My Year of Meats

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Akiko Ueno, the bulimic Japanese wife of the executive who hatched the My American Wife! concept, lives an ocean away. She is thin, so thin that her bones hurt, so thin that her periods have stopped. If only she would eat more meat, her husband thinks, surely she would become “ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest,” much like the Texas women that he is so fond of. And so Akiko Ueno tunes in to My American Wife! every week, trying desperately to cook and consume delicious dishes, like Coca Cola Roast and Beef Fudge, that she learns from watching the American wives. John’s “pale, flaccid” son from a previous marriage. He isn't too fond of the boy and speaks disparagingly about him. Rose Ozeki returned to New York in 1985 and began a film career as an art director, designing sets and props for low budget horror movies. She switched to television production, and after several years directing documentary-style programs for a Japanese company, she started making her own films. Body of Correspondence (1994) won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and was aired on PBS. Halving the Bones (1995), an award-winning autobiographical film, tells the story of Ozeki’s journey as she brings her grandmother’s remains home from Japan. It has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others. Ozeki’s films, now in educational distribution, are shown at universities, museums and arts venues around the world. Early in the novel, Jane says, “All over the world, native species are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem quaint.” Do you believe that this is true? If so, do you perceive it as a step toward a more peaceful, accepting world, or as a step away from a diverse, well-textured world? Is it possible to maintain cultural diversity without prejudice?

In true Ozeki-style, the story is two-fold. We are first introduced to Jane, a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker working in partnership with BEEF-EX, a corporation whose aim is to promote the beauty and health benefits of American meat to Japan. Through the creation of a new TV series, My American Wife!,Jane travels across the country in search of “model housewives” for her Japanese audience. Wives whose concern is no longer ‘old-fashioned consumerism’ but ‘contemporary wholesome values’ like providing ‘good, nourishing food for her entire family. And that means meat.’

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As the story progresses, Jane manages to turn the show into a work of investigative journalism rather than light entertainment and discovers some aspects of the meat industry that she feels need to be made public - and if this happens in a program paid for by the meat industry even better!

Jane is my extroverted self and our exterior identities and experiences of the world have much in common. But Akiko is my little introvert. I suspect I was more like her when I was younger and less able to recognize or harness my strength, and often turned it against myself as a result.

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There are two very distinct parallels between yourself and Jane—you’re both filmmakers and you’re both of mixed heritage. Do the similarities stop there? How about Akiko? What part of her character did you relate to the most? The book veers into Upton Sinclair "The Jungle" territory, and while some may discount it for this, I felt Ozeki steered the ship right - finding a platform to share true and relevant information in this fictional universe.