My Year of Meats: Hybridization, Race Issues

Bhamini Nadarajan 12/11/2001Ruth Ozeki’s captivating debut novel, My Year Of Meats “dips into a widevariety of serious issues: the role of women in America and Japan, stereotypes, racism,relationships, artistic freedom, and of course, the meat industry.” With its many plots andsub-plots, the major ones however, center around Jane Takagi-Little – the Japanese-American documentary filmmaker of the “My American Wife” episodes, sponsored bythe BEEF-EX to promote meat consumption of the people in Japan – and Akiko Ueno,the Japanese wife. The families that we are introduced to through Jane’s documentarywork are each unique as much as they are varied – from Black to White and fromMexican to Asian. There is a subtle commonality that unites these apparently differentcharacters, which to Jane is all about their “authenticity” and “wholesomeness”. Anoffensive John Ueno, associated with the advertising agency sponsored by the BEEF-EX,is no less real but is one who has disconnected himself from his own authenticity and sodoes not perceive it in others like Jane or Akiko. We may recognize that for Ueno tomove beyond his racist and other conflicting attitudes, his willingness is required, toidentify and take responsibility for his own transformation. Just as in Ueno, if discriminatory perspectives is held among individuals in a society in spite of having politically achieved equal human rights, it becomes the responsibility of the individualsto move beyond the limiting views, embrace our oneness as humans and evolve intowholesome individuals, much like Jane and Akiko – as Akiko empowers herself as thenovel progresses.

Akiko is the Japanese wife who frees her self from the oppression in her lifethrough connecting to and drawing the vitality from most of the families appearing in the“My American wife” episodes, even though their culture, ethnicity, nationality andreligion seemingly vary from that of Akiko’s. From the Beaudroux family, she comes toknow of the choice of adopting, during the period she faces infertility. From ChristinaBuskowsky and the townspeople who visit her – who for Christina’s healing, continuedto bring “her the Thing in Life That They Loved Best”” – Akiko realizes that she “was ina coma after all”, not actually living her life and not knowing what she loved. WhileAkiko transcends the limitations of physical differences that separated her from thefamilies, she allows her to be transformed by their spirit of life, thus enabling herself toeventually move from being “stuck” in an abusive marriage to finding “a new life for her self” and from not knowing what she wanted to experiencing a “superabundance of …feeling” – as during the Thanksgiving dinner with Beaudroux family and her journey inthe train to New York with Maurice and other passengers, who cheerfully extend their “Southern hospitality” to her.While Ueno does not agree that Jane Takagi make a documentary on the Dawes’family – Ueno is Jane’s “de facto boss” – reasoning that they are black and so not the preconceived ideal American family, Jane accuses him as a “racist”. But it is alsointeresting that “he has a dark and lonely side to his personality.” In the novel, he appearsto be a powerless character, too focused on his job and trying to gain power for himself only by oppressing his wife, Akiko. He is not in touch with his inner self like Jane anddoes not even attempt to recognize it, like Akiko. So it is no surprise that he projects hissense of ineffectuality on to the world that he exposes himself to. He is incapable of getting in touch with the essence of the Dawes’ family, unlike Jane. Even if he would as

during the prayer service in the church in Harmony, Mississippi – when he experiences a*catharsis while crying over Miss Helen Dawes’ shoulders – he goes back to his negative pattern of disconnecting from his inner self. He disagrees filming the Dawes’ family ashe is obsessed merely on their physicality. Unless he began to value the spirit that hetruly is, he would be unable to identify the same in others and would remain all that he is – internally powerless as manifested through his being an abusive husband and a “racist”.Jane capriciously says that race would become a “relic” in this “ever-shrinkingworld”, when we may all come to look similar as one race. “All over the world, nativespecies are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the idea of anindigenous person or plant or culture will just see quaint”, expresses Ozeki through thecharacter of Jane. As globalization is taking shape, every culture is likely to be exposedto another. In the East, as in many South Asian countries, modernization is taking placerapidly, inspired by the modernization of the West. In the West, spiritual movementshas been taking shape, some of which are influenced by the exposure to the spiritual practices of the East, such as meditation and yoga. Aspects that divide us physically – such as geographically, customarily, traditionally, racially, religiously – may not be soforeign to one another anymore as it had been in the past. And eventually a mixing of people from all parts of the world could happen so as to disable any visible racialdivisions among us anymore, true to Jane’s concept of our future.Although it is likely that people in all parts of the world would unite byovercoming the physical differences such as our skin color, the greater truth however,for harmony would be by evolving to see our oneness as humans, an ability that Jane andAkiko have undistorted in them. In contrast to the Frye’s theory – Frye, an author of the