I mentioned earlier, Ichiro is forced to answer the Loyalty Questionnaire and “at that time there was no other choice for him” but to mark “no” (1). As such, this power of choice that

Ichiro lacks is the vital component that Ichiro connects with being American and 36

masculine, or as Freud would term it, being active rather than passive8. Choice, for Ichiro,

represents subjecthood and existence.

Ichiro’s desire to be castrated becomes apparent in Kenji’s last supper scene. This

food scene highlights Kenji’s ability to consume and enjoy American foods and the

commensality of the American table; this is, of course, in comparison to Ichiro’s food

scenes where a lack of enjoyment in ethnic dishes coupled with meatless meals devoid of

masculine representations prevent successful re-identification. Yet, Kenji’s choice to be an

American and consume American foods exacts a fatal toll on him. Ironically, his own leg,

amputated in service of America, continues to consume his entire being. Thus, although

Kenji’s last supper scene presents a successful attempt to assimilate into American society

reflected in the types of foods and commensality permitted at the table, Kenji’s castrated

limb reminds us that to be American requires members of ethnic communities to destroy their ethnic roots; when paired with Mrs. Yamada’s own representations of the maternal as

Japanese roots, the rejection of one’s ethnic foundations also requires the eradication of the maternal.

Connecting Ichiro’s oral fixation to Kenji’s symbolic castration and the Oedipus

Complex constructs an unlikely bridge. How can an individual be inclined towards both

active and passive (castrated) at the same time? For Ichiro, the desire to be an active subject

is achieved through being able to choose between being Japanese and American. Ichiro

associates this freedom of choice with military service and subsequently, with castration

itself, despite the unrealistic terms of this wish. Thus, Ichiro’s inability to choose, the

ability being stripped away by the Loyalty Questionnaire prior to his internment, acts as

8 Freud argues that “the contrast between masculine and feminine plays no part as yet, its place is taken by the contrast between active and passive” in pre-Oedipal development (Freud 147). 37 the locust of Ichiro’s neurosis. Ichiro’s oral fixation is a neurotic attempt to reaffirm

existence through actively consuming food and the identities represented in them. At the

same time, Ichiro is inclined towards castrated figures like Kenji because he sees their

sacrifice as the key towards gaining the power of choice despite this inaccurate association

between the two. And yet, the question of Ichiro’s progression towards resolution of the

Oedipal Complex remains. In my next section, I move from discussing Ichiro’s oral

fixation as a way to consume against the threat of castration to engaging Ichiro’s relationship with his love-interest Emi and her role in his psychic recovery.

No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk: Maternal Substitutions

Ichiro’s journey towards resolving the Oedipal Complex requires the destruction of the maternal with the death of his mother in order for him to identify with masculine, patriarchal figures. Nevertheless, a desire to exist through the power of choice strips Ichiro

of an active and masculine role model that is not castrated. If Okada implants multiple

complications in Ichiro’s progression towards re-identification, then where can Ichiro

locate a viable psychological mode of recovery to work-through his oral fixation? Okada >

answers this question with the character Emi, Ichiro’s love-interest in the novel; Emi’s

representation of the maternal becomes substitute for Mrs. Yamada’s inefficient motherly

role.

Contrary to Mrs. Yamada, Okada paints Emi “as slender, with heavy breasts,” and

with “rich, black hair which fell on her shoulders and covered her neck, and her long legs

were strong and shapely like a white woman’s” (Okada 83). According to Li, Okada’s

rendition of Emi is problematic because Okada’s “over sexualized portrayal with explicit

reference to white features” reveals his own “implicit racist bias” (Li 90). And yet, as Li 38 later argues, Emi’s status as the sole-inheritor of her family’s estate combines her status as

“head of the household” alongside her role as the feminine girlfriend; Li draws a comparison between Emi and Ichiro’s mother who “has lost all the characteristics of femininity” and how these aspects of Emi’s identity enable her to provide Ichiro with something that his deceased mother cannot - love (91). However, are Emi’s white features the solution to the issue of being Japanese or American? Okada’s rendition of Emi appears questionable when considering the potential for Okada’s racial bias. Nonetheless, I would argue that it is Emi’s role as substitute for the maternal that is fundamentally linked to her physical description rather than Okada’s “implicit” racial preferences.

Ichiro “consummates” his desire for Emi during the night the he meets her.

