Through split narratives, we meet Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese American documentarian, and Akiko Ueno, a Japanese housewife. Jane is hired by Akiko's husband and his business (Beef-Ex) to direct and produce reality / cooking shows about American meats for a Japanese audience. The story of meat (beef) production which also threads through the book is also real. One doesn’t have to accept this from a fictional work. The facts have been reported news multiple times as concerns about “Mad Cow Disease”, the early onset of puberty (via sex hormone exposure), and the effects of growth hormone on children periodically come to the surface of the 24-hour news cycle. Time for a spoiler or two… Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). https://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/. Accessed 1 Nov 2019

Ruth Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, by an American father and a Japanese mother, both of whom taught at Yale University. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College with degrees in English Literature and Asian Studies, received a Japanese Ministry of Education fellowship, and emigrated to Japan to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara Women’s University. She worked at Kyoto Sangyo University, and in 1985, she returned to the States and gave up teaching for a short, but distinguished career as production designer for low-budget horror movies. By 1987, she switched genres to Japanese television.In the early-morning hours, wrapped in a blanket and huddled over her computer keyboard, Jane writes a pitch for the new program: “Meat is the Message. . . .It’s the meat (not the Mrs.) who’s the star of our show! She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest.” And so Jane, a self-described polyracial prototype, embarks on her year of meats, zigzagging across the country in search of healthy American wives. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm." John’s “pale, flaccid” son from a previous marriage. He isn't too fond of the boy and speaks disparagingly about him. Rose Lara and Dyann are a lesbian couple living with their children in Massachusetts; ironically, the pair also happens to be vegetarians--making them the most incongruous contenders for concept of “My American Wife!” Featuring the couple however produces to be the most authentic, most heartfelt, episode that Jane had produced. It is the warmth and authenticity of their relationship inspires Akiko to leave Joichi and seek out her own happiness. Bunny

Ruth Ozeki masks a deeper purpose with a light tone . . . A comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical novel.” The effects of DES and hormonal drugs go further than pregnant women. Despite being illegal in the use of meat production, they are still popular among factory farmers. Cheap meat is often riddled with these hormones, and those in poverty who can afford nothing else suffer the consequences, such as heightened levels of estrogen and expedited puberty. These effects can be seen in some minority families Takagi-Little features on My American Wife! The juxtaposition of first-person and third-person narrative voices is another transgression of sorts. As a former documentary filmmaker, this question of voice and point of view is interesting on several levels, not the least of which is the effect of extreme subjectivity on notions of absolute or objective truth. Of course, this is a topic that Jane discusses quite overtly in the novel, and that forms its thematic underpinnings. some people on here found the book preachy. i can't for the life of me see any preachiness in it, but at the same time i do see, somehow, how one might feel preached at by it. eh. if you feel preached at just drop this book and read something else. ruth ozeki won't mind. she didn't write the book for you. I was not fully aware of the “issues” or “causes” until the first marketing meeting for the book, so no, I was not concerned that it would become a “novel of causes.” My characters live in their world, a universe, parallel to ours, where serious “issues” may constitute the meat and the gristle of their lives, but they do not identify their problems as “causes,” and neither did I.

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When Jane Takagi-Little, an unemployed Japanese-American documentary filmmaker, answers the phone at two in the morning, her life is forever altered. She accepts a job working on My American Wife!, a Japanese television show sponsored by an American national lobby organization that represents American meats of all kinds—beef, pork, lamb, goat, and horse, just to name a few.

Many years ago, my parents had a property (Australian for "farm") in the Wyong Valley north of Sydney, where they bred and raised beef cattle on pasture. It was a beautiful place, worlds away from the stinking feedlots so vividly depicted in Ruth Ozeki's novel. Even though, of course, the end place--someone's table--is the same. My mother read My Year Of Meat while she lived and worked on this property, and then she passed it on to me, saying that she found it "interesting." Soon after that, my parents sold up and retired. In her impressive debut novel My Year of Meats, Ozeki follows American factory farming shortcuts and deregulation to their international - and individual - implications. So far, I’ve mentioned everything from the discovery of one’s sexuality to cross-cultural disconnect. What connects all of these concepts in My Year of Meats?Takagi-Little and Ueno’s parallel pregnancies and previous struggle with infertility. All of the issues discussed in the novel culminate in the protagonists’ experiences with reproduction, which in turn connects with nonhuman animals’ experience with it.My Year of Meats is the 1998 debut novel by Ruth Ozeki. The book takes advantage of the differences between Japanese and American culture to comment on both. [1] Overview [ edit ]

Murasaki may not have liked her much, but I admire Shōnagon, listmaker and leaver of presumptuous scatterings. She inspired me to become a documentarian, to speak men’s Japanese, to be different. She is why I chose to make TV. I wanted to think that some girl would watch my shows in Japan, now or maybe even a thousand years from now, and be inspired and learn something real about America. Like I did." Jane is my extroverted self and our exterior identities and experiences of the world have much in common. But Akiko is my little introvert. I suspect I was more like her when I was younger and less able to recognize or harness my strength, and often turned it against myself as a result. How does this novel treat the question of cultural, ethnic, and gender stereotypes? Did it challenge any of your own perceptions or biases? Consider, too, how the media perpetuates and/or dismantles stereotypes.Then, out of nowhere, the book becomes a poor man's The Jungle, only with more jerks. The character Dave appears completely from thin air, and his entire purpose is to spout paragraph upon paragraph of stuff that seems lifted from "Food, Inc". It's very much like how The Jungle devolves entirely into a socialist manifesto by the end, only a lot less interesting. To avoid government oversight regarding what hormones cattle can be treated with, an American beef manufacturer begins selling their product in Japan, where no such regulation is in place. As a culture strongly influenced by Buddhism, however, the Japanese diet contains comparatively little meat. To boost sales, the beef manufacturer develops a reality TV show called My American Wife. Each week, Japanese audiences are introduced to a new American family, with the wife demonstrating how to cook a meat-laden dish. In My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki does not presume to have the answer to this question, nor does she attempt to shepherd readers through the rough terrain of love and happiness at the cusp of the millennium. Rather, she invites them to revel in the fumbling, imperfect—yet endearing—qualities of human nature. Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.