released the full-length novel, All I Asking for Is My
Body, to critical acclaim.
Murayama has continued the saga of the Oyama
family in Five Years on a Rock (1994) and Planta-
tion Boy (1998). He has also written three plays;
two have been produced by the Kumu Kahua The-
atre Company in Honolulu. Yoshitsune (1977) pre-
miered in 1982, and Murayama’s own adaptation
of All I Asking for Is My Body premiered in 1999.
Hellen Lee-KellerMy Year of Meats Ruth L. Ozeki (1998)
RUTH OZEKI’s first novel, My Year of Meats (1998),
tells the story of two very different women from
opposite sides of the globe whose lives become
entangled due to their involvement in a Japanese
television cooking show. Jane Tagaki-Little, a
documentary filmmaker, is half-Japanese on her
mother’s side, but has inherited her Caucasian
father’s impressive height. At nearly six feet, with
spiky dyed hair, she is fiercely independent, irrever-
ent, and adventuresome. She would appear to have
little in common with the diminutive and submis-
sive Japanese housewife, Akiko Ueno, who meekly
tolerates her loathsome and abusive husband. Yet,
in the course of the novel, and over the course of a
year, the lives of these two women run in parallel
and then intersect, as each resists, and ultimately
triumphs over, the racism, sexism, and commer-
cialism that threaten to overwhelm their lives.
When the novel opens, Jane Tagaki-Little is
unemployed, behind on the rent, and living in an
unheated New York apartment. Naturally, when
she gets a sudden call to work on a Japanese televi-
sion series, My American Wife!, she jumps at the
chance. Sponsored by the beef export industry, the
series is unapologetically promotional, designed to
encourage beef consumption in Japan through the
portrayal of wholesome American wives offering
up their favorite meat recipes on a weekly basis.
Yet, despite the limitations inherent in such a proj-
ect, Jane is confident that she can turn her work to
good ends. When she is given free rein to direct the
series, she immediately sets out to locate families
that disrupt the stereotype of the middle-class, all-
American family: a Mexican-American immigrant
family with a recipe for “Beefy Burritos”; a family
from Louisiana with a slew of adopted Asian chil-
dren; and a mixed-race lesbian couple, who happen
to be vegetarians. This last choice almost proves too
much for Jane’s boss, Joichi Ueno, the advertising
agency executive overseeing the series. He elicits
Jane’s promise to make future shows conform to
company policy and she acquiesces. But when Jane
begins to uncover information on the rampant use
of dangerous hormones in cattle farming, she feels
she must speak out by producing a damning docu-
mentary exposé of the meat industry.
As this narrative unfolds, Ozeki weaves, in a
parallel plot, the story of Joichi Ueno’s long-suf-
fering wife, Akiko, who becomes empowered in
the course of watching the weekly airings of My
American Wife! Originally compelled to watch the
series by her husband, who expects her to cook
the meals that appear on the show and then re-
port back to him, Akiko’s response to the televi-
sion series testifies to the power of culture to shape
human consciousness. Profoundly moved by the
lives she sees on television, particularly the seg-
ment on the lesbian couple, Akiko vows to leave
her husband, to move to the United States, and to
have a child on her own. Her act of quiet determi-
nation, in turn, provides Jane with the motivation
necessary to complete her documentary, which is
eventually picked up by major news programs in
America and Japan.
In narrating the lives of these seemingly dispa-
rate women, Ozeki is able to cover significant po-
litical ground. However, even as Ozeki addresses
weighty issues like domestic violence, infertility,
and the rampant use of hormones in the cattle
farming industry, her novel maintains an upbeat
and lively tone. Frequently humorous, and often
absurd, Jane’s and Akiko’s experiences are related
as a series of narrative snapshots interspersed with
a variety of other texts. Memos and faxes, excerpts
from the television script, recipes for dishes like
beef fudge, and selections from the 11th-century
Chinese classic, the Pillow Book of Sei Sh nagon,
coalesce into a kaleidoscope of text, resulting in an
aesthetic suggestive of the cuts and transitions of
film or television.My Year of Meats 205