However, rather than an explicit sexual union, Emi and Ichiro lie naked in “the darkness of the unlighted room” and discuss both of their post-war experiences as well as their parents (90). Both Emi and Ichiro conclude that the space of abjection in between Japanese and American is “like a sickness...because we’re [both Ichiro and Emi] American and because we’re Japanese and sometimes the two don’t mix.. .you had to be one or the other” with both American and Japanese identities threatening to destroy the other (91).

Immediately afterwards, Emi “drew his [Ichiro’s] face to her naked breast” as he breaks down, “lost and bewildered like a child frightened, he sobbed quietly” (92). Emi’s gesture of comfort towards Ichiro marks the first scene where we witness a rendition of the semiotic and the maternal in Okada’s novel.

Whereas Mrs. Yamada becomes stripped of all representations of the maternal,

Emi’s sympathetic understanding of Ichiro’s displacement provide him with a moment of

Oedipal progression through her own substitute for the maternal that Ichiro is denied. Fu- 39

Jen Chen contends that Ichiro’s quest for “wholesomeness” not only “indicates the political

dilemma of the second-generation Japanese Americas of immigrant parents,” but also

“suggests his [Ichiro’s] unconscious fantasy of sexual union with the (m)other and at the

same time his fear of separation involved with the Symbolic father, America” (Chen 112).

This fantasy of sexual union with the mother as other becomes realized when Emi draws

Ichiro to her naked breast. As Freud explains in his An Outline o f Psychoanalysis'.

“A child’s first erotic object is the mother’s breast that nourishes it; love has

its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment. There is no

doubt that, to begin with, the child does not distinguish between the breast

and its own body; when the breast has to be separated from the body and

shifted to the ‘outside’ because the child so often finds it absent, it carries

with it as an ‘object’.. .This first object is later completed into the person of

the child’s mother” (Freud 70).

Throughout the novel, Ichiro strives to locate a sense of self that he lacks, negotiating this

displacement through an oral fixation with food (food becomes symbolic for the love,

compassion and power of choice which he lacks and desires to incorporate). Emi’s act of

drawing Ichiro to her breast enables him to re-locate himself within Freud’s Oedipus

Complex framework. Rather than wandering in a state of abjection between Japanese and

American, Ichiro’s union with Emi represents the fulfillment of Ichiro’s “fantasy” that

Chen describes and also symbolizes Ichiro’s first step towards wholesomeness through the

nourishment provided by Emi’s comfort and love. Similar to Mrs. Yamada’s lack of

nourishment translated into her meals through rice, Emi’s sympathetic position towards

Ichiro becomes embodied in her food and choice of ingredients as well. 40

Okada portrays the shortcomings of Mrs. Yamada’s and Mr. Yamada’s food scenes

through Ichiro’s reaction to Emi’s food. The morning after Ichiro and Emi sleep together,

Emi prepares breakfast for Ichiro and “flipped the eggs over unthinkingly. T - I hope you

weren’t expecting sunny side up,” she remarks to which Ichiro responds, “makes no

difference to me” (Okada 100). Recalling Ichiro’s scene of consumption with his father reminds us that Ichiro in fact prefers sunny-side up eggs, and yet, Ichiro “assuringly”

replies that Emi’s cooking method does not matter to him (100). Ichiro’s sudden change in

preference comes as no surprise when considering Emi’s representation of the maternal

from the night before. As Xu maintains, “it is the maternal that has the power to sustain a

community at time of deep trouble and to nurture it back to health” (Xu 27). Emi’s act of

comforting Ichiro from the night before carries the power to heal both Ichiro and his

community. This sense of sympathetic love is transmitted into Emi’s food. Ichiro’s struggle, though an individual one defined by Ichiro’s oral fixation, represents a communal effort of the Japanese-American community to redefine themselves against the backdrop of post­ war racism.

At the same time, Ichiro’s position to Emi’s naked breast brings him within close

proximity of his first source of nourishment and first love-object, albeit Emi’s own “heavy

breasts” become substitute for Mrs. Yamada’s breast. Whereas Mrs. Yamada “can no

longer nourish her family’s identity,” because her “small, flat-chested” breasts lack the

nourishment necessary to aid Ichiro in re-identifying with both ethnic and national

identities, Emi’s “white” breasts seem to supply the nourishment Ichiro needs and desires

(Gribben 39 and Okada 10 and 83). Thus, the point of contact between Ichiro’s face and 41

Emi’s breast permits Ichiro to transfer his preferred source of nourishment from his mother’s ethnic meals to Emi’s source of nourishment - Americanized meals.

