46 pages • 1 hour read
My Year of Meats
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Symbols & Motifs
Sei Shōnagon
Ozeki frequently opens her chapters with epigrams from Shōnagon, a 10th-century Japanese court poet and diarist who wrote in the Heian period. Shōnagon is best known as the author of The Pillow Book, a collection of diary entries, poems, lists, and reflections recorded as she served the court of Empress Consort Teishi (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Sei Shōnagon.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 24 Jan. 2017, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sei-Shonagon). Noted for its intimacy and candor, Shōnagon’s work connects to Jane’s artistic identity as a documentarian filmmaker. Like Shōnagon, Jane shapes raw material into art and reflects on the specific experiences of women’s lives with wit, candor, and vision.
Colors
Perhaps the most prominent color in this book is pink. It is often used to signify a state of being in between. For example, Akiko sees a little girl wearing a pink snowsuit. The pink calls attention to the girl’s place in life; she is not a brand-new baby but also not elderly, thus it places her somewhere in the middle. In another scene Suzie Flowers and her husband are poised to kiss over a “pink shag rug” (29). The fact that they are kept in this position, not apart but not together, once again connects pink to a place in between. Later on, in the slaughterhouse Jane sees “puddles of pink water” and equates them with “suspended animation”, again defining pink as a partway point, this time between life and death. (220)
Green is also used frequently and is associated with the unnatural. For example, Jane’s mother says that Jane’s green eyes are a sign that she is the “devil’s spawn” (51). Jane also dyes her hair green, an unnatural color that sets her apart. She also jokingly tells her mother she is going to have a “green baby” (155), a joke that turns serious when her child dies because of unnatural additives in Jane’s system.
Blood
Ultimately, context is essential to understanding the meaning of blood in My Year of Meats. In some instances, the presence of blood is a sign of life and virility. For example, when Akiko references her “pretty gash”’ which is “so ruby / ruby red” she feels empowered by her sexuality and arousal (172). She also refers to a red “river” which signifies that she has gotten her period back after losing it to illness, another instance in which blood is an affirmative sign of life (172). However, this symbol of potency is complicated by the novel’s reference to Rosie’s period. Rosie’s premature sex development is unnatural, alarming, and dangerous.
There are other instances where blood is connoted with death. When Jane sees blood coming down her legs, it signals her miscarriage. The blood that spurts at Jane and her crew from a freshly murdered cow is a sign of carnage, not life. Akiko also bleeds after being raped by John, a sign of his abuse and betrayal.
Meat
In Jane’s pitch for My American Wife! she compares American wives to the “ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest meat” that they serve (8). This is heavy-handed marketing copy, but it also suggests a connection between meat and meaning. For the corporate executives at BEEF-EX, meat is a symbol of abundance, wealth, and family values. The company assigns different values to different kinds of meat: “Beef is Best” while “Pork is Possible” (12). The more Jane works on the project, however, the more she sees meat as emblematic of the negative effects of industrialization, globalization, and factory farming. While she connects with the families that she meets and the recipes they share, she uncovers disturbing facts about the negative environmental and health impacts of meat mass production. Ozeki suggests that meat is a unique type of global commodity: It provides nutrition and sustenance, but it also requires creating, sustaining, and then slaughtering life on a massive scale.
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