My Year of Meats Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. - The Sprouting Month

  Chapter 2. - The Clothes-Lining Month

  Chapter 3. - The Ever-Growing Month

  Chapter 4. - The Deutzia Month

  Chapter 5. - The Rice-Sprouting Month

  Chapter 6. - The Water Month

  Chapter 7. - The Poem-Composing Month

  Chapter 8. - The Leaf Month

  Chapter 9. - The Long Month

  Chapter 10. - The Gods-Absent Month

  Chapter 11. - The Frost Month

  Chapter 12. - The End of the Year

  Epilogue:

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  AN INTRODUCTION TO MY YEAR OF MEATS

  A CONVERSATION WITH RUTH OZEKI

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  Praise for Ruth Ozeki and My Year of Meats

  “This is a very cool book, satirical but never mean, funny, peopled by

  fully inhabited characters who are both blind and self-aware. Ruth

  Ozeki’s My Year of Meats reassures us that media and culture, though

  bound inextricably, will never become one.”

  —John Sayles, former member, Amalgamated Meat

  Packers and Butcher Workers of North America, and

  director of Matewan and Men with Guns

  “Romance, agri-business, self-discovery, cross-cultural misunderstanding—

  it takes a talent like Ruth Ozeki’s to blend all these ingredients beautifully

  together. My Year of Meats is a sensitive and compelling portrait of

  two modern women.”

  —Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

  “Ozeki offers a remarkably fresh view of the rocky road many women

  travel to love and motherhood... one of the heartiest and, yes, meatiest

  debuts in years.”

  —Glamour

  “[An] amazingly assured debut novel... My Year of Meats is a wonderfully

  irreverent novel, with wacky cross-cultural collisions and hilarious

  characters... a joy to read.”

  —Elle

  “My Year of Meats is canny, cunning, muckraking, and lusty, weaving

  hormones and corporate threats, fertility and independence.”

  —The Village Voice

  “A likeably odd and inventively imagined tale... Ozeki writes with the

  same over-the-top verve as fellow hyper-realist David Foster Wallace.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Prepare yourself for a wild ride... a deftly written, witty, sometimes

  infuriating but always entertaining cross-cultural tale.”

  —San Antonio Express News

  “Ozeki has in her first novel created a story that is by turns funny,

  wrenching, and ultimately emotionally healing.... My Year of Meats is

  an open-handed gift, a nervy kick in the pants, a warm embrace from a

  stranger who somehow knows you very well indeed.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  “[A]n extremely readable and entertaining book... it is, in the end, a

  book that extends the possibilities of what an American novel can do.”

  —In These Times

  “Smart, sensitive, slick and sizzling, My Year of Meats possesses an

  edgy hipness informed by maturing convictions, and Ozeki’s recipe

  simmers equal parts attitude and talent.”

  —Bookpage

  “In her hilarious debut novel, My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki combines

  provocative subject matter with an irreverent humor that packs a powerful

  punch.”

  —Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program

  “This is probably one of the most direct and intelligent novels I’ve yet

  read about the divided cultural experience in America.... What I like

  best about My Year of Meats is its brave spirit of intrepid adventuring.

  Ozeki’s voice will not be muted or distracted from its true course. Anyone

  willing to face facts about what they consume—physically or visually—

  should read this book.”

  —Portland Oregonian

  “A book this stingingly funny doesn’t come along very often.”

  —Bellingbam Herald

  “This book is compassionate, sometimes funny, ethnically sensitive

  and unusual.”

  —St. Paul Pioneer Press

  “My Year of Meats is funny enough, more brave than funny, and certainly

  like nothing I have ever read before.... Ozeki’s prose has a terrific

  narrative drive. Expectedly masterful is the author’s presentation

  of TV production atmosphere. The novel’s crusading hearbeat should

  captivate many a reader.”

  —Ft. Worth Star Telegram

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MY YEAR OF MEATS

  Ruth L. Ozeki has worked in television and film for the last thirteen years. Her documentary and dramatic films have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country. She divides her time between New York City and British Columbia.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998

  Published in Penguin Books 1999

  20 19

  Copyright © Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, 1998

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris. Copyright © 1991 by Columbia University

  Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

  Ozeki, Ruth L.

