My Year of Meats (5 page)

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.

 

 

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.

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 contain 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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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.

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.