Instead of consuming rice as a symbol for Mrs. Yamada, madness, and Japanese identity, Ichiro consumes a more Americanized meal centering around eggs, and later,

“meat and potatoes” and a “cup of coffee” that Emi prepares for him (Okada 168). Ichiro’s access to enjoyment of these Americanized foods may be due to Emi’s white features and

Okada’s “subscription to white racial stereotypes in Emi’s portrayal”; and yet, Okada’s emphasis on Emi’s Japanese ethnicity is important because, as Li asserts, it is an “important affirmation of Japanese American values,” that permits Ichiro to substitute Emi’s joint

Japanese-American identity in place of his mother’s sole Japanese one (Li 91). As a result,

Ichiro is now able to enjoy his meals and disregard his preferences for food, instead relying entirely on Emi’s method of preparation to sustain him for “these forms of enjoyment are the very expressions of the maternal” (Xu 27). In accepting her meals, Ichiro also accepts her substitution as the primary maternal figure within the novel.

Furthermore, Ichiro’s preference for Emi’s source of nourishment over Mrs.

Yamada effectively renders Mrs. Yamada useless. Her presence and function as a representation of the maternal is unneeded by the recipients of her nourishment and as a result, she must die. “For me, you have been dead a long time,” Ichiro comments to his mother’s corpse, and after her funeral, affirms that “time has swept her away and time will bury my mistake. She is dead and I am not sorry. I feel a little bit freer, a bit more hopeful”

(Okada 186 and 196). Emi’s substitute for Mrs. Yamada’s lack of nourishment enables

Ichiro - and Okada - to destroy her because her manifestations of the maternal embodied in her food and ethnic enjoyment fail to nurse her family and her community back to health. 42

Although Ichiro’s substitution of Emi for Mrs. Yamada highlights a moment of

sympathy and return to a pre-Oedipal moment of maternal expression, the question of

Ichiro’s oral fixation still remains: how does Emi’s new role as Ichiro’s “surrogate” mother resolve both Ichiro’s oral fixation and his Oedipal Complex? Okada answers this question

in a dance scene between Emi and Ichiro at a roadside restaurant. “Let’s go,” Ichiro responds to Emi despite that “it wouldn’t be right” in lieu of his mother’s death earlier that

same day; “she’s [Mrs. Yamada] nothing. I ran out on the funeral. That’s how it is,” Ichiro affirms (Okada 208). Emi’s substitution for Mrs. Yamada as representation of the maternal now complete, Ichiro takes Emi out and “once in the car and on their way, they felt relaxed and free and happy” (208). Xu observes that “these moments of enjoyment, with their therapeutic power for Okada and his protagonist, are distinctively non-Japanese” with the act of driving divorced from forms of enjoyment equated with ethnic identification (Xu

25). These non-ethnic forms of enjoyment, both in driving and also dancing as I shall demonstrate, reflect Okada’s opinion regarding ethnic and national identities: in the wake of trauma, both communal and individual, it is the actions that one takes towards the future that enable one to reconstruct identity without regard for ethnicity or nationality.

Okada illustrates this dissolution of the ethnicity/national binary on the dancefloor

with Emi and Ichiro. “This is the way it ought to be,” Ichiro contemplates as he dances

with Emi, “nobody’s looking twice at us. Nobody’s asking me where I was during the war

or what the hell I am doing back on the Coast. There’s no trouble to be had without looking

for it. Everything’s the same, just as it used to be” (Okada 209). Ichiro comes to these

conclusions because the dance floor, as Stan Yogi asserts, “becomes a metaphor for

America, and dancing becomes a metaphor for the constant cooperation and respect 43 necessary to maintain a truly pluralistic nation” (Yogi 72). Yogi adds that “Ichiro’s dance with Emi symbolizes a more benign version of Kenji’s assimilation theory, because it does not necessarily result in the disappearance of racial and ethnic differences,” but rather reduces their importance by focusing on Ichiro’s renewed sense of individualism:

“It’s a matter of attitude. Mine needs changing. I’ve got to love the world

the way I used to. I’ve got to love it and the people so I’ll feel good, and

feeling good will make life worth whole. There’s no point in crying about

what’s done. There’s a place for me and Emi and Freddie [a fellow No-No

Boy and Ichiro’s foil] here on the dance floor and out there in the hustle of

things if we’ll let it be that way. I’ve been fighting it and hating it and letting

my bitterness against myself and Ma and Pa and even Taro throw the whole

universe out of perspective. I want to go on living and be happy. I’ve only

to let myself do so” (Yogi 72 and Okada 209).

