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.