My Year of Meats (3 page)

Murasaki Shikibu, author of The
Tale of
Genji,
wrote the following about Shonagon in her diary:

Murasaki Shikibu scorned what she called Shōnagon’s “Chinese writings,” and this is why: Japan had no written language at all until the sixth century, when the characters were borrowed from Chinese. In Shonagon’s day, these bold characters were used only by men—lofty poets and scholars—while the women diarists, who were writing prose, like Murasaki and Shōnagon, were supposed to use a simplified alphabet, which was soft and feminine. But Shōnagon overstepped her bounds. From time to time, she wrote in Chinese characters. She dabbled in the male tongue.

Murasaki may not have liked her much, but I admire Shōnagon, listmaker and leaver of presumptuous scatterings. She inspired me to become a documentarian, to speak men’s Japanese, to be different. She is why I chose to make TV. I wanted to think that some girl would watch my shows in Japan, now or maybe even a thousand years from now, and be inspired and learn something real about America. Like I did.

During my Year of Meats, I made documentaries about an exotic and vanishing America for consumption on the flip side of the planet, and I learned a lot: For example, we didn’t even have cows in this country until the Spanish introduced them, along with cowboys. Even tumbleweed, another symbol of the American West, is actually an exotic plant called Russian thistle, that’s native not to America but to the wide-open steppes of Central Europe. All over the world, native species are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem quaint.

Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we’re all going to be brown, sort of. Some days, when I’m feeling grand, I feel brand-new—like a prototype. Back in the olden days, my dad’s ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom’s on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world.

“Rumpu rossuto,” Akiko repeated to herself. “Notto Pepsi pleezu.” She watched the television screen, where a sturdy American wife held an economy-size plastic bottle of Coca-Cola upside down over a roasting pan. The woman smiled broadly at Akiko, who automatically smiled back. The woman shook the bottle, disgorging its contents in rhythmic spurts onto the red “rumpu rossuto.” Under her breath, Akiko pronounced the words again. She liked the sounds, the parallel Japanese r’s, with their delicate flick of the tongue across the palate, and the plosive
pu
like a kiss or a fart in the middle of a big American dinner.

She liked the size of things American. Convenient. Economical. Big and simple. Like this wife with the “rumpu.” Impatient, she shook the bottle up and down, like a fretful infant unable to make its toy work. A close-up showed the plastic Coke bottle so large it made her fingers look childlike as she squeezed its soft sides. The camera traveled down the foamy brown waterfall of cola until it hit the meat, alive with shiny bubbles. The woman laughed. Her name was Suzie Flowers. What a beautiful name, thought Akiko. Suzie Flowers laughed easily, but Akiko was practicing how to do this too.

Now Suzie was opening a can with her electric can opener. Several children ran through the kitchen and Suzie good-naturedly chased them out with the spatula. Then, never missing a beat, she used the spatula to smear pale mushroom soup over the roast and pat its sides. Pat, pat, pat. She sprinkled the onion soup mix on top and popped it in the oven. Bake at 250° for 3 hours. Easy. Done.

Akiko was so thin her bones hurt. Her watch hung loosely around her wrist and its face never stayed on top. She spun it around and checked the time. The recipe was simple, and if she did her shopping in the morning she would have plenty of time to get to the market and back, marinate the meat, and cook it properly for three hours. She double-checked the ingredients that she had written down on her list and realized she should have a vegetable too. Canned peas, Suzie suggested. Easy. Done. Suzie bent over the oven. Her children pushed between her sturdy, mottled legs and hung off her hem. They must have just poured out, Akiko thought, one after the other, in frothy bursts of fertility. It was a disturbing thought, squalid somehow, and made her feel nauseous.

“It’s not spite,” Akiko muttered, chewing her lip, “or my contrary nature.” She tried a smile again at Suzie, tried to feel happy-go-lucky.

 

 

When her periods stopped coming, Akiko’s doctor had told her that her ovaries were starved and weren’t producing any eggs. Akiko’s husband, Joichi, was very upset. He told her that she must put some meat on her bones and he bought her a stack of cookbooks—
Meats Made Easy, Refined Meat for the Japanese Palate, Delicate Meats,
and
The Meat We
Eat. He read each one, cover to cover.

“‘
A
liberal meat supply,’ ” he said, quoting from this last book, “‘has always been associated with a happy and virile people and invariably has been the main food available to settlers of new and undeveloped territory.’ ”

He held up the book for her to see.

“Professor P. Thomas Ziegler. A wise man. An American.”

Joichi believed in meat. The advertising agency he worked for handled a big account that represented American-grown meat in Japan. After a few months of reading cookbooks, Joichi began working late at the office every night. Then he started making business trips to Texas. Akiko didn’t mind, but she began to worry when he returned from one of them and told her curtly:

“Joichi is not a modern name. From now on, call me ‘John.’ ”

He was working on a big project, he told her. As his state of suppressed agitation grew, she wondered if he was also having a Texas affair.

Then one day he arrived home and made an announcement.

“
My
American Wife!”
he proclaimed, then sat back and waited for her reaction.

Akiko’s heart sank. “Who ... ?” she whispered sadly. “When ... ?”

“Saturday mornings at eight o’clock. Thirty minutes. Our new TV show. It’s a
documentary.”

He swelled with pride—and that’s when her meat duties started. Every Saturday morning, she would be required to watch
My
American Wife!
and then fill out a questionnaire he had designed, rating the program from one to ten in categories such as General Interest, Educational Value, Authenticity, Wholesomeness, Availability of Ingredients, and Deliciousness of Meat. To complete these last two, she would have to go out and shop for the ingredients and then prepare the recipe introduced on that morning’s show. On Saturday evening, when “John” came home from work, they would eat the meat, and he would critique it and then discuss her answers to the questionnaire.

