EXISTENTIAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE LOST GENERATION IN J. OKADA’S NOVEL NO-NO BOY

John Okada is one of the most famous representatives of Asian American literature, that received a powerful impetus for development after World War II. The writer was one of the first to depict the premis- es and consequences of the complex self-identification that Japanese Americans had to go through during and after World War II. The writer, who saw the horrors of war and the forced policy that broke the fates of people of the country with his own eyes, creates a novel that reflects the confusion of the representatives of the “nisei” generation, who find themselves at a crossroads in their own destinies. Published in 1957 No- No Boy, the only novel by an American writer of Japanese descent, is now attributed to the “jurisdiction” of postcolonial discourse, Asian American studies and ethnic/post-ethnic studies in American literary crit- icism, remain unexplored. Today, this is the writer bearing incontestable status of one of the forebears of Japanese American literature, fathers of the Asian American literary canon. The objective of the study is to refute this established postulate and demonstrate that the novel should be considered not in a narrow connection with the formation and development of American literature written by authors of Asian ori- gin, but in connection with overcoming the tendency to “hypercanonization” of a limited number of works written by WASP Americans. Research methods are historic-literary and comparative. As a result of the re- search, it has been found out that J. Okada’s novel is important not only because it contains an existential- ist projection of the Lost Generation, one of the key images for the European and American literatures of the second third of the 20th century. But it adds completely new features that are not characteristic of this image. Its significance lies in the fact that its poetics reveals a genetic cohesion with the classical Japanese philosophical and aesthetic tradition. Taking this into account, J. Okada’s novel is presented not simply as an Asian American version of the Western literary school, a kind of “carriage return” and the milestone of a certain stage in the development of American literature written by authors of Asian origin. The study of this novel with an emphasis on its aesthetic and poetic features reveals a significant influence of the classi- cal aesthetic principles of Japanese art, which, despite its apparent replication, makes this writing a unique example of the penetration of a new artistic construing of the philosophical framework of existentialism into the American existential literary canon.