My Year of Meats

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At first glance, a novel that promises to expose the unethical practices of the American meat industry may not be at the top of your reading list, but Ruth Ozeki's debut, My Year of Meats is well worth a second look. Like the author, the novel's protagonist, Jane Takagi-Little, is a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker; like Ozeki, who was once commissioned by a beef lobbying group to make television shows for the Japanese market, Jane is invited to work on a Japanese television show meant to encourage beef consumption via the not-so-subliminal suggestion that prime rib equals a perfect family: TO: AMERICAN RESEARCH STAFF
FROM: Tokyo Office
DATE: January 5, 1991
RE: My American Wife!...

Here is list of IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife!

DESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality
2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Pork and other meats is second class meats, so please remember this easy motto: "Pork is Possible, but Beef is Best!")
3. Attractive, docile husband
4. Attractive, obedient children
5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle
6. Attractive, clean house...

UNDESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Physical imperfections
2. Obesity
3. Squalor
4. Second class peoples

FROM OUR EDITORS

Rarely does one encounter a first novel so unique that it is impossible to compare it with other works or voices. But this is exactly the case with Ruth Ozeki's assured debut, My Year of Meats. Like the author, a half-Japanese former filmmaker, the novel reflects a melange of contrasting influences and multiple points of view. The result is a book that is both cinematic and diaristic, a book whose compelling fiction rests upon unsavory, often horrifying facts. My Year of Meats may just represent a new hybrid in the literary landscape -- documentary fiction, or docufiction, if you will.

My Year of Meats chronicles a year in the life of Jane Takagi-Little, a struggling New York City-based documentary filmmaker who is hired to produce a Japanese television show, My American Wife!, sponsored by a lobby group of the U.S. meat industry. The show requires Jane to travel to the American Midwest to interview "representative American" women about their favorite beef recipes, interviews that are later broadcast to an audience of Japanese housewives. But it soon becomes apparent that Jane's ideas for the show differ wildly from those of the Japanese executives producing it. Unlike the list of "Desirable Things" that the executives tell Jane to look for in her subjects ("1. Attractiveness....2. Wholesomeness...3. Exciting hobbies....4. Obedient children.....5. Docile husband"), Jane prefers to focus on the individuals she finds most compelling: a pair of vegetarian lesbians, for example, and a family of impoverished gospel singers.

Jane's inadvertent subversiveness, while incurring the wrath of her bosses, also touches the hearts of the housewives back in Japan who watch her show religiously. One of My American Wife!'s most faithful viewers is Akiko Ueno, the long-suffering wife of John Ueno, the show's head advertising executive and Jane's boss. At first, John forces Akiko to watch the show and perform the functions of a mini-focus group, filling out a questionnaire after each episode that rates categories such as "Educational Value, Authenticity, Deliciousness of Meat and Wholesomeness." But Akiko, who is bulimic, begins to look forward to the program for the glimpse it gives her of lives so radically different from her own. Jane's feminist viewpoint gradually seeps in, and Akiko begins to dream of dismantling the power structures of her marriage.

But power structures, whether marriages or industries as powerful as the beef industry, are notoriously resistant to change. Jane's bosses threaten to fire her from the project for her attraction to "unwholesome subjects." John's abusiveness toward Akiko for what he feels is her willful infertility becomes increasingly violent. During filming, Jane, who had believed herself infertile due to her mother's use of DES (diethylstilbestrol -- man-made estrogen) during pregnancy, also discovers she is pregnant. DES, she soon learns, is the same growth hormone used to enhance the beef she is being paid to promote. While the plot thickens on several fronts, a desperate Akiko reaches out to Jane after a particularly severe beating by John. In her letter she pleads for what she believes is the key to a happy life.

Dear Miss Takagi-Little,

You do not know me because I am only the wife of Ueno of BEEF-EX so I regret to bothering you at all. But I feel compelled to writing for the reason of your program of the Lesbian's couple with two childrens was very emotional for me. So thank you firstly for change my life. Because of this program, I feel I can trust to you so that I can be so bold.

You see, Ueno and I wanted to have the child at first but because of my bad habits of eating and throw up my food I could not have monthly bleeding for many years. But now I can have it again thanks to eating delicious Hallelujah Lamb's recipe from your program of My American Wife! so secondly thank you for that also.

But I am most wanting to say that I listen to the black lady say she never want man in her life, and all of a sudden I agree! I am so surprising that I cry! (I do not know if I am Lesbian since I cannot imagine this condition, but I know I never want marriage and with my deep heart I am not "John's" wife.)

I feel such a sadness for my lying life. So I now wish to ask you where can I go to live my happy life like her? Please tell me this.

Sincerely yours,

Akiko Ueno

As it turns out, Akiko is soon well on her way to defining her own happiness. In the hospital after the beating, she befriends one of the nurses, Tomoko, who offers her a place to stay. While at Tomoko's, Akiko begins to plan her escape to America. Jane, meanwhile, has miscarried due to an accident at a slaughterhouse, but has shot damning footage of the meat industry's corrupt practices, a videotape that will secure her future for a long while to come. Thankfully, Ozeki doesn't opt for the entirely happy ending. Although the meat industry ultimately gets its comeuppance (in the book's final chapters, Jane exposes the literal -- and emotional -- toxicity in one cattle ranchers' home), Ozeki never lets us forget how the beef industry's greed has scarred Jane and Akiko -- and countless others -- forever.