For Okada and Ichiro, the “hustle of things” on the dance floor marks a form of enjoyment, similar to driving, that does not place an emphasis on ethnic forms of enjoyment. If

“language, symbolic of all norms, initiates us into the social, and by doing so, it regulates our eating and controls our enjoyment,” then Ichiro’s affirmation to “go on living and be happy” is the key factor that then fully allows Ichiro to access different moments of enjoyment - including enjoyment from eating American foods (Okada 209 and Xu 168).

More importantly, Okada’s dance floor scene illustrates Ichiro’s struggle against Freud’s concept of the death drive and the ultimate desire of all living beings: the desire to return to a state of inanimate being - to die. 44

Freud conceives the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle wherein he connects the compulsion to repeat in neurotics to the ultimate desire for death. For Freud, an instinct is characterized by “a compulsion inherent in organic life to restore to an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces” (Freud 47). This “earlier state of things,” Freud reasons, is “an initial state from which the living entity has at one time other departed and to which it is striving to return” (50). Freud articulates this state as a stage of inanimacy for “what was inanimate existed before what is living” and as a result, “the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state” or to die (50). The remedy to this instinct, as

Freud notes, is novelty, for “novelty is always the condition of enjoyment” and thus spontaneity breaks this cycle of repetition that inevitably destroys us (47). For Ichiro, these moments of novelty are inherently non-Japanese.

In Okada’s novel, moments that are not affiliated with ethnicity such as driving or dancing with Emi depict Freud’s claim that novelty provides enjoyment because these moments exist outside the confines of being Japanese or being American. They are separated from the question of race or nationality. Within the space of the dance floor, the only visible object within the “hustle of things” is “a young couple” undefined by culture or nation (Okada 211). In these scenes of non-ethnic enjoyment then, Ichiro transitions from a passive victim wandering in abjection to the active thinker contemplating his future.

However, Freud’s death drive and Ichiro’s struggle against it include another instinct that must be considered and discussed - Eros, the life instinct.

Freud explains that Eros, the life instinct, “operates from the beginning of life and appears...in opposition to the ‘death instinct,” ands “seeks to force together and hold 45 together the portions of living substance” (84). That is to say that Eros seeks to “combine organic substances into larger unities” through such acts as sexual union, or even through acts of cooperation that unite individuals (57). In No-No Boy, moments like the driving scene and the dance floor scene not only mark moments of non-ethnic enjoyment, but they also signal prosocial moments where Ichiro and Emi interact together and cooperate with each other and those around them. In the car, both Ichiro and Emi feel free as they speed away together, while in the dance floor scene, we witness the work of Eros in, as Yogi explains, the cooperation displayed between all dancers in the metaphorical dance floor of a “pluralistic” America. All of these acts reflect Ichiro’s desire to live and the overall goal of Eros itself - “I want only to go on living and be happy,” he admits (Okada 209). Thus, in these scenes of non-ethnic enjoyment, Eros operates against the death drive by promoting cooperation between both Ichiro and Emi in order to preserve Ichiro from the repetitive aspect of his oral fixation - a characteristic attributed to the death drive. These moments of cooperation, then, take the form of spontaneous acts unaffiliated with ethnic forms of enjoyment. In my final section, I will link non-ethnic enjoyment to Ichiro’s oral fixation and will discuss how Ichiro’s oral fixation is connected to the death drive and

Ichiro’s desire to be an active subject.

Eating Away the Troubles: (Re)Constructing Identity

Throughout Okada’s novel, Ichiro is placed in a passive role as the abject victim

looking inwards. This point is best illustrated by an internal debate that Ichiro holds with himself and the symbolic Japanese community after returning from a neighbor’s house.

