There is no safety or community for No-No Boy because Ichiro's character is left perfectly isolated by his experience of internment against his will by the US government. When he returns his social experience is perfectly critical. There are those who view him as a traitor for not fighting in the war, and there are those even among the Japanese community who hate him for various other reasons. The novel is in-between two cultural ways of life, so the character is in no-man's land.
The idea of horror rings through the novel, because the governments of the world are in untold new ages of warfare, and he is asked by the same government who rounded him up during the same years as the Holocaust in Germany, without knowing why it was happening, and now they want to sent him to war, and he doesn't go. So his experience of life is shaped by horror, because his experience of government is horrific.
The question of identity also lurks around every corner, because Ichiro has a biological impulse to belong, to be in community, and to share the thoughts that are plaguing him, but instead, he finds criticism from his friends and family who don't understand him. He eventually finds some companionship in Emi, who doesn't know whether she's allowed to be with him or not, because her husband may still be coming back some day, but not for a long time anyway. The ambivalence of their points of view make them friends.