  My year of meats / by Ruth L. Ozeki

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14178-6

  I. Title.

  PS3565.Z45M’.54—dc21 97-52319

  Set in Weiss

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Oliver, for trajectory and ballast

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to actual events, to r
eal people, living or dead, or to real locales are intended only to give the novel a sense of reality and authenticity. Other names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

  One day Lord Korechika, the Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks. “What shall we do with them?” Her Majesty asked me...

  “Let me make them into a pillow,” I said.

  “Very well, ”said Her Majesty. “You may have them.”

  I now bad a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects. was sure that when people saw my book they would say, “It’s even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.” After all, it is written entirely for my own amusement, and I put things down exactly as they came to me...

  As will be gathered from these notes of mine, I am the sort of person who approves of what others abhor and detests the things they like.

  —Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book, c. 1000 A.D.

  The home of the white race in the Old World lies between the lands of the black and the yellow people.... In the New World the white race has settled almost everywhere.

  It is thought that ages ago there lived somewhere in central Asia a race of white people, now known as Aryans. As the race increased in size large bands roamed about in search of new homes, where they could find pastures for their cattle.

  —Frye’s Grammar School Geography, 1895—1902

  Prologue

  The American Wife sits on the floor in front of a fireplace. The flickering light from an electric yule log, left there all year round, plays across the sweaty sheen of her large, pale face. Legs tucked, toes curling nervously in a brand-new pink shag rug from Wal-Mart, she is leaning forward on one arm, perfectly still. Her lips are pursed. Her husband faces her, his mouth drawn taut, ready, inches from hers. They wait.

  “Takagi!”

  “Hai!”

  “Chotto ... can you please tell the wife not to stare like that! It is creepy. It is not romantic at all.”

  “Hai... Excuse me, Mrs. Flowers ... ?”

  Without turning her face, the wife glances sideways toward me.

  “The director, Mr. Oda, was wondering, do you think you could close your eyes for this scene, just as your husband comes in close to kiss you?”

  “Okay,” grunts Suzie Flowers. Her jaw remains motionless, but she can’t keep her head from nodding ever so slightly.

  The cameraman, eye pressed to the finder, groans in exasperation.

  “Takagi, tell her not to move!” he says.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Flowers, but I have to ask you once again not to move your head ... ?”

  “Muri desu yo,” the cameraman tells Oda. “It’s impossible. We can’tgo in any closer than this. Her face is all shiny and blotched. She looks ugly.”

  “Takagi!”

  “Hai!”

  “Ask her if she has any makeup she can use to cover up her unattractive skin!”

  “Uh ... Mrs. Flowers? Mr. Oda is asking if you happen to have any foundation? We are having a bit of a technical problem with the camera, and there’s this one little area ... It’s just for the close-up.”

  “Should I go and get it?” Suzie asks, her jaw still frozen.

  “She has makeup. Do you want her to go and get it?”

  “Baka ... Don’t be stupid. I don’t want her to move. Ask her where it is, and you get it!”

  “Uh, Mrs. Flowers? Do you think you could tell me where it is? So I could get it for you?”

  Suzie nods. “Do you know in my bedroom?” she says through her teeth. “The dresser? The one next to the mirror on the wall on the left side as you—”

  “She’s moving!” moans the cameraman, sitting back in disgust.

  “Forget it!” Oda barks at me. He turns to the cameraman. “Sorry, Suzuki-san. Listen, just widen the frame out a bit and let’s shoot it.”

  “... in the top right-hand drawer, underneath—”

  “Uh, Mrs. Flowers, that’s okay. Actually, we’re just going to shoot....”

  “Roll camera—and five, four, three ...” Oda slaps me on the shoulder.

  “Action!” I call out.

  Suzie squeezes her eyes shut. Like a projectile released from a catapult, Fred Flowers’ head lurches forward for the kiss—too fast—and he bangs his teeth hard against his wife’s upper lip. Her eyes pop open.

  “Ouch!” cries Suzie.

  “Cut!” cries Oda.

  “Tape change!” says the video engineer.

