My Year of Meats

This chapter is prefaced by an excerpt from Japanese court poet Sei Shōnagon about piecing together a “torn” letter (5). 

Jane Takagi-Little pulls the cold covers around her and mulls over her current occupation as a “starving artist” (7). It’s January 1991 and Jane has been trying to find a job as a documentary filmmaker in New York City’s East Village. As Jane reflects on her lack of success, money, and central heating, the phone rings. It’s her former boss, Kato, asking for her help on a TV show he wants to launch called “My American Wife” (8). She hangs up and immediately jots down a catchy pitch that promises a show which will teach Japanese women the “traditional family values” of the American wife through the medium of meat (8). Satisfied with her pitch, Jane starts to ponder her hyphenated last name, recalling her parents bickering over the importance of including both the Japanese and American names. Her mother had been insistent that Tagaki be included in Jane’s name to offset the “insignificant surname” Little, whereas her father didn’t see any issue with his name (9). Jane’s mind travels from her long last name to her long body. She is abnormally tall for a Japanese person and therefore she has always been considered a “freak” (9). However, Jane has adopted the term with zest and has done everything she can to further stick out physically from the crowd. 

Jane thinks about she has always been stuck between two worlds of Japanese and American cultures. It is her place in between that she believes lands her the job as coordinator for Kato’s show. This isn’t her ideal position; she had wanted to be in charge, but given her ability to be a “cultural pimp” Jane is given the coordinator position instead (9). The show is sponsored by a meat company in America that is hoping to make Japanese women want to buy their meats. They film 52 shows over the duration of its life, all of which require Jane to track down American wives in meat sections, looking for women who will make the American meat look as attractive as possible. 

The first shoot is at a VFW in Arkansas. Jane’s team, fresh from Tokyo where “militarism is treated like a sexual perversion,” are shocked by the way the military men are coddled by both women and children (11). While Jane is there, one of the veterans refuses to accept that she is an American, causing Jane to get upset and defend her American citizenship. 

Soon after, a memo from Kato reveals the specifications he is looking for in American wives for the show. The list ends up offending some of the American researchers, so Jane sends out a memo which provides research to back up Kato’s desires and rewords them so that they come off more appropriately. Jane learns a lot working on the show, such as the fact that meat is relatively new to the Japanese diet. She thinks about her inspiration, Sei Shōnagon, a woman whose documentation of her life still survives from a millennium ago. Shōnagon was not afraid to take on masculine attributes and be different from society, ideals which Jane tries to follow closely.

This chapter is prefaced by an excerpt from Shōnagon about her contempt for women who are docile and obey their husbands “scorn” (17).

Akiko, the wife of one of the show’s creators, watches as Suzie Flowers dumps a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola on a pot roast. She admires Suzie’s love for things “[b]ig and simple” (19). Her husband’s involvement with the show began because of her limited diet. He had become “very upset” (20) when he found out she wasn’t fertile due to her low weight and had tried a little bit of everything to fix the problem. As such, once the show took off, he used her as a reviewer of the food and the wives, hoping she would learn to cook and eat some of the hearty meat selections herself. At the moment, she is looking outside the studio window at a little girl playing on the swings in the snow. It makes her think of how she used to love them until she got her tongue stuck to a frozen swing set one day. She had been forced to tear her tongue off the pole and suffer in silence. Her attention drifts back to the set, where before she sets out for the store to buy the ingredients to test Suzie’s pot roast recipe, she gets sucked into the scene one more time, finding it impossible to leave after Suzie’s husband admits that he once had an affair. 

After the set clears, Suzie buries her head in her newly purchased comforter and cries over the admission of the affair. She had thought this show would be her chance to bring her and Fred closer together but now thinks it has been a disaster. She just can’t seem to get things right. 

Jane is also dealing with the fallout from this episode. She talks with Kenji, the British-Japanese producer she works with, about Suzie’s misfortune and the possibility of getting sued over Fred’s on-air confession. Kenji shows Jane how they covered up Suzie’s sadness with a laugh track, but Jane is not satisfied. She is less concerned with being sued and more concerned with the show not offering viewers anything real. She shares her regret that she is not the director. Kenji responds by saying she is “essentially” the director, she just doesn’t get to choose what “is cut” (30). It’s the ability to edit, however, which Jane wants so badly and which she believes would save the show from being “dumb” and “silly” (27).

This chapter is prefaced by an excerpt from Shōnagon which depicts a scene in which a thief witnesses another thief in action and finds it “amusing” (31).

Jane reflects on the way her crew—Suzuki, Oh, and a blonde American production assistant—wreak havoc throughout America, bingeing porn, creeping through endless Wal-Marts, and invading the privacy of small American families in the name of documentary TV. She feels especially bad about Suzie Flowers after the temporary director, Mr. Oda, insists she give them the photo album from her wedding, a request Jane feels is “too cruel” (36). Teary and red-faced Suzie had handed over her wedding photos, begging for their safe return since they are “all I’ve got left” (36).

Akiko thinks about how her life has changed since she married Joichi, now called “John.” She thinks about the job she gave up writing for a manga publishing house and about her descent into bulimia, as well as about the continuous pressure on her to conceive. She reads some of Shōnagon’s lists because she likes the certainty of them and then tries to make some of her own lists, but they feel “lack-luster” (39). She thinks about how angry John became when she rated Suzie’s episode a 3 out of 10. She had told him it felt like the show was “hiding something” (40). She quickly realized that her rating had only added to the sense of failure John felt, as he had recently come to realize his dream show was a joke (40).

Jane is also vexed by John, whom she has pegged as a control freak, as well as “hateful” and “pathetic” (44). He makes it clear he is unsatisfied with Akiko and is in search of “big-breasted American women” (42). Akiko thinks back to the early months of her marriage when “John” had told her she would now be responsible for supplying him with “Mandom SuperPlus” condoms (46). She had been both ashamed to buy the condoms and ashamed to return home with the wrong brand. She thinks about how his frustration with her inability to conceive has now become “rage” (47).