Paperback, 400 pages
English language
Published March 1, 1999 by Viking Press.
My Year of Meats is the 1998 debut novel by Ruth Ozeki. The book takes advantage of the differences between Japanese and American culture to comment on both.
Ruth Ozeki’s mesmerizing debut novel has captivated readers and reviewers worldwide. When documentarian Jane Takagi-Little finally lands a job producing a Japanese television show that just happens to be sponsored by an American meat-exporting business, she uncovers some unsavory truths about love, fertility, and a dangerous hormone called DES. Soon she will also cross paths with Akiko Ueno, a beleaguered Japanese housewife struggling to escape her overbearing husband.
I was interested at first, and there’s clearly some good commentary here on American values. Also commentary on the Japanese view of America and vice versa. But I like to feel like what I’m reading has some stakes, and I don’t feel that here.
I was expecting more after enjoying A Tale of the Time Being so much.
Ozeki's first novel. So she hadn't hit her stride yet.
I got the feeling that she'd wanted to write an exposé about the dangers of hormones in meat production, but decided to wrap it in a novel, to get more people to read it. And so ended up writing a novel about a woman who creates an exposé about the dangers of hormones in meat production. She created a plot to showcase all the horrible things that go bad in feedlots and slaughterhouses, and then set up stock characters to populate the story. The male characters in particular came across as stereotypes.
