My Year of Meats

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. In the end, though, it is a tribute to the power of the imagination. You cannot make a better world unless you can imagine it so, and the first step toward change depends on the imagination’s ability to perform this radical act of faith. I guess I see writing as a similar endeavor.

Parallel to Jane's story is the life of Akiko Ueno, a former manga artist who specialized in horror scenes and is reluctantly married to Joichi "John" Ueno, who works for BEEF-EX. John cares only that Akiko has a baby and forces her to watch My American Wife and cook the recipes, believing that it will allow her to conceive. However, as Akiko's independence and sense of self grows from watching the show and cooking for John, her relationship with John becomes violent.A likeably odd and inventively imagined tale . . . Ozeki writes with the same over-the-top verve as fellow hyper-realist David Foster Wallace.” 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

Akiko is so underweight due to her bulimia, stemming from her dismal marriage to an asshole, that she cannot have children. However, her husband is obsessed with passing on his genes. He also enjoys drinking excessively, ogling strippers, and beating up his wife whom he only sees as an incubator for his future child. All of these characters are embedded in the terrain of America—and the text of the novel—like unique jewels. Each is different, yet none is less captivating than another. And as Jane, much to the chagrin of the Japanese production company, detonates stereotypes by incorporating these quirky, unforgettable characters into My American Wife!, a central theme of the novel begins to crystallize—that of authenticity.

READERS GUIDE

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. My mother had two children myself (a boy) and my sister without any problems, but a third pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. So, for her fourth pregnancy she took DES and thus, my youngest sister is a DES baby. This means that she has the uterine and cervical issues commonly found in DES females and so far she seems to have missed the later-life risks of cancer, but we won’t know until it happens or she dies of old age. 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… Maybe it’s because I’m like Jane, racially halved and “neither here nor there,” but I’ve always been suspicious of binary oppositions—comedy and tragedy, documentary and drama, fact and fiction—so I guess it makes sense that I’d write a transgressive, genre-bending novel. It’s an outgrowth of my independent film work, too. I’ve made two movies, Body of Correspondence and Halving the Bones. The first is a drama with documentary aspirations, and the second is a documentary with fictional lapses. Both rely heavily on montage in their construction, something you can see in My Year of Meats, in the use of faxes, memos, quotations from newspapers, from eighth-century Japanese court diaries.

If you look at any of the widely available summaries, you’ll know that the book concerns a pair of women whose lives interact via a pseudo-documentary-episodic-commercial TV program, My American Wife. Although filmed in the United States, the program is created for and produced by a Japanese advertising agency for broadcast within Japan. Since there is a considerable difference in the two cultures, the book uses the inevitable misunderstandings and opposing sensibilities as one of its strengths. Having experienced both cultures (if ever so briefly during my trips to Japan), I can attest to the “trueness” of these observations. But, don’t rely on me; the author herself is the living embodiment of both cultures. Upon Jane's discharge from the hospital, Jane’s former colleagues reach out to her informing her that they had made copies of her footage of both the horrible conditions at the farm as well as the infected children. Jane makes a documentary from the salvaged footage, which is then circulated by the family of the hormone-poisoned kids. The revelation of the Beef-Ex feedlot operations sparks a great public outcry and Jane’s documentary sells to hundreds of media outlets. Having vindicated herself Jane then reconnects and reconciles with Sloan and together move forward to a brighter future. Update this section! At the end of the novel, Jane says, “I don’t think I can change my future simply by writing a happy ending. That’s too easy and not so interesting. I will certainly do my best to imagine one, but in reality I will just have to wait and see.” For the most part, the characters in My Year of Meats do, in the end, get what they want, what they need, or in the case of John Ueno, what they deserve. Will you elaborate on why you decided to write a happy ending?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 So, she and her team set out on a journey across America to find the perfect participants for the show. Soon enough, Jane's disenchantment with the "beef is best" message of the show brings out her creative streak and instead of pleasing the producer's bigoted expectations of what a typical American family is, she sets out to put a dose of reality into "reality tv".