What do you call a book that brings together a recipe for Coca Cola Roast, the elegant observations of ancient Japanese writer Shonagon, the scripts for numerous documentaries and a very convincing argument for vegetarianism? Oh, and a love story. And an anti-love story. I think that’s about it.
You’d call it pretty strange, actually.
Laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, Ruth L Ozeki’s My Year of Meats has all of these things and more. It is one of those novels which jams together a variety of disparate elements to become so much more than the sum of its parts.
It tells the story of Jane Tagaki-Little, a Japanese American documentary-maker who, for desperate financial reasons, takes a job making a weekly program for Japanese television. Called ‘My American Wife’, it is sponsored by BEEF-EX and aims to make hearty meat-eaters out of its Japanese viewers. Jane’s role is roam around the country finding sturdy American women willing to serve their lives, as well as their favourite recipes, up on a platter (food analogies are very strong in this novel). And we all know how much Americans love to do that.
Along the way, Jane and her camera crew learn several lessons. Among them: not everyone benefits from becoming a TV star; TV shows don’t always tell the truth; and, most persuasively, eating meat can be very, very bad for your health.
The headstrong Jane is very much the anti-type of the quiet and docile Asian female caricature. She is physically very tall, has grown up as an American girl and appears to have rejected her mother’s Japanese heritage in toto. But her job on ‘My American Wife’ slams her head on into Japanese culture, and her struggle to work around its limitations only leads her to see more and more inadequacies in the American culture she has adopted as her own.
There are so many threads and sub-texts in My Year of Meats that it is very hard to sum the novel up in a few paragraphs without making it seem a bit of a grab bag. The story deals with cultural boundaries, growth hormones, sterility, cancer, television, motherhood, love, animal cruelty, truth and relationships. The list goes on, and yet none of them are token topics - all of them are woven carefully and subtly into the story so that the end, when it comes, leaves you with the sense of satisfaction and completion that comes after a good meal. (There are those food analogies again.)
While Jane is scurrying around America, trying to outwit her Japanese producers, we are given a parallel story concerning one of those producer’s wives. Akiko is anorexic, married to an absolute monster (regardless of cultural perspectives) and desperate to conceive a child. Of course she can’t, as she has long since stopped having periods, so her producer-husband forces her to watch ‘My American Wife’ each week and make the featured recipe.
Slowly, while the food starts to bring her body back to health, her mind is similarly nurtured and enlarged, until she must decide whether to act on her desires (like an American woman) or subsume them to her husband’s will (as a proper Japanese girl would do).
American culture - especially the meat industry - comes in for a good beating (I put down the book determined to never eat meat again, a decision which lasted, oh, a solid three hours), but it is set up as still clearly better than life in Japan. Values such as truth, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, however cynical we may be about them, are perhaps still more achievable today in the US than in Japan. The pitiful non-life of the salaryman and the abominable treatment of women in Japan were issues I had never before taken in. It is instructive for anyone interested in understanding the world to look into it.
One other major theme in the novel that will interest Christians is the treatment of animals by the meat industry. Even the hardest heart would have to be moved by common practices such as keeping young calves in boxes where they never learn to walk, feeding cattle plastic, cement dust and manure to save money, and pumping chemicals into cows so that they abort almost at full-term.
For those who care so little for our stewardship of the earth that they can live with these practices, there’s always the dangers to human beings. How about cows given so many antibiotics that a mouthful of veal can induce anaphylactic shock in sensitive humans? Or growth hormones that can give breasts and pubic hair to a five year old girl? Or boy?
These and other matters are not presented as abstract problems to be mulled over quietly, but as real events in the lives of the characters. Without losing her wry humour and light touch, Ozeki forces us to face some of the compromises we make every day - in fact every time we eat an animal.
My Year of Meats may not make you a vegetarian, but it will make you want to find out a bit more about where your meat comes from and what happened to it on the way to your table.
