My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  The soundman, Oh, was a quiet man who spoke in monosyllables out of the corner of his mouth. He was always turning away. He was walleyed and mean, except to animals. He loved animals. Sometimes you’d see him holding his boom pole, taking sound, and his coat would be alive, stuffed with a writhing litter of barnyard kittens poking out from his collar and cuffs. But if he loved animals, he worshiped Suzuki. The two of them would get drunk on Jack Daniel’s and tape pictures of blondes from Hustler all over the Sheetrock walls of motels across America, then use the girls for target practice, shooting out their tits and crotches with air guns they’d bought at Wal-Mart.

  The PA was American, an ex-flight attendant. He was a short but handsome young man who wore cowboy boots with heels for added elevation and blue jeans with carefully pressed,creases. He sent his laundry out to valet services at every hotel we stayed in and racked up huge bills on toll calls to phone-sex chat lines. I’d hired him because I thought his chiseled blond looks would come in handy wrangling the wives. He loved to talk about Making It on Airplanes and the Mile High Club. This made him popular with Suzuki and Oh.

  The directors were sent from Japan on a rotation basis, showing up every couple of months to shoot a show or two. The ones I remember were like Oda—dumb, or disaster prone.

  We left our mark in truck stops and motels across the country. So much was new to them. In Taos, New Mexico, Suzuki and Oh stayed in a pink adobe suite with a fireplace. They got drunk and made a small, cozy fire in the hearth, and when they ran out of firewood they burned the telephone book and the Bible, then a chair and a bed-post, and finally the bedroom itself. After the fire department had left, Oh explained, somewhat sheepishly, “In Japan fireplaces are not so common.”

  In Austin, Texas, after Suzuki passed out while running a bath and flooded thirteen floors of the Radisson Hotel, I asked him if baths, too, were not so common in Japan, but he just shrugged. “Of course we have baths,” he said. “We are famous for our baths. It’s just that our tubs are so much deeper.”

  But what really impressed them was the sheer amplitude of America. I’ll never forget the look of astonishment that lit up Suzuki’s moonlike face the first time he walked into a Wal-Mart. To a Japanese person, Wal-Mart is awesome, the capitalist equivalent of the wide-open spaces and endless horizons of the American geographical frontier. All this for the taking! Your breast expands with greed and need and wonder. I followed Suzuki around the store as he pored over a dozen brands of car caddies, fingered garden hoses, and lingered on the edge of Lingerie, watching farmwives choose brassieres. He loved the fact that you could buy real firearms, not just air guns, over the counter at Wal-Mart, but that was where I drew the line.

  I was learning. This was the heart and soul of My American Wife!: recreating for Japanese housewives this spectacle of raw American abundance. So we put Suzuki in a shopping cart, Betacam on his shoulder, and wheeled him up and down the endless aisles of superstores, filming goods to induce in our Japanese wives a state of want (as in both senses, “lack” and “desire”), because want is good. We panned the shelves, stacked floor to ceiling, tracked women as they filled their carts with Styrofoam trays of freezer steaks, each of which, from a Japanese housewife’s perspective, would feed her entire family for several days.“Stocking up” is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.

  Locating our subjects felt like a confidence game, really. I’d inveigle a nice woman with her civic duty to promote American meat abroad and thereby help rectify the trade imbalance with Japan. Overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of the task, she’d open up her life to us. We’d spend two or three days with her, picking through the quotidian minutiae of her existence, then we’d roll out of town and on to the next one. We tried to be considerate, but you have to remember that My American Wife! was a series. You are doing a wife or two a week. While you are shooting them, they are your entire world and you live in the warm, beating heart of their domestic narratives, but as soon as you drive away from the house, away from the family all fond and waving, then it is over. Their lives are sealed in your box of tapes, locked away in the van, and you send these off with the director to edit back in Tokyo, and that’s it. Easy. Done.

  That was the idea, anyway. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t happen exactly that way.

  “Mrs. Flowers?” I knocked loudly on the door. “Ub, Suzie?”

  Finally she answered, opening the door a crack and peering around the edge. She was dressed in an old bathrobe. Her face was mottled and her eyes were swollen shut from tears. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “I am so sorry to disturb you....” I was struggling. “Ub, I just wanted to tell you we’re leaving and that I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  She sobbed once, then gulped. “It’s okay, Jane. It’s not your fault, really.” She opened the door a little further, even tried to smile.

  “Well, we just wanted to say good-bye, and ...” I gestured toward the street, where the van was waiting. The PA had the engine running, and Oda, Suzuki, and Ob were inside. Oda flapped his band at us from the front seat. He hadn’t even wanted to come to the door with me. Suzie waved back.

  “... and, uh, Suzie? One last thing ... Mr. Oda wanted me to ask you for the photographs. You know, the ones you said you’d lend us? I mean, if it’s still all right...”

  They were her wedding photos, in her wedding album, and Oda wanted to shoot some of them to use in the show. I had tried to talk him out of it—it just seemed too cruel—but he was adamant. Suzie stared at me, then nodded. “Sure. I’ll go and get it.”

  When she came back, she was bugging the big puffy album to her breast.