“Kill two birds with one stone,” “John” said jovially. They were sitting at the low
kotatsu
table after dinner. “John” was drinking a Rémy Martin, and Akiko was having a cup of tea.

“You will help me with the campaign,” he continued, “and learn to cook meat too. Fatten you up a little.” Then, all of a sudden, he got very serious. He sat straight up on his knees in front of her, spine stiff, head bowed.

“It was on account of your condition that I was able to have this wonderful idea for the BEEF-EX campaign in the first place,” he said in formal Japanese. “I have received great praise from my superiors at the company, and if everything goes well I shall get a significant advancement too.” He bowed deeply in front of her, touching his head to the tatami floor. “I am most grateful to you.”

Akiko blushed, heart pounding with pleasure, then she realized he was drunk.

 

 

It was the Sociological Survey part of the program that Akiko didn’t really care for, so she stood up to get ready to leave. She checked the thermometer on the balcony, then stepped outside and looked over the railing at the playground in the courtyard, twelve flights below. It was cold and still quite early on a winter morning to be outside. A toddler, a little girl swaddled in a pink snowsuit, was playing on the swings. Her mother stood near the chain-link fence with an infant strapped to her back, draped in a hooded red plaid cape that made the woman look hunchbacked. She leaned forward under the weight of the child and bounced it gently up and down. Akiko watched the little girl in pink. She could hear the chains quite clearly as the girl swung back and forth. The
kree kraa kree kraa
sound echoed up the sides of the tall buildings of the
danchi
apartment complex, which surrounded the playground like steep canyon walls.

Akiko used to play on a swing set like this one in Hokkaido when she was little. She loved the swing, but it was always crowded with other children. One winter day as she waited her turn, standing off to one side of the set by the upright pipe that supported the crossbar, she pressed her tongue to the cold metal—for no reason, except that she thought it would taste refreshing, like ice. But to her surprise, her tongue stuck fast. She remembered the pain and also the strangeness of being stuck like that, surrounded by people who didn’t know. It was lonely. She whimpered a bit to see if anyone would notice, and then stopped when no one did. Finally she held her breath and wrenched her head back, ripping the skin. Separated from the pipe, her torn tongue filled her mouth with blood. She crouched down so no one would see and spit onto the frozen ground. Then she swallowed and stood up. The blood lay on the frozen sand in a little puddle, so she rubbed it out with the tip of her toe and continued to wait her turn.

Akiko shivered. Now, whenever a cold wind brought tears to her eyes and the winter sky turned the color of steel, she could taste the flavor of blood and metal. She went back inside and slid the glass door shut.

 

 

Suzie Flowers and her pipe-fitter husband, Fred, were posed in an awkward group portrait with a dozen neighbors and family friends. The Survey was conducted like an informal quiz show; the participants all held two large cards facedown in their laps, and when a question was read off, they answered by flipping up one or the other of the cards to reveal a bold YES or NO. It was the special Valentine’s Day Show, so there was a romantic theme to some of the questions, and the cards were decorated with big red hearts.

“Did you marry your high school Valentine?”

“Was he/she a virgin when you got married?”

“Do you think Japan is an economic threat to America?”

The questions mixed current events with a bawdy household humor that made Akiko uncomfortable. She put her coat on, ready to go.

“Have you ever had an extramarital affair?”

Finger on the button to turn off the TV, Akiko watched as pipe-fitter Fred flipped a YES. No one laughed. The camera cut to Suzie Flowers’ panic-stricken face and, astonishingly, the sound track reverberated with a loud
boinnggg!
Akiko sank slowly back down to her knees and watched the show until the end. The piece of paper with her shopping list on it was in her pocket, and later, standing in front of the butcher’s counter at the market, she pulled it out and realized that she had kneaded it between her fingers until the writing had all rubbed off. The butcher waited impatiently as she stared down at the limp scrap in her palm, trying to decipher the meat. Then she remembered the parallel r’s and the plosive
pu.

“Rumpu rossuto, please,” she said to the butcher. “A big one.”

Out of habit, Suzie Flowers stifled her crying under a mountain of brand-new floral bedding. From time to time she wiped her nose on the comforter and she noticed that the polyester blend didn’t absorb as well as the old cotton one. When Jane, the coordinator, had come for the location scout, she had asked to see all around the house, including the bedroom. The old quilt caught her interest and she had asked all sorts of questions about it. Suzie’s mother had made it. It was all stained and torn, and Suzie was so ashamed of it that after the coordinator left that day, she went right out to Wal-Mart and bought new bedding that would look nice on TV. She also bought new guest towels for the bathroom and lots of extra sodas for the Japanese crew. But they never wanted any. They were so well prepared, with their own cooler in the van, filled with mineral water from France. They were polite about it, but Suzie figured that the Japanese people just didn’t like American pop.

During the shooting the following week, Jane had hesitated when she saw the new bedding and asked again about the old quilt, which Suzie had already washed and sent off to her sister in Wisconsin, who collected antiques. That was the big joke, that the quilt was so old you could call it an antique. Jane frowned and consulted with Mr. Oda, the director, in Japanese, then she asked if there was any way to get it back quickly. But Suzie had sent the package by parcel post, because airmail was so expensive. There wasn’t any real hurry for it to get there, after all, and now it was probably on a mail truck somewhere between here and Sheboygan. Jane had looked stunned. She explained that it was the
old
quilt they liked, because it had old-fashioned, wholesome family values. The new quilt was not interesting, she said, and Mr. Oda seemed very angry and decided not to shoot in the bedroom. Suzie felt terrible.