My Year of Meats

My Year of Meats is a contemporary novel of literary fiction which focuses on the American meat industry, global capitalism, sex and gender, and artmaking. Written by Booker Prize-nominee Ruth L. Ozeki and published in 1998, the novel won the 1998 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. This guide refers to the 1999 Penguin paperback edition of the text. 

Plot Summary 

Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese American documentarian living in New York City in 1991, gets a phone call from her former boss, Kato, about a possible position working for a new TV series called My American Wife! sponsored by an American meat company called BEEF-EX. The show is slated to feature a different American wife cooking a different American meat-based dish each episode. Jane dashes off some flashy copy advertising the show and lands the job.

A world away, Akiko Ueno vomits into a flushing toilet, afraid her husband Joichi “John” Ueno will hear her. Set up with him by her former manager at a manga publishing house, Akiko has been bulimic ever since. In an effort to morph his wife into the voluptuous Texan beauties of his dreams, John asks Akiko to help him with the new show he is working on, to help him rate the wives and test their meat-heavy recipes.

Jane starts work on the show. Expected to translate both language and custom, Jane spends most of her time trying to make peace between the American and Japanese workers. She grows more and more frustrated as she watches her male colleagues piece together predictable episodes that lack imagination and depth.

Akiko watches the wives and makes their recipes, but nothing inspires her to want to be like an American wife as the show intends. John becomes frustrated with her assessments of the show, her inability to conceive and her thin body. He becomes violent and unbearable. 

Jane gets a break when one of the show’s directors is inadvertently poisoned by one of the wives’ recipes. She takes over the job with gusto and seeks out narratives with emotion and authenticity which earn higher ratings. These narratives don’t feature white, middle-class wives like BEEF-EX has demanded. For John Ueno, BEEF-EX’s rep, it’s a big problem.

Ueno repeatedly beats and then rapes Akiko. Inspired by the wives featured in the shows Jane’s directed, and finally fed up with her husband, Akiko contacts Jane. She asks for help and eventually flies to her in New York.

By the time Akiko reaches Jane’s doorstep Jane has been fired from My American Wife! but not before capturing some arresting footage and testimony that exposes some of the true horrors of the American meat industry. Editing this footage becomes Jane’s passion, her obsession, and eventually her breakthrough into the world of feature-length film. Akiko finds happiness in her newly acquired solitude, and Jane finds happiness in her career.