In real life, Mori, faced a fate not unlike his own character. “Yokohama” had originally been slated to be published by the Caxton Printers in Idaho in 1942. But with the arrival of the war, Mori’s publisher likely decided that readers would be unsympathetic to such human portraits of Japanese-Americans. It wasn’t until 1949, seven years after the initial publication date, and four years after Mori left the camps, that his first story collection was finally published. The book went mostly ignored; Mori died in 1980.

AFTER TOO LONG, silence is complicit. We still don’t talk about the camps the way we should: We still call it “internment,” we still find it inconvenient to learn that people died without the help they needed, that families were separated, that a young man was expected to serve a country that chose to imprison him. We still use the term “evacuation,” even though the guns pointed into the camps, and it’s more than an evacuation when you’re being forced to sell the car, sell the farm, sell the house and pack up forever. The message was clear, and it’s a message many Americans are all too familiar with to this day: Go back to where you came from.

When Wong, Chin, Inada and Chan — who all became writers themselves, and edited the seminal 1974 anthology of Asian-American literature, “Aiiieeeee!” — finally read the copy of “No-No Boy,” they were stunned. This was the great American novel they had been searching for. Their correspondence with Tuttle, the book’s publisher, revealed that Okada had been working on a second novel, this one about the experience of the Issei. A few of them arranged to visit Okada’s widow, Dorothy, who had moved into a small apartment in Pasadena, Calif. Okada had died just nine months earlier from a heart attack at the age of 47. The men asked her if she had a draft of her husband’s second book. She said she had written to U.C.L.A., asking if they were interested in her husband’s work about the Nisei. When no response arrived, she burned all his papers. Wong recalled: “We couldn’t believe it. One, we couldn’t believe we put off reading the book. And two, in a fit of grief, she had burned everything. I remember sitting there just looking at her like either I wanted to strangle her or tell her how sorry I was.”

Okada’s biographer, Abe, told me that there was a time when he had searched and then waited, hoping that other great works from the Nisei would emerge. Others have surfaced, but nothing to rival “No-No Boy.” Abe suspects it is the only complete novel to exist from its time. The work of these writers sits in the shadow of other great American literature — a truth underscored by the fact that the country was too intolerant, too apathetic to what happened to them. But it’s also true that Japanese-Americans of Okada’s generation were not interested in reading about themselves. The wounds were too deep, the loss too overwhelming. It’s telling that Okada’s widow burned his papers, that Okada, Yamamoto and Mori all wrote on the side, removed from a larger literary community. Had Okada lived just a decade longer, he might have begun to see the beginnings of his own revival, as Asian-American writers began to become more political, more vocal. Dorothy told Abe that Okada had spoken of creating a multigenerational trilogy, and I wonder if the third, about the Sansei — a generation born during the postwar baby boom — would have captured something different about the Asian-American experience. In Yamamoto’s 2001 preface to the four additional stories that she added to “Seventeen Syllables,” she wrote: “I came to realize that our internment was a trifle compared to the two hundred years or so of enslavement and prejudice that others in this country were heir to.” It is exactly what a Nisei writer would say. But Yamamoto wrote, I suspect, for another reason. Surely she dreamed of literary success, as all writers do. But she also wrote because she understood that if she didn’t, no one else would. We are always bound to repeat ourselves if we don’t try to remember.