  “You won’t forget to send it back?” she asked anxiously.

  “No, I won’t forget,” I promised.

  “And a videotape of the show too? You said I could have that....”

  Reluctantly she handed me the album.

  “You see,” she said, as her tears welled and her voice dissolved, “it’s all I’ve got left....”

  Mind you, I had Kenji send the album back promptly, although without the tape. But even so, I felt bad about Suzie Flowers—like I’d stolen something from her that could never be replaced.

  AKIKO

  Sometimes Akiko felt like a thief, sneaking through the desolate corners of her own life, stealing back moments and pieces of herself.

  It hadn’t always been like this. She and “John” had been married for three years. Before that, Akiko had a job at a manga publishing house, writing copy for comic books. She had studied the classics in college, but there wasn’t much of a market for that these days. Not that she ever really thought she’d have a career or even continue her education.

  She liked the job at the comics because it gave her a chance to write things. Her specialty was action-adventure and her coworkers teased her, said she had a knack for gore. When she got married, she gave up the job in order to learn to cook and otherwise prepare for motherhood. Since then she’d written articles for maternity magazines from time to time, but she could tell that the young mothers from the danchi thought it presumptuous of her to write on subjects she knew nothing about. “John” was a great believer in positive thinking, though. He had taken an American course in it. He believed that if she concentrated on positive thoughts of maternity, she would get pregnant, so he had forbidden her to write about anything else. His meat campaign to fatten her up and restore her periods was part of the same training. Positive Thinking leads to Positive Action which leads to Success.

  But it wasn’t working. Akiko had a hard time with positive thoughts. After dinner, when the washing up was done, she would go to the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, and stare at her reflection. Then, after only a moment, she’d start to feel the meat. It began in her stomach, like an animal alive, and would climb its way back up her gullet, until it burst from the back of her throat. She could not con
tain it. She could not keep any life down inside her. But she knew always to flush while she was vomiting, so “John” wouldn’t hear. She also knew that she felt a small flutter in her stomach, which she identified as success, every night when it was over.

  Things That Give a Clean Feeling

  An earthen cup. A new metal bowl.

  A rush mat.

  The play of the light on water as one pours it into a vessel. A new wooden chest.

  Things That Give an Unclean Feeling

  A rat’s nest.

  Someone who is late in washing his hands in the morning. White snivel, and children who sniffle as they walk. The containers used for oil.

  Little sparrows.

  A person who does not bathe for a long time even though the weather is hot.

  All faded clothes give me an unclean feeling, especially those that have glossy colors.

  The effete somnambulance of Heian court aesthetics was reassuring to Akiko, late at night in a dim pool of light, lying next to “John,” who was snoring with his back to her. She turned the pages of The Pillow Book with exquisite care so as not to wake him. Shōnagon was so sure of herself and her prescriptions, and Akiko found that it comforted her to read them.

  Oxen should have very small foreheads.

  Small children and babies ought to be plump.

  On the fifth of the Fifth Month, I prefer a cloudy sky.

  A preacher ought to be good-looking.

  To meet one’s lover, summer is indeed the right season.

  Akiko could not imagine what such certainty would feel like. She never felt at all sure of anything, even of her likes and dislikes. She had bought a pillow book of her own, a small locked diary that she kept under the futon, and from time to time she tried to make some lists like Shonagon’s: “Splendid Things” and “Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past.”

  “Snow,” she wrote, trying to recall Hokkaido in her mind. “Cows. Countryside. Farmhouse.” But then her mind would stray and she would see instead the dour face of the aunt who’d raised her, and the leer of her uncle, drunk and lurking by the outhouse. A car accident had killed her parents and her younger brother. She had been in the car too, thrown safe, but she had seen the rivers of blood, seen their bodies....

  These were not fond memories at all and Akiko wondered if perhaps they ought not to be listed under “Regrettable Things” instead. In the end, she found that she couldn’t really get past Shonagon’s headings. She did a bit better with more concrete topics, like “Clouds.” Maybe her choice of categories was wrong, she thought. Too lackluster. She picked up a pencil and flipped through Shonagon’s lists, looking for a topic with more gusto.

  Squalid Things

  The back of a piece of embroidery.

  The inside of a cat’s ear.

  A swarm of mice, who still have no fur, when they come

  wriggling out of their nest.

  The seams of a fur robe that has not yet been lined.

  The problem with Shōnagon, Akiko thought, is that she was hard to improve on. Even if the things that she described, like unlined fur robes, weren’t so common in everyday life nowadays, you could, if you thought about it, still imagine perfectly how squalid they would seem. Of course, other items on her lists were timeless.

  Darkness in a place that does not give the impression of

  being very clean.

  A rather unattractive woman who looks after a large brood of

  children.

  That was a perfect description of Flowers, the Coca-Cola lady, and she was a housewife from Iowa in the United States of America. Not that Flowers was unattractive to start with. At first she seemed quite charming, but by the end of the show Akiko felt that something was wrong. After all those squirming children and the sweet, greasy roast and the cheap champagne that her cheating husband brought home, her life seemed squalid indeed. Akiko had given the show a 3 for Authenticity, and “John” was still angry with her.

