Up the Creek Book Club

My Year of Meats

by Ruth Ozeki

November 1998

Synopsis

"Jane Takagi-Little, by trade a documentary filmmaker, by nature a truth seeker, is 'racially half,' Japanese and American, and, as she tells us, 'neither here nor there...' Jane is sharp-edged, desperate for a job, and determined not to fall in love again. Akiko Ueno, a young Japanese housewife, lives with her husband in a bleak high-rise apartment complex in a suburb of Tokyo. Akiko is so thin her bones hurt, and her husband, an ad agency salaryman who wants her to get pregnant, is insisting that she put some meat on them - literally. Ruth L. Ozeki's novel opens with two women on opposite sides of the globe, whose lives cannot be further apart. But when Jane gets a job, coordinating a television series whose mission is to bring the American heartland, and American meat, into the homes of Japan, she makes some wrenching discoveries - about love, meat, honor, and a hormone called DES. When Jane and Akiko's lives converge, what is revealed taps the deepest concerns of our time - how the past informs the present and how we live and love in this blessed, ever-shrinking world." (Publisher)

Reviews

• ". . .[T]he novel's characters. . .contend with infertility, infidelity and domestic violence. Often these concerns are seamlessly incorporated into the plot, at other times, Ozeka (herself a documentary filmmaker) allows her fiction to be overshadowed by her message." (Lise Funderberg - The New York Times Book Review)
  
• "Juicy..." (Entertainment Weekly)
  
• "This is a very cool book, satirical but never mean, funny, peopled by fully inhabited characters who are both blind and self-aware. Ruth Ozeki's 'My Year of Meats' reassures us that media and culture, though bound inextricably, will never become one." (John Sayles)

Book Club Rating and Comments

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Other Books by Ruth Ozeki

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