My Year of Meats (46 page)

 

It sounds coherent now but it wasn’t. It’s certainly not something I planned to do in advance. I’d describe the process as organic, with one part growing willy-nilly out of another.

 

This was a tongue-in-cheek reference, a way of alerting the reader to the potential unreliability of author/narrators. The quote continues at the end of the book, when Shonagon asserts, “I wrote these notes at home, when I had a good deal of time to myself and thought no one would notice what I was doing. Everything that, I have ever seen and felt is included.... Whatever people may think of my book, I still regret that it ever came to light.” Jane then attacks Shonagon’s stance, calling it falsely modest, and goes on to proclaim her own determination to bring her stories to light, unflinchingly. Of course, that is Jane. Who is different than me. I flinch. And yes, I was stunned at the acclaim, both national and international. Honestly, you write something, you inhabit your world for a year or ten or however long it takes, and then it’s over and you simply cannot imagine why anyone else would be interested. And then, miraculously, they are.

 

There are two very distinct parallels between yourself and Jane
—
you’re both filmmakers and you’re both of mixed heritage. Do the similarities stop there? How about Akiko? What part of her character did you relate to the most?

 

Jane is my extroverted self and our exterior identities and experiences of the world have much in common. But Akiko is my little introvert. I suspect I was more like her when I was younger and less able to recognize or harness my strength, and often turned it against myself as a result.

 

I’d agree that he is perhaps more simply depicted than Jane and Akiko, but then maintain that he is not a point-of-view character and the book isn’t really about him. One thing that has surprised me is that some readers feel so little empathy for him. Sure, he is the villain of the book, but he is a sad man, too. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, between his American bosses and Japanese corporate culture on one hand, and two highly subversive women on the other. He feels extreme rage and he has a substance-abuse problem; he handles himself very badly. I think his position is interesting, compromised, and one I can relate to.

 

 

No. As I mentioned, I’ve made two films, both of which have trodden into fictional realms before, and all through school and college I wrote short stories. In fact, as a child, the first thing I remember ever wanting to be was a novelist. The filmmaking was a bit of a detour.

 

 

I’ve talked about montage as a technique I started using in film. I should mention that I used montage because it can be done cheaply, my aesthetic vision being largely determined by economic constraints. This is what I find most liberating about writing, the fact that I can produce an entire novel on a ream of paper for under five dollars, and if the paper is recycled, I don’t even have to feel bad about wasting the trees. You’d be hard-pressed to produce even a minute of film on a budget like that.

I love the lightness and freedom of the written word, the absence of physical constraints. You can travel to the moon or circle the planet, write a scene in a suburb of Tokyo, then flip back to Bald Knob, Arkansas. And if you forget to write a scene, or think up another, you can blink your eye and just do it. When I started the novel, I felt like I’d stepped off a skyscraper and realized I could fly. In comparison, filmmaking feels like taking a walk in a swamp with shackled ankles. Writing is portable and doesn’t require a large amount of heavy equipment. You don’t have to feed a crew, or find bathrooms for them. You don’t have to make compromises with collaborators. You can have complete artistic control.

 

Still, I learned an awful lot from making films. Readers say
My Year of Meats
is cinematic, which makes sense to me. When I write, I feel like a virtual camera, moving into a location, panning around, choosing a frame, then starting to record. When I used to write, back in school, I never was very good at moving a story quickly and efficiently through time. Chronology defeated me. But after learning how to edit visuals in a time-based medium, suddenly I understood how to make the segues and transitions work, how to cut from a wide establishing shot to a close-up, for example, or how to move inside a character’s head. Additionally, I think filmmaking is the best training in discipline and stamina one can receive. All in all, I don’t think I could have written a novel had I not been a filmmaker first.

 

 

I’m working on another novel. I used to talk about new projects but I’ve stopped doing that because until you choose to make them public, they are very private things.

 

At the end of the novel, Jane says, “I don’t think I can change my future simply by writing a happy ending. That’s too easy and not so interesting. I will certainly do my best to imagine one, but in reality I will just have to wait and see. ” For the most part, the characters in
My Year of Meats
do, in the end, get what they want, what they need, or in the case of John Ueno, what they deserve. Will you elaborate on why you decided to write a happy ending?