  “I thought ... ,” Akiko tried to explain. “I don’t know why ... maybe it was the computer graphics.”

  “But it’s just like cartoons,” he complained, as though she’d betrayed him. “I thought you liked manga....”

  “Yes, but this is supposed to be real, isn’t it? It just ... it felt like they were hiding something.”

  “John” sighed with irritation. “It still deserves better than a three.”

  Akiko knew better than to argue. Ever since the production of My American Wife! had gotten under way, “John” was irritable all the time. “It’s out of my hands now,” he declared. “It’s a good, solid program concept, and the Americans are ruining it.” He came home regularly every night and had turned his restless attention back to her menstrual difficulties, annoyed that the increase in their meat consumption still hadn’t fleshed her out. She was as pale and anemic as ever.

  A woman who falls ill and remains unwell for a long time. In

  the mind of her lover, who is not particularly devoted to her,

  she must appear rather squalid.

  And there it was, thought Akiko, her own sad self. What could she possibly add to a list like that? She put down her pencil. It was depressing. Some things hadn’t changed in the last one thousand years. As she closed her pillow book and tucked it under her mattress, she realized there was one thing she felt sure of. However squalid, the meat was critical. She glanced over at “John,” then turned off the small lamp. She must continue to make a big deal of the meat.

  JANE

  “His name is Joichi Ueno,” I explained to my ex-flight attendant PA. “That’s pronounced ‘Wayno.’ He likes to be called John.”

  The flight attendant groaned. I shrugged. Actually, I was the one who had given him the nickname, during the initial planning meetings for the show. Kato told me he was so proud of it that he insisted on using it all the time, even to his colleagues in Japan.

  “Listen,” I continued sternly. “Don’t give him attitude. This is the big man, the Chief Beef. I’m giving you a major responsibility here. I want you to pick him up at the airport and fall in love with him, and more importantly, I want him to fall in love with you. Got it? Your job is to take care of him, keep him out of the way. You are uniquely suited to this assignment. The two of you have similar tastes.”

  As the representative of the ad agency in charge of marketing the meats, Ueno was my de facto boss. He was a real hands-on kind of guy and he always showed up for the commercial shoots. Each episode of My American Wife! carried four attractive commercial spots for BEEF-EX. The strategy was “to develop a powerful synergy between the commercials and the documentary vehicles, in order to stimulate consumer purchase motivation.” In other words, the commercials were to bleed into the documentaries, and documentaries were to function as commercials.

  We had bigger crews for the commercials. I didn’t coordinate them, since I am a documentarian, but I was asked to help out, in order to reinforce the synergy.

  It’s good to unbalance these agency guys right from the get-go, and renaming them is an effective way to start. Ueno was a large, soft-bodied man, with smooth, damp skin and a stunningly profound halitosis, indicative of serious digestive problems, which rose, vaporlike, from the twists of his bowels. He had gone to a Christian college and been a member of the English Speaking Society, where he studied the language assiduously in order to explain to Americans why the Japanese were unique. He had one weakness, which I happened to know all about, having done my part on previous shoots to both cultivate and exploit it: he loved big-breasted American women. Strapping Texas strippers were a very effective tool in the unbalancing of John Wayno.

  So I assigned my flight attendant to him with specific instructions to “get Wayno wasted.” The two of them toured all the strip joints in Austin that night, and accordingly, on the first day of the shoot, John was still drunk and docile. We were shooting a square dance scene; the girls were wearing short, frilly dresses that looked like inverted chrysanthemums, and John sa
t quietly on a sandbag in a corner of the set where he could look up their skirts as they sashayed by. We finished Day One on schedule.

  That night, though, he resisted our combined efforts at temptation and got a good night’s sleep. Day Two was a nightmare. It was the most important day, ten hours of tabletop, and we were shooting the Presentation of the Meat. To stay on schedule, we needed to get two shots: the Sizzle Cut, a big fat slab of raw steak hitting the griddle; and the Presentation, the same steak on a platter, perfectly seared and carved to reveal a moist and tender pink interior.

  John hated everything. The choice of plates was inadequate. The vegetable accessories were unappetizing. The meat was dull and lifeless. He complained about the marbling and fussed with the hues, peering over the shoulder of the food stylist as she labored with her little camel-hair brushes to achieve just the right blush of pink. Eighteen hours later he was still unsatisfied with the Sizzle, then the meat wranglers ran out of glycerin to make the beef glisten and the American crew walked. I found him all by himself on the empty set, leaning over a platter of steak, breathing on the lettuce and morosely tweaking a pea. John Wayno had a dark and lonely side to his personality.

  Of course, when he saw the dailies, everything was gorgeous, and he was as pleased as if he’d shot every plump and juicy frame himself.

  That night we all went club hopping. Between the whiskey and the lap dancing and the warm sense of a job well done, old John Wayno was in heaven. The young Texas beauties were breaking his heart. He wept freely as one—her name was Dawn—straddled his tenderloin and offered up her round rump for his inspection. When she pivoted to face him, the tears in his eyes rolled down his mottled checks and splashed the pert pink tips of her nipples.