“You can’t make me go in the army because I’m not an American,” Ichiro internally

screams when he considers the various responses given to “the judge” by Japanese citizens 46

(Okada 31). This affirmation is quickly followed by others: “you, Mr. Judge, who

supposedly represent justice, was it just a thing to ruin a hundred lives,” as well as “if you think we’re the same kind of rotten Japanese that dropped the bombs on Pearl Harbor, and

it’s plain you do or I wouldn’t be here,” and also “I’m a good American and I like it here

but you can see that it wouldn’t do for me to be shooting at my brother” (30-32). All of these internal conversations between imaginary Japanese victims of racial oppression and the judge (undoubtedly representative of America) represent Ichiro’s consciousness and the “self-loathing” that Xu discusses in that it generates hatred of “one’s own being... [and] revulsion of the significant markers of one’s ethnic community” (Xu 26). However, in separating himself from these various responses representative of the Japanese community,

Ichiro places himself in the role of the passive and helpless bystander in the court room.

He relies on his oral fixation to remedy this passiveness.

Ichiro’s oral fixation is an attempt to position himself into a more active role rather than a passive one. In addition, it allows him to negotiate his identity displacement by physically permitting him to control the food he desires to incorporate. Unlike Ichiro’s identity which must be fractured and slowly rebuilt, the act of consumption provides a quick method of trafficking the forms of nourishment that constitute the body. It is this

stimulation of the mouth during the act of consumption that continuously gives Ichiro pleasure because “feelings of pleasure... lie on the borderline between outside and inside”

(Freud 27). Eating constitutes the willful crossing of these external and internal borders.

There is no doubt that “repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in

itself a source of pleasure” as repetition of an act, even unpleasurable ones, enable

individuals to “master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they 47 could by merely experiencing it passively” (45-46). Eating allows Ichiro to assume an active role in constructing his identity. In effect, consuming allows Ichiro to exist.

Ichiro’s dilemma does not provide a final solution to his identity crisis, instead leaving us with two primary questions: if Ichiro’s oral fixation is a method of coping with abjection by permitting him to govern what he incorporates and this, thereby enables him to exist by assuming an active role in his re-identification, then is there ever a way to break this fixation? At the same time, if food symbolizes culture and nationality, then why is it that Ichiro derives pleasure in consuming foods that are more American - has he indeed come to resolve his Oedipal regression via substitution of the maternal and is this what provides access to non-ethnic foods and forms of enjoyment? Okada leaves us with a vague

“glimmer of hope” with the novel’s ending (Okada 250). Yet, it is this ending that causes the most controversy due to its obscurity.

At the end of the novel, Ichiro witnesses the death of another no-no boy named

Freddie after a short brawl between him and a yes-yes boy named Bull. During this scene,

Freddie crashes his car and was “just about cut” into two (249). It would seem even Freddie, a fellow no-no boy, cannot escape the polarization of being Japanese and American for it literally splits him apart. Ichiro approaches Bull and places a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says. Bull responds in rage, “the words refused to come out any longer. Mouth agape, lips trembling...the eyes, the frightened, lonely eyes, peered through a dull film of tears and begged for solace that was not to be had” (250). Despite Bull’s desire to serve

America, like Kenji, America forces Bull to sacrifice his identity and abjectify himself.

Even in this moment, Bull regresses similarly to Ichiro, for “he started to cry, not like a man in grief or a soldier in pain, but like a baby in loud, gasping, beseeching howls” (250). 48

Ichiro’s newfound position between the polarizations of nationality and ethnicity embodied by both Bull and Freddie, respectively, exemplifies Okada’s final conclusion on the matter: only within spaces of non-ethnic representation can an individual’s ethnic and national identities exist in cooperation outside of the binary of national self and ethnic other. Ichiro’s oral fixation, then, is more of an attempt to control these moments of enjoyment by substituting foods with racial significance for foods embodying both national and ethnic identities; whereas the foods that he enjoys eating are more Americanized, the person preparing his food symbolizes the joint Japanese-American identity that he so desires.

Eating is not just becoming through incorporating food representing national identities, but also an act of self-fashioning through consuming the person that prepared the foods that we enjoy and what these individuals represent as well.