 

Jane needs hope. As a D.E.S. daughter there is still a chance that she might develop cancer, and she acknowledges this. What’s important here is her awareness that although writing a happy ending might not change the future, it is still important to imagine one. She says, just prior to the section you quote, “In the Year of Meats, truth wasn’t stranger than fiction; it was fiction.... Maybe sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes.” Without the power of the imagination we lack the power to alter outcomes, so if we can’t imagine better outcomes in a better world, we cannot act to achieve these. You can’t make something you can’t imagine first.

 

As the author, I wrote a happy ending, although, like Jane, I am suspicious of the efficacy of doing so. But happy endings satisfy the emotions, and I wanted to provide that type of satisfying narrative closure in the hope that it would free the intellect to continue its trajectory beyond the story line, pondering the issues the book raises.

 

At the same time, by having Jane discuss the shortcomings of happy endings right smack in the middle of one, I was hoping to invite the reader into a more complex relationship with that ending. In essence, I point an authorial finger at the very thing that I am writing, and poke a hole in the seamlessness of the happy ending by making it self referential and reflexive. Ironic.

 

In the end, though, it is a tribute to the power of the imagination. You cannot make a better world unless you can imagine it so, and the first step toward change depends on the imagination’s ability to perform this radical act of faith. I guess I see writing as a similar endeavor.

In the end, though, it is a tribute to the power of the imagination. You cannot make a better world unless you can imagine it so, and the first step toward change depends on the imagination’s ability to perform this radical act of faith. I guess I see writing as a similar endeavor.

1. Each chapter of
My Year of Meats
opens with an excerpt from Sei Shonagon’s
The Pillow Book.
Consider the interplay between these quotes and the narrative’s trajectory. How does this interjection from the past enrich the novel? How does the Shonagon voice shape your relationship to the characters?

2. On the surface, Jane and Akiko appear to be opposites. Jane is physically strong while Akiko is frail. Jane is fiercely independent while Akiko is submissive to her husband. Are there any similarities between the two? How do they complement each other?

3. In the beginning of chapter 3, Jane makes this comment: “One requisite for a good documentarian: you must shamelessly take what is available.” What does this assertion tell you about Jane? At the end of Jane’s year of meats, do you think that she still believes it? If not, at what point in the novel do you think she changed her mind? Do you think that “shamelessly taking what is available” is a necessary part of being a documentarian or a journalist?

4. Our exposure to the media has reached a fever pitch. Increasingly, we are bombarded by instant information via television, print, radio, and the Internet. Is this a positive development? What is your own “screen” for judging information received in the media? Has your reading of
My Year of Meats
suggested any new possibilities for your own relationship with media sources?

5. How does this novel treat the question of cultural, ethnic, and gender stereotypes? Did it challenge any of your own perceptions or biases? Consider, too, how the media perpetuates and/or dismantles stereotypes.

6. Chapter 2 begins with this quote from
The Pillow Book:
“When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands, women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe they are happy, I am filled with scorn.” Akiko and Jane, as well as the women featured on
My American Wife!,
reflect the different roles women play both in Japan and within America. Of all of the women featured in the novel, with whom did you most identify? Were there any that you upheld as models for what women should aspire to be?

7. Think about some of the male characters in
My Year of Meats.
There is Suzuki, who has a “passion for Jack Daniel’s, Wal-Mart, and American hard-core pornography”; Oh, who is Suzuki’s drinking companion; and Joichi Ueno, Akiko’s violent husband with a fondness for Texas strippers. Do these characters’ affinity for pornography reflect the way that they relate to women?

8. Early in the novel, Jane says, “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.” Do you believe that this is true? If so, do you perceive it as a step toward a more peaceful, accepting world, or as a step away from a diverse, well-textured world? Is it possible to maintain cultural diversity without prejudice?

9. Consider Jane and Sloan’s relationship. It seems that the same qualities that make Jane successful in her career—strength and control—become obstacles in developing an intimate relationship with Sloan. Have you encountered this problem in your own relationships ? At any point did you find yourself impatient with Jane or Sloan? Were you surprised to see them together in the end? Do you think that the novel is optimistic about intimacy? Are you?

10. “Truth lies in layers, each one thin and barely opaque, like skin, resisting the tug to be told. As a documentarian I think about this a lot. In the edit, timing is everything. There is a time to peel back.” Consider the way the novel plays with the notions of “truth” and “authenticity.” What do these words mean to Jane? To Akiko? To John Ueno? To the Wives? To the author? What forms of denial of truth do the various characters practice, and how do they “peel back”? What does the novel imply about denial in our world today?

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