  Oda shakes his head, disgusted, and walks away.

  “I think my lip is bleeding,” whimpers Suzie.

  “This is stupid,” growls Fred.

  “Okay,” I say soothingly. “Why don’t we all relax for a bit, just take a little breather while the cameraman changes tape.”

  “What is this, anyway?” says Fred, standing and stretching his legs. “Is this the beginning? Is this how the show is going to start?”

  “No, honey,” explains Suzie. “Don’t you remember? This is the last scene. Of the whole program.”

  “Well, if this is the end, how come you’re shooting it first?”

  “Well, Fred,” I explain patiently. “In TV, sometimes you have to shoot the endings.first.”

  “Takagi!”

  “Hai!” I answer, gently easing Suzie and Fred Flowers back down onto the rug.

  “Get them into position. We’re ready to go.”

  1.

  The Sprouting Month

  SHŌNAGON

  Pleasing Things

  Someone has torn up a letter and thrown it away. Picking up the pieces, one finds that many of them can be fitted together.

  JANE

  “Meat is the Message.”

  I wrote these words just over a year ago, sitting right here in my tenement apartment in the East Village of New York City in the middle of the worst snowstorm of the season, or maybe it was the century—on TV, everything’s got to be the worst of something, and after a while you stop paying attention. Especially that year. It was January 1991, the first month of the first year of the last decade of the millennium. President Bush had just launched Desert Storm, the most massive air bombardment and land offensive since World War II. The boiler in my building had blown, my apartment was freezing, and I couldn’t complain to the landlord because my rent was overdue. I had just defaulted to a vegetarian diet of cabbage and rice because I couldn’t find a job. Politics and weather aside, the rest was fine. I mean, I was doing the starving artist thing on purpose: I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, but who could find work in a climate like this?

  When the phone rang at two in the morning, I didn’t bother to answer. It was unlikely to be a job offer at that hour, and I had just gotten into bed and was lying there, rigid, trying to relax against the icy sheets long enough to fall asleep. I didn’t want to lose what little body heat I’d already invested, so I let the answering machine pick up—isn’t that what they are for? But then I recognized the voice. It was Kato, my old boss at the TV production company in Tokyo where I had gotten my first job, translating English sound bites into pithy Japanese subtitles. Now, he said, he had a new program and could use my help. I threw back the covers and dived for the receiver. After a brief conversation, we hung up. I wrapped myself in blankets, huddled over my computer keyboard, and, blowing on my fingers to keep them warm, wrote the following:My American Wife!

  Meat is the Message. Each weekly half-hour episode of My American Wife! must culminate in the celebration of a featured meat, climaxing in its glorious consumption. It’s the meat (not the Mrs.) who’s the star of our show! Of
course, the “Wife of the Week” is important too. She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest. Through her, Japanese housewives will feel the hearty sense of warmth, of comfort, of hearth and home—the traditional family values symbolized by red meat in rural America.

  I sat back and read it with some satisfaction. It was a pitch for Kato’s new program, a more or less faithful translation of the Japanese text that he had dictated to me over the phone—well, maybe not so faithful; maybe a little excessive, in fact. But I liked it. It would do. I faxed it off to Tokyo and crawled back into bed. As I lay there, shivering, wondering about the new show, I had no way of realizing that what I’d just written would turn out to be some of my most lucrative prose—it would land me a job and keep me both meat-fed and employed for over a year.

  My Year of Meats. It changed my life. You know when that happens—when something rocks your world, and nothing is ever the same after?

  My name is Jane, Takagi -Little. Little was my dad, a Little from Quam, Minnesota. Takagi is my mother’s name. She’s Japanese. Hyphenation may be a modern response to patriarchal naming practices in some cases, but not in mine. My hyphen is a thrust of pure superstition. At my christening, Ma was stricken with a profound Oriental dread at the thought of her child bearing an insignificant surname like Little through life, so at the very last minute she insisted on attaching hers. Takagi is a big name, literally, comprising the Chinese character for “tall” and the character for “tree.” Ma thought the stature and eminence of her lofty ancestors would help equalize Dad’s Little. They were always fighting about stuff like this.