it seems as if what i'm about to say could be said of all of ozeki's novels, but this is mainly a story of women, and since ozeki is nothing if not a fierce woman writer, she gets into the nitty gritty of femalehood -- sex, the body, mothers, children, wives, blood, guts, food, work, love, resilience, and the bond of honesty that must (imperatively must) link women everywhere -- from the get go, and stays there, right in there, in that space of womanhood that is so often undervalued and dismissed, the whole time, even when the going gets tough and malehood threatens to encroach and take over. Jane’s initiative to highlight families of non-Caucasian, non-heterosexual persuasions as well as to feature dishes containing lamb, pork, and even vegetables angers John Ueno and in retaliation he makes life difficult for Jane. She tries to appease him by taking him out drinking; unfortunately he interprets this a sexual advance and he tries to rape her when she take him to his hotel room after their bar crawl. Fortunately Jane is able to escape his advances.

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 ] Early in the novel, Jane says, “All over the world, native species are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem quaint.” Do you believe that this is true? If so, do you perceive it as a step toward a more peaceful, accepting world, or as a step away from a diverse, well-textured world? Is it possible to maintain cultural diversity without prejudice? My Year of Meats is a novel written by Ruth Ozeki and published in 1998. This is Ozeki’s first novel, and it tells of two women, separated by an ocean and by their respective cultures but connected by a Japanese TV cooking show being filmed in “All-American” households all across the United States. 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."A cross-cultural tale of two women brought together by the intersections of television and industrial agriculture, fertility and motherhood, life and love—the breakout hit by the celebrated author of A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness Jane storyline runs concurrent to that of another Japanese woman, a former horror mangaka, Ueno Akiko. Akiko is unhappily married to Ueno “ John” Joichi, the Japanese director of “ My American Wife!” John is an abusive husband who is obsessed with Akiko conceiving. Thinking that somehow by cooking the recipes featured in the show Akiko would be able to bear children he forces her to watch and evaluate episode after episode of “ My American Wife!” demanding that she have the highlighted viand prepared for him by the time he gets home. In the process of watching the show however, Akiko’s sense of self grows and with it a growing sense of independence, straining the already troubled relationship between her and John. Ozeki takes this novel from sharp-witted and playful to emotional and honest seamlessly. Her writing shines in the descriptions of each of the families Jane profiles, adding layers of richness to the main story.

Jane is a documentary maker who lands a job producing a television series for Japanese housewives called "The American Housewife" sponsored by the US Beef Conglomerate. She travels the country in search of families who exhibit American wholesomeness and values and can also provide a tasty meat recipe. (It's really a great premise.) Across the world, Akiko is a bulimic Japanese housewife, watching and being moved by these shows. Opening each chapter are the words and poetry of a 1st Century female writer Sei Shonagon. Currently Ruth is working on a second novel, and divides her time between New York City and an island off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. But it was not just fear of his anger or even of getting hit. As she watched the sun set on the vast American landscape—“ Beefland!” the logo proclaimed— she realized that her tears had nothing whatsoever to do with John. These were tears of admiration for the strong women so determined to have their family against all odds. And tears of pity for herself, for the trepidation she felt in place of desire and for the pale, wan sentiment that she let pass for love." These themes are played out of the relationships of both Jane and Akiko with their respective struggles with their miscarriages, surprising pregnancies and contrasting attitudes towards sex. John Ueno's frustration and anger towards his wife stems from her inability to bear him children which ultimately stems from his fears of how he will be perceived as a man. He feels greatly pressured to prove his virility as it is considered odd if Akiko did not become pregnant shortly after getting married. Akiko responds to his abuse in a meek, submissive manner as this is what she is expected to do. Jane also experiences marital grief associated with her difficulty in conceiving in her first marriage, eventually resulting in her divorce. In contrast to the subservient Akiko, Jane engages in passionate, casual sex with Sloan. There is also a strong contrast between the two characters when they are finally and unexpectedly able to conceive. The Sloane and Jane's baby actually becomes a catalyst in forging a mature and mutually caring relationship between them, whereas John and Akiko's child comes as a result of a a violent beating and an equally violent rape. The presence of their baby becomes part of the impetus that finally pushes Akiko to leave her abusive husband. Trust and Betrayal The story follows their individual discoveries - Jane of the meat industry and Akiko of herself - until their two journeys have them meet...through meat. It is a beautiful, humanist tale of the many things that connect us as humans and a very fulfilling read.Determined to learn more, Jane visits Dunn & Son, Custom Cattle Feeders, where she meets the family: Bunny, a former stripper and rodeo queen; her elderly husband, John, who proposed to Bunny during a lap dance; Gale, his “pale, flaccid” son from a previous marriage; and John and Bunny’s five-year-old daughter, Rose.

