My Year of Meats

Ruth Ozeki

Paperback

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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."

Book Details

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publish Date: Mar 1st, 1999
Pages: 402
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.06in - 5.12in - 0.80in - 0.62lb
EAN: 9780140280463
Recommended age: 18-UP
Categories: • Literary• Humorous - General• Family Life - General

About the Author

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.

Praise for this book

"Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists . . . bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page."
--Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of This Is How You Lose Her

"In precise and luminous prose, Ozeki captures both the sweep and detail of our shared humanity. The result is gripping, fearless, inspiring and true."
--Madeline Miller, author of the Orange Prize winner The Song of Achilles

"Wonderfully wild and bracing . . . A feast that leaves you hungry for whatever Ozeki cooks up next."
--Newsweek

"My Year of Meats pulsates with passion. . . . Ozeki's first novel detonates an attack on the meat industry that would make Upton Sinclair sit up and smile . . . yet all this energy doesn't obscure the novel's quirky charm."
--USA Today

"Ruth Ozeki masks a deeper purpose with a light tone . . . A comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical novel."
--Jane Smiley, Chicago Tribune

"An amazingly assured debut, My Year of Meats is a wonderfully irreverent novel, with wacky cross-cultural collisions and hilarious characters . . . a joy to read."
--Elle

"Ozeki offers a remarkably fresh view of the rocky road many women travel to love and motherhood . . . one of the heartiest, and, yes, meatiest debuts in years."
--Glamour

"Romance, agri-business, self-discovery, cross-cultural misunderstanding--it takes a talent like Ruth Ozeki's to blend all these ingredients beautifully together. My Year of Meats is a sensitive and compelling portrait of two modern women."
--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

"Canny, cunning, muckraking, and lusty, weaving hormones and corporate threats, fertility and independence."
--The Village Voice

"A likeably odd and inventively imagined tale . . . Ozeki writes with the same over-the-top verve as fellow hyper-realist David Foster Wallace."
--Detroit Free Press