My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  “Japanese girl not like this,” he cried out mournfully. “Scrawny, you know? Not happy-go-lucky.”

  Dawn winced at the warmth of his carrion breath. She lifted her ample tit to her mouth and licked off his tear, then scampered away with a hundred dollars of our production budget tucked inside her G-string.

  John sighed mightily and wiped his eyes with his neatly pressed handkerchief. You could tell that his wife back in Tokyo had packed his bags. He looked around the room with great longing. His eyes came to rest on me.

  “You, Takagi, are good example of hybrid vigor, you know?”

  “No.” I was sitting in the corner, minding my own business, making mental notes for a fax I was going to write later on that night. I didn’t think I needed to be drawn into this conversation.

  “Yes.” John Wayno surveyed me critically. He reached across the table and took my jaw in his hand, turning my head from side to side. I held my breath. I fully expected him to pry open my mouth to inspect my gums and teeth. Then he let go of,my face and shook his head sadly.

  “We Japanese get weak genes through many centuries’ process of straight breeding. Like old-fashioned cows. Make weak stock. But you are good and strong and modern girl from crossbreeding. You have hybrid vigor. My wife, never mind her. We try for having baby many, many years, but she is no good. Me, I need mate like Texas Dawn to make a vigor baby.”

  He leaned back in his chair, took a long drink, then waved at another dancer, who came trotting obediently over. As I exhaled and watched him, I started counting categories:Hateful

  Unsuitable

  Depressing

  Annoying

  Presumptuous

  Things That Give a Hot Feeling

  Things That Give a Pathetic Impression

  Things Without Merit

  Things That Are Unpleasant to See

  When I’d put enough distance between us, it occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the history of the world who has ever recalled Shonagon in a strip joint in Texas. I liked that.

  People Who Look Pleased with Themselves

  I was at the top of that list.

  AKIKO

  Three years earlier, when they moved into the danchi complex after their honeymoon, “John” had instructed Akiko that it was her duty to purchase condoms until such time as it was appropriate to cease practicing birth control and start a family. Kneeling on the futon next to her, he broached the subject as he plucked a condom from the box.

  “That’s the last one,” he said, “from the honeymoon supply.” He ripped open the foil packet. “You have to take care of buying them from now on. As a married man, it’s not appropriate for me to do it. Make sure you always have plenty on hand—this brand.”

  He dropped the torn wrapper onto her bare stomach. She smoothed the ripped foil carefully and studied the label, “Mandom SuperPlus,” then pressed it carefully between the pages of the cooking magazine she’d been studying.

  “You don’t suppose you could possibly learn to do this too?” There was an edge to his voice. He straddled her head, his penis inches from her nose. She watched, cross-eyed, as he slowly unrolled the thin rubber sheath down the shaft. She reached up and held it between the tips of her finger and her thumb and tugged obligingly.

  How does one buy condoms? During their sex that night, she had been wholly preoccupied with the problem.

  Next to the market there was a neighborhood pharmacy, but when Akiko went the following day, she saw that the condoms were behind the counter, out of reach. She deliberated for a long time over American painkillers and then bought a spare bottle of shampoo and an unnecessary box of mineral bath salts from a famous local hot spring. It was hopeless, she realized as she paid. A box of Mandom SuperPlus, please, She could hear the words in her head, but she would never be able to say them out loud to the salesgirl.

  The only other option was the vending machine on the corner by the liquor store just down the block from the train station. Akiko waited until dusk.

  There were actually three machines on the corner. One sold the condoms. The one next to it sold pornographic magazines. The magazines were displayed in two vertical rows, with strips of mirrored foil discreetly shielding from view the nude parts of the girls on their covers. But in the dim yellow glow of the streetlamp you could still see the top halves, and you could still get the gist, whether it was high school girls in sailor uniforms, or tortured women bound in fetal positions with ropes that crisscrossed their breasts, or nude nuns, even.

  The third machine sold batteries.