Conclusion

Okada’s ending baffles readers - it seems like an unsatisfying escape from addressing heavier questions or internalized racism and ethnic identification. Stan Yogi argues that Okada’s ending “tries to bridge the rifts rampant in the Nikkei community in part because he [Ichiro] sees the divisions which tear the community apart have, in his mind, collapsed” while Bryn Gribben’s psychoanalytic reading implies that Okada’s ending reflects “nothing more than the emptiness American identity formation creates for

Japanese Americans” (Yogi 74 and Gribben 44). Other No-No Boy scholars like Ling affirm that the final scene “prevents Ichiro's struggle from merging totally into either assimilationist impulses or Japanese isolation, maintains his painful resistance to power, and keeps his own voice contradictory and problematic, even while it profoundly dramatizes both the need for a Japanese American discourse and the difficulties of finding 49

a place to stand in order to invent one” (Ling 375). Where do we stand in relation to

Okada’s ending (and his novel as a whole) and these other scholars? Okada purposefully

offers the novel’s final paragraph up for interpretation:

“A glimmer of hope - was that it? It was there, someplace. He [Ichiro]

couldn’t see it to put it into words, but the feeling was pretty strong. He

walked along, thinking, searching, thinking and probing, and, in the

darkness of the alley of the community that was a tiny bit of America, he

chased that faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take

shape in mind and in heart” (Okada 250-251).

Okada’s finale leaves Ichiro in search of something yet to exist - a nation that accepts all

individuals regardless of ethnic roots. This imaginary homeland, to conjure Salman

Rushdie, is an America that exists “in the mind and in heart,” but also in the mouth, that requires its ethnic communities to understand “the feeling.”9 The feeling that Okada describes can only be a reference to the semiotic and the maternal, the pre-symbolic world that cannot be “put into words,” but rather is a feeling that must be chewed on, grinded, cut, shaped, swallowed, digested and experienced. And yet, Okada implies that these imaginary spaces of the mind and heart hold the potential and hope for change.

No-No Boy highlights one of the primary flaws of western discourses like Freudian psychoanalysis. For individuals from non-western backgrounds, placement into a western

form of psychoanalytic discourse forces a fracturing of the self- am I Japanese or am I

American? Am I one or the other? As Chen contends in a bio-bibliographical critique of

9 Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” describes how an individual’s homeland solely exists in the mind and is constructed from fragments of memory. Especially pertinent is Rushdie’s claim that “redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it,” for these steps are the very actions that Okada highlights in his ambiguous ending with Ichiro (Rushdie 14). 50

John Okada, “the uncompromising distinctions aggravated by the war prove that the issei’s insistence on maintaining Japanese culture is a mistake and the nisei’s belief in American nativity, acquisition of English, and education as guarantees for an American identity turns out to be wishful thinking” (Chen 284). Whether the answer is to be one or the other, individuals of Japanese descent “both end up being ‘incomplete’ and ‘half’ (284). There is no complete self nor are there only two halves to a single identity.

Okada establishes binaries in each character - ethnic and national, Japanese and

American, masculine and feminine, active and passive, living and dead. However, the self is comprised of “the multiple identities we assume” for “identities are to our social being what food is to our body. Without them, we do not exist” (Xu 168). Ichiro’s failure to register this concept is the fuel behind his oral fixation. Throughout the novel, Ichiro seeks to answer the question “who am I,” and yet the question itself already implies Ichiro’s existence with the word “I”. But “I” am made of many different identities. He does not understand that he is comprised of different identities that vie for control. Perhaps this is what Okada points to through his hopeful ending. In the imaginary space of the mind and heart and the literal space of the mouth, there are no binaries that polarize individuals.

Rather, to claim one identity, is to claim the others too and in this semiotic space, these identities, like tastes, are able to co-exist prior to becoming labeled as Japanese or

American. 51

Coda: All that’s Leftover

Although food scholars typically analyze food and identity through post-colonial, psychoanalytic, or even Marxist lenses, my project is unique in that it focuses on how oral fixations are negotiated through food and its relation to identity formation in Freudian psychoanalysis. Okada’s No-No Boy indeed has a number of psychoanalytic interpretations already in circulation by various scholars - Stan Yogi, Wenying Xu, and Fu-Jen Chen for example. While each scholar provides a reading of the novel through a psychoanalytic framework, none of their works discusses the importance of Ichiro’s oral fixation and his psychological regression in terms of food, consumption and identity.

