I actually finished My Year of Meats, by Ruth L. Ozeki, before Christmas, but it’s taken me this long to write an entry about it. One of my ENGL 204 students lent me her copy of the book (which I had never heard of before) after we read “No Name Woman” and some other Asian-American texts.
My Year of Meats is a strange book (if the title doesn’t already give it away), but I enjoyed it. It’s a kind of hybrid book—a funny, entertaining, cross-cultural novel that’s also an expose on the advertising and meat industries. The plot is pretty simple (at first): Jane Takagi-Little, whose mother is Japanese and father is white, is a film-maker who lands a job making a TV show called My American Wife!, a show sponsored by the American meat industry that will be broadcast in Japan so that more Japanese wives will buy American meat. Here’s how the company pitches the show:
“Meat is the Message. Each weekly half-hour episode of My American Wife! must culminate in the celebration of a featured meat, climaxing in its glorious consumption. It’s the meat (not the Mrs.) who’s the star of our show! Of course, the “Wife of the Week” is important too. She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest. Through her, Japanese housewives will feel the hearty sense of warmth, of comfort, of hearth and home—the traditional family values symbolized by red meat in rural America” (8).
This hilarious passage sets up most of the themes the novel will touch on: how America is defined, both here and overseas, what it means to be the “all-American” family, and the great distance between our ideals and reality.
Jane, the narrator (well, technically, she only narrates half the book—see below), is an interesting character, one who is transformed by what she sees as she travels the country looking for different Wives of the Week. (Imagine this: one episode focuses on an interracial, lesbian, vegetarian couple and their two kids. How do you think that went over with the executives at the meat company?)
Jane’s take on racial identity is also key: “Back in the olden days,” she explains, “my dad’s ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom’s on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world” (15). That’s a very positive take on our shrinking world.
The other key character in the book—and my favorite character—is Akiko Ueno, an unhappy Japanese housewife who dutifully watches Jane’s programs and cooks the weekly recipes for her husband. As I read through the sections that Jane narrated, I found myself speeding through them a bit, eager to get back to the sections narrated by a third person narrator, the sections about Akiko. I won’t say too much more about Akiko or the plot, in case any one wants to read it.
But I will say that this book also introduced me to a historical/literary figure I hadn’t heard of before: Sei Shonagon, who wrote The Pillow Book around 1000 A.D. (Basically a collection of musings, lists, and observations, a pillow book sounds a lot like a blog or a journal.) The Pillow Book appears in excerpts throughout My Year of Meats. Here’s one example: the heading is “Pleasing Things” and below it is written, “Someone has torn up a letter and thrown it away. Picking up the pieces, one finds that many of them can be fitted together” (5). Here’s another: “Shameful things: A thief has crept into a house and is now hiding in some well-chosen nook where he can secretly observe what is going on. Someone else comes into the dark room and, taking an object that lies there, slips it into his sleeve. It must be amusing for the thief to see a person who shares his own nature” (31). I am stopping myself here, as I could go on quoting, but needless to say, I’ve put The Pillow Book on my Amazon wish-list. Think about how useful it could be for teaching writing: you give students a topic “Hateful Things,” for instance, and have them write their own descriptive sketches to include. Or do the opposite—take the descriptions and then give them labels.
Anyway, My Year of Meats is a good book—not one of my favorites, but I enjoyed it and you might, too.
