My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki (1999)
characters:
Jane Takagi-Little – unemployed Japanese-American documentary filmmaker
Akiko Ueno – bulimic Japanese wife of My American Wife executive
Alberto Martinez – emigrated to Texas so son could be American
Catalina Martinez – “
Vern Beaudrox – Jane meets at Askew, Louisiana pig festival. adopt 10 Asian American kids
Grace Beaudrox – Vren’s wife
Miss Helen Dawes – chicken
Christina Bukowsky – legs crushed by a container truck
Lara – Massachusetts vegetarian lesbian
Dyann – Lara’s partner
Sloan – saxophonist, Jane’s lover
John Dunn – Dunn & Son, Custom Cattle Feeders, proposed to Bunny during lapdance
Bunny Dunn – former stripper and rodeo queen
Gale Dunn – John’s pale, flaccid son from a previous marriage
Rose Dunn – John and Bunny’s 5 yr-old daughter, has developed breasts
setting:
plot:
Epigraphs
Description of the inception of the pillow book, which begins when Lord Korechika, Monister of the Centre, brings the Empress a bundle of notebooks and the speaker asks to make a pillow. “As will be gathered from these notes of mine, I am the sort of person who approves what others abhor and detests the things they like” (Sei Shonogan, The Pillow Book, c. 1000 AD)
Excerpt from the account of the origin of white race: “It is thought that ages ago there lived somewhere in central Asia a race of white people, now known as Aryans. As the race increased in size lrge bands roamed about in search of new homes, where they could find pastures for their cattle” (Frye's Grammar School Geography, 1985-1902).
Prologue
characters:
Takagi
Suzie Flowers (Mrs. Flowers)
Fred Flowers (Mr. Flowers)
Mr. Oda – director
Suzuki-san - cameraman
setting:
Flowers' living room
plot:
Takagi translates for Mr. Oda as he shoots a kiss scene on a Walmart rug in front of an electric yule log in the Flowers' living room. Mr. Oda and cameraman Suzuki-san complain about Suzie's appearance and Tagaki tactfully translates into a request that Suzie close her eyes or an inquiry about whether she has any foundation. The kiss misfires the first time, the couple clanging teeth, and ask the crew prepares for a second take Tagaki explains to a frustrated Fred Flowers that although this is the ending scene, they are shooting it first because you sometimes have to do that.
1. The Sprouting Month
SHONAGON
Pleasing Things
Someone has torn up a letter and thrown it away Picking up the pieces, one finds that many of them can be fitted together.
characters:
Jane Takagi – documentary filmaker
Kato – Takagi's old boss at a film production company in Tokoyo
setting:
Jane Takagi's East Village Appartment in NYC
January 1991
President Bush has just launched Desert Storm
plot:
JANE
Jane Takagi is unemployed and trying to get to sleep at 2AM in a cold apartment when she hears her former employer Kato's voice on her answering machine. After hanging up, she writes the pitch for My American Wife: “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 the 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). She faxes the pitch to Tokoyo and goes back to bed.
Jane Takagi-Little is the daughter of a Japanese mother and white father from Quam, Minnesota. Her mixed race is an asset to her in the job Kato offers her as coordinator for My American Wife. “Although my heart was set on being a documentarian, it seems I was more useful as a go-between, a cultural pimp, selling off the vast illustion of America to a cramped population on that small string of Pacific islands (9). My American Wife is funded by the Beef Export and Trade Syndicate (BEEF-EX), the national lobby for “American meats of all kinds – beef, pork, lamb, goat, horse – as well as livestock producers, packers, purveyors, exporters, grain promoters, pharmaceutical companies, and agribusiness groups” (10). During her work with My American Wife, Jane Takagi travels to each of the United states. In a VFW hall in Bald Knob, Kansas, a man asks where Jane is from and is repeatedly unsatisfied with her answers - “No, no . . . What are you?” He whined with frustration” (11).
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MEMO to American Research Staff from Tokyo Office Jan 5, 1991
List of “IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife” includes a lists of desirable and undesirable qualities:
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
7. Attractive friends and neighbord
8. Exciting hobbies
UNDESIRABLE THINGS
1. Physical imperfections
2. Obesity
3. Squalor
4. Second class peoples
*** MOST IMPORTANT THING IS VALUES, WHICH MUST BE ALL-AMERICAN
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MEMO to research staff from Jane Takagi-Little, Jan 6
Some of the American staff had been offended by the memo from Tokyo, and Jane sends out an email clarifying some points. About American husbands, Jane writes that Japanese women often feel neglected by their husbands and see American men as characterized by “kindness, generosity and sweetness” (13). BEEF-EX wants to associate these qualities with meat eating, creating “a new truism: The wife who serves meat has a kinder, gentler mate” (13). About the reference to “second class peoples” Jane says that, according to market studies, Japanese housewives find “a middle-to-upper-middle-class white American woman with two to three children to be both sufficiently exotic and yet reassuringly familiar” (13). About all-American values, Jane notes that My American Wife! should be a role model like she was for Japanese wives after WWII. “In recent years, due to Japan's 'economic miracle,' the Japanese housewife is more accustomed to these amenities even than her American counterpart. The Agency thinks we must replace this emphasis on old-fashioned consumerism with contemporary wholesome values, represented not by gadgets for the wife's sole convenience but by good, nourishing food for her entire family. And that means meat” (13).
(JANE)
Jane notes that eating meat is a relatively new custom in Japan, and would have been looked down on in the Heian Court (when Sei Shonagon was writing). Shonagon is Jane's inspiration for becoming a documentarian. Reflecting on what she's learned from her experience with My American Wife! Jane notes that cows and tumbleweed are both late comers to America - “All over the world, native species are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the ideal of an indigenous person or plant will just seem quaint” (15). She sees her own mixed racial identity as “evidence that race, too, will become relic” (15).