Recognizing and analyzing Ichiro’s oral fixation is not only vital to our understanding of identity formation, but also to our application of the Oedipus Complex

(and psychoanalysis in general) to individuals from non-European, ethnic communities in

America. In Okada’s novel, the maternal and semiotic represents ethnic heritage while the patriarchal and symbolic reflects an American national identity. If we compare identity formation in the novel with Freud’s original model for the Oedipus Complex, we notice that the rejection of one’s cultural roots parallels the rejection of the mother in resolving the complex. The type of nourishment provided within ethnic communities for members of those specific communities rivals the nourishment provided by the mother during pre-

Oedipal stages of development. Thus, to become an American, then, requires self-abjection

(individuals must expel their ethnic communal roots) and also demands that individuals from these communities hate the very communities that fostered them through a rejection

(or as Okada displays in the novel, a destruction and/or substitution) of the maternal. 52

As Okada demonstrates with characters like Kenji, Freddie, and Bull, this model of identification breeds self-loathing and in the cases of Kenji and Freddie, equals death. For

Ichiro, this realization of self-loathing in the face of abjection ends in a stalemate where the “glimmer of hope” for a Japanese-American identity is portrayed as a work in progress.

I would argue that for Japanese-Americans, and other Asian-American communities, this struggle between American selfhood and ethnic community still exists today. If this be the case, how are we as scholars supposed to negotiate the lines between individual and communal identities and how they are formed? Rather than force individuals from ethnic communities into the binary oppositions of western models of identity formation, it is imperative to recognize that Japanese-Americans, like other ethnic communities of Asian descent, construct identity in relation to the community through orality - food, story­ telling, drink culture, traditional songs, etc.). That is to say, that cultural identity for Asian communities is an identity that is communally constructed together through orality.

Contrary to western identity formation in Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on the individual’s progression through the Oedipus Complex, identity formation for Japanese-

Americans requires the support of both the Japanese community, but also of American society to ensure that a person successfully negotiates the requirements of Japanese and

American social codes.

I approached the topic of orality and Ichiro’s oral fixation because it was a new path of inquiry that I had not encountered in my research and I was fascinated by Okada’s subtle use of food scenes in the novel. But more importantly, recognizing Ichiro’s dependence on stimulation of the mouth and the novel’s obsession with orality from food, consumption, smoking, and verbal aggressions made me realize that our obsession with orality has not 53 changed. Rather, I contend that we are still orally fixated now, more so than ever, on negotiating the expansion and violation of our internal and external, what we permit into our bodies and what we remit outwards. In our efforts to control this process, we have begun to project our anxieties over border crossings into newer spaces, newer foodscapes.

I mention this idea because I believe that it is a field worthy of additional inquiry-the movement from traditional foodscapes like the dinner table to innovative spaces like social media imply our desire for different external outlets accessible to all individuals on a global scale. It signals a desire for connection in a digital space that crosses and intersects all borders10.1 refrain from delving further into this topic primarily because it is outside the scope of my research, however, I look forward to the ways in which this newer, digital foodscape will alter the field of food studies and our obsessions with orality.

While I have examined Ichiro’s journey towards re-identification extensively in my chapter, I have neglected to mention the topics that Okada does not discuss in the novel, primary amongst them, the lack of female representation and character development.

Jeanne Sokolowski brings our attention to the fact that Okada’s novel “implies a gender specificity to the act of citizenship,” inherent in the very title of the work ‘No, No, and

Boy’ (Sokolowski 69). More specifically, Sokolowski observes that No-No Boy “locates the particular challenges for men in a masculine context of military service and patriotism,” while treating “female Japanese Americans as tools for personal growth” of these male characters; this is achieved through a reduction of female character roles to mere representations of the maternal and passivity (70). I would even extend this argument to

101 am indebted to my colleague Ailyn Pambid for helping me make these connections through her current research on social media as a new foodscape and the first-generation immigrant experience of Asian- Americans. 54 highlight that male characters feed off of these female characters in order to develop. Mrs.

Yamada’s representation of the feminine is anything but feminine. Instead, she is portrayed as a woman whose source of nourishment is dry and inefficient whereas Emi is shown as a ripe, sensual woman with “white” features that is ready to be consumed.

Rather than uniting both the male and female experiences of post-World War II

Japanese-Americans, Okada’s novel centers on the trauma experienced by solely male individuals whereas female characters are deployed as male-character development devices through ways in which male characters feed or consume them. In this respect then,

Okada equates being American with being a masculine, male character and ignores the experiences of non-male characters whatsoever. In addition, oral fixations in the novel, like identity formation, are a strictly Japanese-American male coping mechanism. That is not to say that both Japanese-American men and women did not suffer from oral fixations, but rather that Okada identifies Ichiro’s oral fixation as a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma in an attempt to re-identify as both Japanese and American. As a result of the novel’s focus on male characters and their journey towards a patriarchal model of re- identification, fixations and other mental defense mechanisms used to negotiate male experiences are also inherently associated with men as well.