As the story progresses, Jane manages to turn the show into a work of investigative journalism rather than light entertainment and discovers some aspects of the meat industry that she feels need to be made public - and if this happens in a program paid for by the meat industry even better! So my initial impulse was purely anecdotal; the novel’s primary theme, that we live in a world where culture is commerce and where global miscommunication is mediated by commercial television, grew from the very specific escapades of the narrator, Jane. The meat was metaphorical, a gag, if you will. As Jane and her crew embarked on a road trip to make a cooking show featuring rural American housewives (I’d done a similar kind of show myself and found it rich in narrative episode), meat took on a variety of metaphorical resonance: I was thinking of women as cows; wives as chattel (a word related to cattle); and the body as meat, fleshy, sexual, the irreducible element of human identity. I was thinking, too, of television as a meat market, and Jane as a cultural pimp, pandering the physical image of American housewives to satisfy the appetites of the Japanese TV consumers. And thus Beef-Ex was born as the sponsor of Jane’s TV show. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.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." Gatens, M. (2013). Imaginary bodies: Ethics, power and corporeality. London and New York: Routledge. I really enjoyed My Year of Meats. When a book sets out to be challenging but still remains a form of intelligent discourse, full of colourful wit and empathy, what's not to like? And when the book does all of this without trying to manipulate an opinion or drawing at your hear strings to evoke a response - yes, looking at you here J.S. Froer - perfect! Jane sees herself as a "documentarian" and her aspiration is, on one hand, to record the times she lives in like the Japanese writer Shōnagon, and on the other to inspire someone by the results of her work. Another family that Jane meets at the annual hog festival in Askew, Louisiana, and another one of her more successful attempts at featuring non-traditional families, Vern is a chef and Grace is a mother of twelve kid--ten of the twelve are Korean children that they’ve adopted. Joichi particularly resents Jane for featuring the Beaudrouxs as it is the husband that does the cooking rather than the wife. Christina Bukowsky

About halfway through the book, Takagi-Little discovers the effects of diethylstilbestrol (DES), a plant-based hormone administered to farm animals and, previously, pregnant women. The effects of DES on pregnant women are detrimental to their children, who can suffer from deformities at birth and cancer. Takagi-Little’s mother was administered DES during her pregnancy, resulting in Takagi-Little’s uterus being deformed and described as being in the shape of a bull. This connection between Takagi-Little’s pregnancy and nonhuman animals is not the first, as she notices the parallels between slaughtered cows, their aborted fetuses, and her own child’s ultimate fate. Chapter 2 begins with this quote from The Pillow Book: “ When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands, women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe they are happy, I am filled with scorn.” Akiko and Jane, as well as the women featured on My American Wife!, reflect the different roles women play both in Japan and within America. Of all of the women featured in the novel, with whom did you most identify? Were there any that you upheld as models for what women should aspire to be? Khan, G. A. (2012). Vital materiality and non-human agency: An interview with Jane Bennett. In G. Browning, R. Prokhovnik, & M. Dimova-Cookson (Eds.), Dialogues with contemporary political theorists (pp. 42–57). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). https://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/. Accessed 1 Nov 2019Then, 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.