  Akiko was in a hurry, afraid that one of her neighbors, returning home from work to the danchi, would pass by and see her. She put her coins in, pressed the button, and quickly pocketed the pack that came out. As she turned away, she caught a glimpse of her eyes reflected in the foil that shielded the girls in the magazine machine. The girls peered back from their covers, but her own eyes, fractured in the wrinkled foil, were the ones that looked lifeless.

  On the way home, seeing that the street was still empty, she sneaked a quick peek at the package in her pocket. They were the wrong brand, not Mandom SuperPlus. “John” would be angry. He would stare at her with contempt.

  “Just don’t think about it,” she counseled herself, taking a detour so she could walk a little longer along the embankment by the train tracks. She liked it there. Plum trees lined the tracks; since it was March, they were just starting to bloom, and the blossoms, lit by the streetlamps, were bright against the cold, dark sky. “Think about something else instead.” So she thought about the vending machines, but couldn’t understand why the three types of machines were grouped together, next to each other like that, occupying the same street corner. If you bought the pornography, why would you need condoms? And how did the batteries fit in?

  The extra shampoo would never go to waste. She decided that she would pack the bath salts in “John” ’s suitcase, as a surprise, the next time he went to America. It would be a considerate, wifely gesture, if indeed he noticed, and would perhaps make him feel nostalgic for home.

  As it turned out, he did notice. He returned the gesture by bringing her a package of prickly neon-colored rubber rings, “Texas Ticklers,” that he’d bought in a vending machine in the men’s bathroom of a truck stop in America. She looked curiously at the quivering apparatus sitting in the palm of her hand. It looked like a small pelagic squid, like something she remembered from her cousin’s fishing tackle box. “John” lay on his back, waiting, and she attached it to him with a dexterity that she was practicing to hide her distaste.

  Sex with the squids on was more abrasive than usual, and after a couple of tries, she asked “John” if it would be all right not to use them anymore.

  “Fine, whatever.” He shrugged, obviously offended. “I bought them for your pleasure.”

  “John” felt it was unseemly for couples to announce a pregnancy too early in a marriage, but after a year, he announced it was time to try. By then, though, Akiko had lost weight and her menstruations were beginning to dry up. She hadn’t told “John” because it hadn’t mattered. But suddenly her periods became his business, and as soon as they did, she stopped having them entirely. After the second year, he began to grumble; his mother was expecting a grandson, he said, people at work were beginning to talk. But still, nothing. Now, in the third year of their marriage, he was stony with rage.

  4.

  The Deutzia2 Month

  SHŌNAGON

  Hateful Things

  A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time. He drags himself out of bed with a look of dismay on his face. The lady urges him on: “Come, my friend, it’s getting light. You don’t want anyone to find you here.” He gives a deep sigh, as if to say that the night has not been nearly long enough and that it is agony to leave. Once up, he does not instantly pull on his trousers. Instead he comes close to the lady and whispers whatever was left unsaid during the night. Even when he is dressed, he st
ill lingers, vaguely pretending to be fastening his sash.

  Presently he raises the lattice, and the two lovers stand together by the side door while he tells her how he dreads the coming day, which will keep them apart; then he slips away. The lady watches him go, and this moment of parting will remain among her most charming memories.

  Indeed, one’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking. When he jumps out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens his trouser-sash, rolls up the sleeves of his Court cloak, over-robe, or hunting costume, stuffs his belongings into the breast of his robe and then briskly secures the outer sash—one really begins to hate him.

  JANE

  I had a lover in the Year of Meats. His name was Sloan and he was a musician from Chicago. A mutual friend had sort of set us up, but I was never in New York much and he was always on the road, so it was months before we actually met in person. Instead we got into this phone sex thing. I’d call him up late at night from some trucker’s motel in Gnawbone, Indiana, or wherever we happened to be shooting, and we’d have these libidinous conversations that went on into the night. Production paid the bills, so it didn’t matter how long we talked. When we weren’t on the phone we’d fax, and I could usually count on a transmission waiting for me at the front desk when I’d check into a new motel. It made things interesting, helped mark the time. I always wondered if the desk clerks read our faxes or listened in to our calls.