Moreover, Okada’s focus on male-centered identity formation subscribes to the

“white-savior” hero complex by comparing Ichiro to the Japanese hero Momotaro. In my chapter, I cited Ichiro’s “half and half’ speech where Okada likens Ichiro to Momotaro, the Japanese folklore hero bom from a peach. Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald argues that this allusion to Momotaro “underlies his [Ichiro’s] feelings of estrangement: he is not truly the son of his parents but someone miraculously born of the American experience and nurtured 55 by an infertile and alien couple” (McDonald 22). More importantly, McDonald draws attention to the idea that Okada’s reference to the folklore hero “has used white American standards” to paint the ideal picture of a typical western hero, albeit, a western hero bom out of a Japanese folklore (23). Okada’s use of the tale not only affirms that Japanese-

American heroes (or individuals) are male, but also implies that military service is equated with the “gallant and fierce warriors” that Ichiro recalls from his “half and half speech”

(Okada 15). To be American is to be heroic. Thus, through an allusion to the famed Peach

Boy bom out of a fruit, Okada attempts to fuse both American and Japanese into the ideal

“Japanese-American” individual - and for Okada, this fantasy manifests itself as a parentless, male child that borrows the white cultural standards of heroism but encases them within a Japanese body. Okada’s use of Momotaro’s tale confirms his desire to cast­ off the constraints of ethnic roots and their social codes in favor of constructing a new identity defined by experience in America.

Both Sokolowski’s and McDonald’s articles remind readers that Okada’s lack of female representation and identity formation demands further inquiry in relation to a wider understanding of Japanese-American identity formation. Due to his focus on male identity formation, however, this type of analysis must compare No-No Boy to other works by

Japanese-American authors that include a female perspective (for example, Julie Otsuka’s

When the Emperor was Divine). A future comparison of such novels will yield, I believe, a more complete picture of how Japanese-Americans negotiated the trauma of internment while reconstructing identity through food and food practices. Consequently, the selection of literature from this community during the post-war period is limited. 56

The lack of Japanese-American authors populating the field of Asian-American literature in comparison to other prominent authors provides a limited voice for this particular ethnic community. When examining the ways that this community recognizes and negotiates the trauma of internment, our sources are scarcer than others. However,

Japanese-American literature, like Okada’s novel, offers us a rare glimpse into the individual struggle of members of a community that questions how to bridge the divide between self and other, ethnic and national, foreigner and citizen. Whereas works like

Otsuko’s When the Emperor was Divine or Lawson Fusao Inada’s poem collection Legends from Camp provide us with powerful narratives of the internment experience, Okada’s No-

No Boy is one of the first novels to dramatize the psychological effects after internment. In a community that labels discussing trauma or mental illnesses as “abhorrent” as it leads to

“the loss of honor for the family,” books such as No-No Boy became taboo as well due to the novel’s focus on Ichiro’s trauma and identity". It is the novel’s transformation into a subject of taboo that removed substantial Japanese-American representation in literature during the post-World War II period. However, in becoming taboo, No-No Boy allows us to recognize it as something important and worthy of discussion. It is the continued discussion of Japanese internment, trauma, and identity formation that will remove novels like Okada’s No-No Boy from its taboo status and enable Japanese-American literature a more defined place at the table amongst other Asian-American works.

When I began writing my thesis, I wanted to highlight Okada’s focus on the oral through food scenes in the novel, but consistently came across work on race and cultural studies in relation to No-No Boy in my research. In order to differentiate my own research

11 Tong, Benson. “Race, Culture, And Citizenship among Japanese American Children and Adolescents during the Internment Era.” 57 from other scholars (many of whom are cited within this thesis), I attempted to bring these discussions of race and ethnicity into conversation with food and psychoanalytic studies in order to offer another perspective on the hyphenated racial identity. An examination of orality through what is being consumed entails looking at what markers of identity are impressed on the food we eat. It requires us to consider gender, sexual, ethnic/cultural, national, public, and private identities and the ways in which we consume these identities through food, but also how our identities consume one another and ourselves in the process.

I hope that as the field of food studies expands, it considers the importance of oral fixations and the influence they have in our attempts to control our own identity and how they reflect our anxieties regarding the violation of our physical foreign/national borders alongside our own internal/external borders of the body and self. Identities are complex as is the process of regulating them through consumption. Indeed, like the foods that we consume, identities are more than they seem. 58

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