Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year Of Meats

Ruth L. Ozeki’s novel, My Year of Meats, is centered around the main character, Jane Takagi-Little, as she struggles to find her racial and cultural identity, because she is half White and half Japanese. Jane is a producer on the Japanese reality show “My American Wife!”, which attempts to expose its Japanese audience to the average American household.. The show features an American wife cooking a beef-centred meal, usually and old family recipe. The goal of the TV show is to encourage their audience to purchase more beef. By exposing the audience to the desirable lifestyle, it makes them want to incorporate some of the American culture in their everyday lives, and the easiest way they could do this is by cooking the meals presented on the show, and thus buying beef. Jane is responsible for finding the wives that are featured on the show. Jane’s multiracial struggle is enhanced while working with the other Japanese producers because she is always budding heads with them because her diversity

allows her to see things in a different perspective. With the use of diction and the character’s personal experiences, Ozeki’s novel captures idea of the cultural collisions and identity crisis presented when two races and cultures intertwine.
The diction presented in the quote above plays a major role in expressing one of the major themes in the novel, race. The younger version of Jane uses the phrases “King of the World”, and “an embodied United Nations”, to really capture her view of the superiority in mixed race. She felt that a strong human being was capable of specializing in more than one field of life. She mentions that she wanted to create a human being that consisted of at least three of the five races that the old Frye’s geography book mentioned. The races included the Indian race, presented by the color red, the African race, presented by the color black, the Malay race, presented by the color brown, the Japanese race presented by the color yellow, and the American race presented by the color white (Ozeki, 150). Each race offered special talents and abilities that were used to guide them through life. Some specialized in hunting and fishing, while others stimulated their brains more in order to learn new and easier ways to gather the materials needed for survival. So why not create a person, an undefeatable superiority by simply finding a mate that would combine Jane’s “white and yellow” abilities, with the abilities offered from those in a different racial group? This is what a young Jane wished to create, a child with multiple abilities. The thing that would make this child different, it's mixed race, would also make this child superior. She had not yet been introduced to the struggles of finding her identity, so Jane felt that there should be a combination of races rather than a hostility between them.
Jane’s flashbacks of her early childhood experiences with the Japanese culture also play a role in the understanding of the identity crisis she suffered due to her mixed cultures. The television company relied on Jane choose an American wife that would attract a Japanese audience, but since Jane was not completely intact with the culture, she relied heavily on her memories as a child because she was surrounded by it and understood it better. Jane sometimes struggled to find ways to represent the American lifestyle and beliefs to the audience in a way that they would find attractive and desirable because she sometimes did not remember what a Japanese audience could find attractive . Although Jane’s memories helped her remember the things that caught the attention to her audience, her struggle of being caught in the middle of the two cultures sometimes hindered her ability to present a set of values and beliefs that would make one culture want to adopt the values and beliefs of the other culture.
Along with cultural collisions comes the collisions of the cultural expectations which is expressed through Jane’s knowledge and experiences with Japanese families, and what is known to be a true American Family. Here the clash of the American and Japanese cultural differences present a struggle for Jane. Throughout the novel, Jane both experiences the differences in American and Japanese culture through her recount of childhood memories, and wrestles with an internal conflict with her mental clash of cultures as she struggles to identify with her mixed heritage.Concurrently, the Japanese view of American families clashes with the real families that Jane portrays on her episodes of the series “My American Wife!”
As previously mentioned, Jane is a prime example of the result of mixing to cultures together , throughout the novel she remembers her experiences growing up as a child of mixed race and her realization of her identity crisis when she began to feel like she did not fit into either group. Her cultural battle is even present in her name, her mother thought that the American lastname of Little would have brought great burden upon her life, and she decides to have her child keep a Japanese surname of Takagi, literally meaning “tall.” For Jane’s father, Little is “just a name,” but to her mother, her surname was very important and it was how she expressed to herself to the world. More important than her external experiences with the Japanese and American cultures, is her internal struggle to identify with a race. Presented in the quote above, as a child Jane fantasized marrying a man of mixed heritage, which could be seen as an indicator of her youthful openness to her mixed race. After she reads of the supposed inferiority of her mixture of races in a local book in her hometown library of Quam, Minnesota, she begins to doubt the benefits of her mixed heritage. Though her mixed heritage did cause her a great deal of struggle, Jane eventually finds peace and a small sense of pride for it.
Another main cultural theme presented in My Year of Meats is the introduction of American meat to Japanese families using the TV reality show Jane worked for, which is sponsored by BEFF-EX. Every week the show featured a new American wife, who cooked a meal that included beef as its main course. It emphasized the positive American values, such as “attractiveness, wholesomeness, and warm personality” (Ozeki, 11), that Japanese families are fascinated with, and correlated this with the meat of the week. A cultural collision occurs because the values presented by the show are beneficial to the audience; however, the Japanese diet traditionally consists mainly of fish and vegetables, and a sudden change in diet caused some physical discomfort to the consumers. This is seen in Akiko who throws up the beef every night which consequently prevents her from getting pregnant due to all the hormones found in the meat . Thus, while the TV show may have presented authentic American values that enhanced understanding, it did so at the cost of the health of its audience and the corporate interests in the meat industry had detrimental effects on individuals such as Akiko.
Other cultural conflicts occur when races collide without any cultural understanding. For example, while in Montana, Jane and her film crew were accused of being a “band of Mexican terrorists with a rocket launcher”. (Ozeki, 189) This blatantly misguided accusation was based on “Gulf War fever” which caused many Americans to be on edge against seeming foreigners. This conflict resulted in the the film crew getting thrown in jail, and also had more subtle cultural effects on Jane who was already frustrated that people do not recognize her as an American. This further exemplifies Jane’s identity struggle for being different. In the eyes of American society she was labeled as Japanese, and in the eyes of her Japanese acquaintances she was seen as too American she could never find a subtle middle between the two, which resulted in her feeling like she never quite fit in any where.
This however, is not a new issue, mixed race individuals have struggled with their identities for quite sometime.

A case study focused on mixed race individuals reactions to certain social situations mentioned that “the majority of the respondents experienced identity conflict or discomfort, usually in the form of not belonging” (Motoyoshi,176) . People with mixed races struggle to fit into the little categories that society wants to place them into. Society likes to categorize people based on race and give each race a certain set of expected behaviors, so when people who fall under two different categories society does not know what to expect from them. Mixed raced individuals sometimes struggle to fit into their own skin because although their bodies scream once race, their cultural beliefs express a different race. People also struggle to fit in because sometimes their own racial groups will unintentionally exclude them because they express too much of their “other”

race.
Altogether, cultural collisions and identity crisis occur when two races and cultures intertwine. Many people, like the novel's main character Jane, suffer from a lack of belonging when they have a cultural background that comes from two different races. They struggle to fit society’s model of how they should behave. Although Jane suffered with this identity crisis for most of the novel, she eventually revives that little girl inside her who was once excited to create “an embodied United Nations” and comes to peace with who she is, a proud Japanese-American woman. She is eventually okay with the idea that she might never fit into the societal norms that everyone around her lives by, she can instead be her own person and exemplify to others that it is sometimes better for society to not expect you act or behave a certain way. Even though there are a lot of clashes along the way, a lot of great things happen when two very different things are intertwined and there are very few who are lucky enough to be in the middle of all of this and share two very dynamic set of traditions.