  “Exotic? Well, botanically speaking, yes, but not what you’d expect. I’m more of a hybrid or a mutant.... I’m tall. Very tall, pole thin....

  “Green eyes, shaped like my Japanese mother’s with her epicanthic fold. My dad’s eyes were blue. The green’s not traceable, but Ma thinks it’s the oni and I’m the devil’s spawn....

  “Brown hair. Usually. Sometimes I dye it when I’m not working. Short, but respectable. No, like really short. Like boy short. Yeah, with a couple of AWOL parts that stick out in front....

  “Breasts? Upstanding, small. Never discouraged, never lethargic ... Yes, quite sensitive ... Hmm, yes, some pain is good....

  “Now? At a truck stop. Lying on the bed looking up at the drop ceiling ... An old army-green sleeveless undershirt and brand-new boxer shorts from Wal-Mart ... Haven’t been near a laundromat in weeks. Yes, men’s shorts ... More room to move around in ...

  “The room? Lurid. Weeping walls and peeling ceilings, and it reeks of Tiparillos. The wallpaper’s flocked, harvest gold with a floral pattern. The walls are riddled with pockmarks, looks like from an air gun, and the mirror has a large crack in it. Mattress like a sponge. The carpet is golden, too, and sticky, so I’m wearing my combat boots ... unlaced, no socks.... No. You know what it’s like? A 1960s porn set: exotic Eurasian of ambiguous gender, dressed in men’s underwear and combat boots, lying on her back having phone sex on the damp polyester bedspread—sort of post-Vietnam nostalgia-porn thing. A quick little R and R fantasy in Tokyo or Seoul. I should call the boys in to film it. There must be a market for this....”

  We finally met in Nebraska. I got back to the motel after a day of shooting a Mrs. Beedles and her Busy-B-Brisket, to find Sloan sipping a martini at the motel bar. He had no trouble recognizing us, of course, being as we were the only Japanese television crew in the 77,355 square miles of high plains that is Nebraska. He strolled over to us and extended his hand.

  “Jane Takagi-Little? Sloan Rankin, Nebraska Film Commissioner. It’s my distinct pleasure to welcome you and your distinguished crew to the Cornhusker State.”

  I tripped over the tripod I was carrying. Suzuki and Oh and the director were right behind me, so I introduced them all, and that’s when I noticed something peculiar about the Japanese crew—they would not look an American in the face. The director, a shy, sweet man this time, approached the ersatz Commissioner with desperation and gusto. In a valiant simulation of a hearty American greeting, he pumped Sloan’s hand, but he was unable to raise his eyes from the floor. When Oh’s turn came, his body just seemed to rotate like a magnet driven away by an opposing charge. Suzuki was the most successful ; he fixed his gaze in the region of Sloan’s solar plexus and haltingly greeted the string tie Sloan had purchased as part of his Commissioner disguise. Along with the cowboy hat. Or so he told me later.

  “Will you be visiting our national forest during your stay?” Sloan drawled with unctuous aplomb. “It truly is one of Nebraska’s more notable attractions, being as it’s the only man-made forest in the United States of America.”

  The crew stood quietly, heads bowed, and withstood this onslaught of English like schoolboys being singled out for unfair punishment, so I excused them and they escaped to their rooms with the equipment. Later I gave them petty cash and asked them to fend for themselves; I had to eat with the Commissioner. He’d been such a valuable asset during preproduction, I explained, and had introduced us to Mrs. Beedles and her Brisket and all the nice folks of Nebraska ... but Suzuki and Oh and the director were already deep into communion with Jack Daniel’s, cackling convulsively about something esoteric pertaining to their choice of video entertainment for the evening.

  I left them in the motel room, cabling up the Betacam to the motel TV. In our equipment case was a small but well-curated collection of prerecorded tape stock with titles like “Texas T-Bone Does the Hoosier Hooters.” These were little-known regional delights that the crew had acquired during our travels, and needless to say, the climax was always about meat.