Throughout the novel, hard-nosed documentarian research provides the underpinnings for a compelling, inevitable story. Combining the personal, the fictional, and the political, My Year of Meats is an intoxicating hybrid and an explosive and courageous debut.

—Sarah Midori Zimmerman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jane Takagi-Little, by trade a documentary filmmaker, by nature a truth seeker, is "racially half," Japanese and American, and, as she tells us, "neither here nor there..." Jane is sharp-edged, desperate for a job, and determined not to fall in love again. Akiko Ueno, a young Japanese housewife, lives with her husband in a bleak high-rise apartment complex in a suburb of Tokyo. Akiko is so thin her bones hurt, and her husband, an ad agency salaryman who wants her to get pregnant, is insisting that she put some meat on them - literally. Ruth L. Ozeki's novel opens with two women on opposite sides of the globe, whose lives cannot be further apart. But when Jane gets a job, coordinating a television series whose mission is to bring the American heartland, and American meat, into the homes of Japan, she makes some wrenching discoveries - about love, meat, honor, and a hormone called DES. When Jane and Akiko's lives converge, what is revealed taps the deepest concerns of our time - how the past informs the present and how we live and love in this "blessed, ever-shrinking world."

FROM THE CRITICS

Nina Mehta

This first novel, written by a young documentary filmmaker, describes the production of a year-long series about red meat broadcast on Japanese network television and sponsored by BEEF-EX, a U.S. lobby group looking for new markets for American meats. Robust, funny and insistently educational in tone, My Year of Meats deals with the cross-pollination of people and values, toxicity in meat, synthetic estrogens, camera angles and the ever-pertinent issue of perspective and reliability in the media. The only problem is that Ozeki's novel sometimes feels as much like a Lifetime movie as a complex, hard-hitting exposé.

Jane Takagi-Little, the tall daughter of a Midwestern father and Japanese mother, is hired to help produce weekly installments for a show called "My American Wife." Each episode will offer a tightly wrapped cameo of a traditional American family, promote "authentic" values, scroll through a recipe and culminate in the attractive presentation of a meal of red meat by the week's chosen wife. Despite the infomercial aspect to the series, Jane sees this as documentary work; she believes individual episodes can be used to undermine pat notions about what it means to be American. As she learns more about meat production, feedlots and the harmful use of artificial growth stimulants in cattle, the camera also becomes a means of countering ignorance and unchecked consumerism.

When a mishap puts one of the visiting Japanese directors out of commission, Jane is given command. In a heartbeat, she's off making episodes about people the conservative network considers less than "wholesome": a Mexican couple, a Louisiana family with a dozen adopted children (many shipped over from Korea), a vegetarian and biracial lesbian couple who cook pasta primavera. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a woman named Akiko prepares the recipes (including "beef fudge") and rates the episodes, as instructed, for her husband, the chief drone at the ad agency representing BEEF-EX. She's physically abused and mocked by her husband and has become bulimic, perhaps to avoid pregnancy through malnourishment. The purpose and often conflicting aims of making a documentary are highlighted by how Jane and Akiko ultimately view the series: For Jane the shows are about transcending demographic divisions and going public with difficult information, while for the book's Japanese protagonist the shows offer a glimpse of some otherworldly realm where relations between people can actually be loving and pleasant.

My Year of Meats is compelling reading but aggressively stage-managed; ultimately, it's too subservient to the author's didactic zeal. By the end of the novel everything has come full circle, a dollop of self-consciousness is parceled out to all (or most) of the characters, Japan is minus one citizen and everyone knows more about hormones and the horrific practices going on in some feedlots. What's unfortunate here is that Ozeki's compassion for her characters causes her to pursue her list of causes so forcefully that readers are liable to feel manipulated. It doesn't help that doctors and other experts are paraded through the novel to provide whatever information is deemed necessary at the moment. There are large and generous ambitions in this novel, but in fiction as in documentaries, all is not always well that ends well. -- Salon

Lise Funderberg - The New York Times Book Review

. . .[T]he novel's characters. . .contend with infertility, infidelity and domestic violence. Often these concerns are seamlessly incorporated into the plot, at other times, Ozeka (herself a documentary filmmaker) allows her fiction to be overshadowed by her message.

Entertainment Weekly

Juicy...

Library Journal

As a writer, Ozeki draws upon her knowledge in documentary filmmaking cleverly to bring the worlds of two women together by utilizing the U.S. meat industry as a central link. Alternating between the voices of Jane (in the United States) and Akiko Ueno, the wife of Jane's boss (in Japan), Ozeki draws parallels in the lives of these two women through beef, love, television, and their desire to have children. Ozeki skillfully tackles hard-pressing issues such as the use and effects of hormones in the beef industry and topics such as cultural differences, gender roles, and sexual exploitation. Her work is unique in presentation yet moving and entertaining. Highly recommended for general fiction collections.
--Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Stanton, CA

Library Journal

As a writer, Ozeki draws upon her knowledge in documentary filmmaking cleverly to bring the worlds of two women together by utilizing the U.S. meat industry as a central link. Alternating between the voices of Jane (in the United States) and Akiko Ueno, the wife of Jane's boss (in Japan), Ozeki draws parallels in the lives of these two women through beef, love, television, and their desire to have children. Ozeki skillfully tackles hard-pressing issues such as the use and effects of hormones in the beef industry and topics such as cultural differences, gender roles, and sexual exploitation. Her work is unique in presentation yet moving and entertaining. Highly recommended for general fiction collections.
--Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Stanton, CARead all 7 "From The Critics" >

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