My Year of Meats

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Ruth Ozeki’s first novel is quirky and intriguing. Like her
protagonist, Ozeki is a documentary filmmaker. In this novel, she
explores a number of issues. Primary among these is the ongoing
contamination of the meat supply by an industry that cares nothing for
health and everything for profit. The generous use of antibiotics,
hormones, and other drugs on the animals destined for market is meant to
compensate for the cruel and careless treatment of them en route to the
slaughterhouse.

Ozeki’s protagonist, Jane Takagi-Little, is a Japanese-American
filmmaker in search of a job. She finds one with a Japanese advertising
firm that plans to shoot 52 episodes of a series to be called My
American Wife. Each episode will feature a “wholesome” and
attractive American housewife cooking a “delicious” supper that
features meat. The American sponsor, BEEF-EX, wants to sell American
meat to the Japanese; to Americans, nourishing food means “meat.”

The Japanese man in charge of the project is married to Akiko Ueno, a
lonely, childless young woman whose anxieties have stopped her body from
menstruating. Akiko is reading Sei Shohnagon’s The Pillow Book and is
fascinated by the insights into human life and society that she finds in
this thousand-year-old diary. Ozeki cleverly links passages from The
Pillow Book to characters and events in her novel. Gradually, the lives
of Jane and Akiko begin to converge, with surprising results.

My Year of Meats is a satire on human nature and a biting attack on the
dangerous and unprincipled methods of the meat-packing industry. It is
also a love story of sorts. Astringent, funny, and dynamic, this
page-turner makes Ruth Ozeki a popular novelist to watch.