  It was a cinematic night. A seedy motel room. A tall, dark stranger in cowboy boots, who followed me through the door, shut it firmly behind, then locked it. The unfamiliar hand, resting heavily on my shoulder, letting me know that I wouldn’t get away. In the cool night, beyond the venetian blinds, the nervous light of the neon flickered red and hot. Sloan was unapologetic as he pushed me down onto the flimsy bed and lowered himself on top. As the Commissioner, he was relentless.

  “Nebraska,” he breathed into my ear. “Population: one million, five hundred eighty-four thousand, six hundred seventeen. Birth rate: seventeen per thousand. Death rate: nine point two per thousand. Population density: twenty point seven persons per square mile. Thirty-seventh state in the Union.”

  He kissed me for a long time, then turned me over onto my stomach. “Major agricultural products,” he continued, “—corn, soybeans, hay, wheat, sorghum, dry edible beans”—he gnawed on the back of my neck—“sugar beets”—he doubled me over—“cattle, pigs, sheep ...”

  He ran his hands around me, up under my T-shirt and down into my boxer shorts. With a quick yank, he pulled them down, then pressed against me. “Nebraska state motto: Equality Before the Law.”

  There was to be no discussion.

  Sloan played the sax. He had a remarkable embouchure and a memory for facts. All the things I’d told him on the phone over the previous months he remembered and now put to use, in an ebb and flow that lasted until morning. It was odd. Since I knew him so intimately from the phone, I felt emboldened to do or say anything—but at the same time, since I’d never met the physical man before, I was rocked by the heart-pounding terror of fucking a total stranger. He felt the strangeness too. During a rest, I opened my eyes and caught him staring.

  “Is it what you’d imagined?” I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask.

  “More or less. You’re younger looking. Like a prepubescent boy after a growth spurt.”

  “Do you feel like a pedophile?”

  “A bit. But I like it. What about you?”

  “I knew you. Your descriptions were good. Gaunt, cadaverous.”

  “Do you feel like a necrophile?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I don’t mind looking like a corpse, but you shouldn’t think I fuck like one. I’d be upset.”

  He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. His face was rough and his eyes were deep-set, curtained by a forelock of dark-brown hair, which diffused their intensity. He was tall. Taller than me, and lanky, but still somehow elegant.
He had the most remarkable fingers, long and dexterous, and a habit of pressing his fingertips against his lips, as though to seal them shut. He could do wonderful things with his fingers.

  In the morning, when it was still dark, I dragged myself out of bed, showered, and dressed. I left Sloan asleep, sprawled across the bed; he was an exquisite corpse. The crew was in the parking lot, silently loading the equipment into the van. We drove through the deep-blue, shadowy dawn to shoot the sun rising over the Nebraska dunes. Throughout the long day I thought about Sloan incessantly. He had insinuated himself under my skin. Whenever I could, I would disengage from the scene at hand, and my mind would retract like an oyster to its shell, to worry this newfound nacreous pebble. When we got back to the motel later that day, he was gone. He had chartered a flight from the municipal airport and disappeared as abruptly as he’d come. The room had been cleaned, sheets changed, bed made. I thought perhaps he might have left a note on the night table, or perhaps in my suitcase, or on the bathroom mirror. Perhaps a message at the front desk. But he hadn’t. I went to bed. Lay there and waited. By the time he called, I was dead asleep.

  “You’re not here,” I told him groggily.

  “No. That’s right. I’m here.” His voice was low, a rough whisper. Suddenly I was wide awake.

  “Oh, Weren’t you just here?” A deep, sleep-induced indifference was the effect I was after, but my heart was in my throat and pounding.

  “Yes. I was there last night.”

  “Oh.” I yawned. “I don’t believe you.”

  “No?” I could hear him smile.

  “No. Because I don’t think you exist. Good night.”

  “That’s too bad. It’s sad that I leave such a transient impression. I will try to fix that. Let’s see, Bloom on Saturday, isn’t it? Just south of Dodge City?”