I know, this sounds like My Year of Meats might be one of these books written by militant vegetarian out on a crusade, but it is actually a pretty well researched documentary about issues in cattle ranching and the meat industry in general of that particular time. No. As I mentioned, I’ve made two films, both of which have trodden into fictional realms before, and all through school and college I wrote short stories. In fact, as a child, the first thing I remember ever wanting to be was a novelist. The filmmaking was a bit of a detour. I’ve mentioned plenty of concepts already, and though they all intersect, not many are willing to suffer the headache that connecting them involves. However, Ozeki saves those privileged enough to ignore this the trouble. Told through the eyes of protagonists Jane Takagi-Little and Akiko Ueno, Ozeki takes the reader on a discovery of the meat industry’s evils in two countries across the globe: the United States and Japan. Bunny’s elderly husband, who proposed to Bunny during a lap dance; is clearly smitten with his young, vivacious wife. Gale Ruth Ozeki is not only an author but also a filmmaker and a Zen Buddhist priest. My Year of Meats, as her debut, was extremely well received, winning the 1998 Kiriyama Prize, and the 1998 Imus/Barnes & Noble American Book Award. Ozeki’s novels are unique in that they combine very intimate and personal stories with large scale social issues, such as science and regulations, environmental issues, race, and much more.

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". The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Jane starts sneaking controversial subjects into her shoots: a lesbian couple, a family formed by interracial adoption, and a five-year-old who has already undergone puberty due to the hormones used on her family’s cattle feedlot. What is “natural,” and what gets branded alien or invasive? From the kudzu that strangles the South to a murdered Japanese exchange student, Ozeki probes the related issues of nativism and racism. Her two protagonists’ stories – one in the first person; the other in the third person – come together in a surprising manner as Jane decides that she has a more pressing obligation than creating a diverting television show.

Didactic and full of unlikely coincidences though My Year Of Meat is, you've got to admire Ozeki for deciding to treat the beef industry in novel form. On pp. 393-94, her documentary-making heroine Jane even muses on the difficulty of telling such a story: "Ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence."

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Ozeki has directed and produced a large number of documentary-format programs for network television. Her first independent narrative film, Body of Correspondence, was the winner in the New Visions category at the 1995 San Francisco Film and Video Festival, was screened at the Sundance Festival and on PBS. Her second independent and first feature-length film, Halving the Bones, traced her mother’s Japanese roots and offered an exotic portrait, partly factual and partly speculative, of her maternal grandparents and their lives in Hawaii. The film aired at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 1996 Asian American Film Festival in San Francisco, the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, and many other venues, as well as being shown on PBS. Each chapter of My Year of Meats opens with an excerpt from Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book. Consider the interplay between these quotes and the narrative’s trajectory. How does this interjection from the past enrich the novel? How does the Shonagon voice shape your relationship to the characters?

Jane Smiley described My Year of Meats as a “comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical” novel. Beginning with quotations from Sel Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, peppered with faxes and memos, and ending with a documentary-like description of a slaughterhouse, your novel does indeed seamlessly combine several different genres. Is this how you originally envisioned the narrative, or, as you began writing, did the story and characters simply begin to outgrow a straight, linear structure? 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. Are “authentic” American wives really the “ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest” middle-class white Americans that Beef-Ex wants to offer up to the Japanese TV audience? Ruth Ozeki paints a world where wives are “meat made manifest,” where, according to the Beef-Ex hierarchy of meats, “pork is possible but beef is best,” and with this type of metaphorical play, she deftly yet relentlessly teases out our own preconceptions and misconceptions about culture, gender, and race. To my fellow Asian Americans… we really have to do better than this. Not to center my feelings, though I’ll just say it’s frankly embarrassing to me that this book exists. some people on here found the book preachy. i can't for the life of me see any preachiness in it, but at the same time i do see, somehow, how one might feel preached at by it. eh. if you feel preached at just drop this book and read something else. ruth ozeki won't mind. she didn't write the book for you.Jane Takagi-Little is a Japanese-American aspiring documentarian from MN, desperately in need of a job when she's given the chance to produce My American Wife. While the show wants to repeatedly portray families reflecting an American stereotype (straight white parents with straight white kids), Jane prefers to capture the country's diversity. As she interviews families from all across the country to showcase, she begins to see a pattern of detrimental effects from the very product she must sell, meat. 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 ]