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My Year Of Meats

It's time for another book review. I read a lot of books (I finished those damn library books- all 10 of them- in the required 3 weeks!) but rarely do I feel compelled to tell others about them. Of course, you've all heard me ramble on and on about Haruki Murakami's books, and rightfully so, but not often do I feel the need to share what I'm reading with others. Recently though a book ended up on my bed stand (and by bed stand I mean the box that my sewing machine came in) that literally moved me to tears. And now, because I care about you dear readers, I feel driven to share.

While perusing the library bookshelves I stumbled across the book "My Year of Meats" by Ruth L. Ozeki. It is the tale of a documentarian who is half Japanese half American and always somewhere half way between here and there. Her mother was born in Japan and moved to a small farming town in middle America when she married her husband, a botanist. Not too shortly there after, Jane is born. Jane is taller than your average American and when she moves to Tokyo in college she finds that she is taller than everyone in Japan. Her height and her "half" breeding makes her an outcast in the tight knit society. Not one to take life sitting down, Jane cuts her hair into a typical man's style and insists on using "men's Japanese" instead of the usually femininely demure language used by women.

The book opens up with Jane, now back in the US after having finished up a job in Tokyo, receiving a phone call in the middle of the night. Her former boss in Japan is offering her a job as a production assistant for a new television show that will be filmed in America and shown weekly in Japan titled "My American Wife!" The corporate sponsors behind the show are American meat manufacturer's Meat-Ex. Each show will feature an American housewife, her wholesome lifestyle and her happy husband and healthy children, finally culminating in the real star of the show: the meat. Meat-Ex intends to reintroduce American meat to the Japanese people by showing them how wonderful life with meat can be. Jane, living in tenement squalor, takes the job eagerly and eventually ends up directing the episodes.

On the other side of the world lives Akiko, the Japanese wife of the show's producer. Akiko is so thin that her bones hurt. She and her husband have been trying to get pregnant without success. Because of Akiko's low weight, she eventually stops menstruating and her husband decides that the answer to Akiko's health problems is meat! He gives Akiko the task of watching the weekly episodes of "My American Wife!" and then preparing the meat dishes presented in each show.

The story line alternates between Jane's adventures in filming and Akiko's battle with an eating disorder. As Jane digs deeper into the inner workings of the meat industry she finds that perhaps meat isn't so healthy after all. After a particular incident with her boss, Akiko's husband, she decides to sabotage the show by revealing the meat industries dangerous underbelly. What she finds out is shocking.

I won't reveal too much more of the story line because I really want everyone to go out and read this book. When I picked it up I had no idea that it dealt with infertility. I cried through most of the book, and laughed at the rest, because this story spoke to me in such a beautiful and eloquent way. The most shocking thing about this book is that it made me feel good about the job that I have. The reality of America's meat industry is terrifying and I felt the need to do something about it when I was finished with the book. Then I realized that I already am doing something by writing the articles that I do. And that made me want to keep writing them, to get the truth out there so that people can make informed decisions about what they put into their bodies.

I highly recommend this book to everyone! It is a strange tale and I am hard pressed to find another book that I can compare it to.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland

Last night I stayed up into the wee hours reading "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World", another book by Haruki Murakami. I finished this one a lot quicker than "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" but it wasn't nearly as long or as dense. It was, none-the-less, amazing! I recently read a review on someone's blog about Murakami's work and she said that his writing broke her heart because she knew that she could never write as beautifully as him. That sums up my feelings in a nutshell.

My husband was the one who first told me about Murakami's books. He thought that I would like him because my writing style is similar to his. For whatever reason I put off reading anything by him for a long time. When I finally did get around to picking up one of his books, I was floored! Yes, my writing style is sort of like his, but his way with words is nothing short of poetic. He paints a picture that is at once both gentle and powerful. His words float on an ocean, tumbling up and down, ebbing and flowing as if guided by the moons gravitational pull. Every word is meticulously placed, like a puzzle piece, and the end result is an accomplished masterpiece.

The first of his books that I read was "Sputnik Sweetheart". It took me two days to finish and when I finally put it down I curled up in my husbands lap and cried. Why did I cry? The story was heartbreaking and bursting at the seams with unfulfilled longing. It's an unending search for the one thing that these characters couldn't have. But at the same time, the characters were woven with such a gentle pen that you wanted to wrap your arms around them and protect them from the cold and uncaring world. Murakami told the tale of these characters so beautifully that I felt he was writing about me. Of course he wasn't, and my life's story is nothing like the story of Sputnik Sweetheart, but the way that he was able to get to the very core of the character's souls left me feeling naked and vulnerable. Would you believe though, that I loved the story? Sometimes naked and vulnerable is not a bad place to be. It's not comfortable, but it could be on the doormat to change. Something big can come out of that glaring spotlight. I think that I cried at the end because I knew that I was on the cusp of something big and the immense pressure to stand up to it was terrifying.

I didn't pick up another Murakami book for 3 more months. My husband kept prodding me but I pushed it off. I didn't want to feel that way again. I hadn't stood up to the pressure. I had backed down and I didn't want to be reminded of that again. I will be the first to admit that I don't like sad movies and I don't want to read a book that makes me cry. I have had a life filled with immense pain and I don't want to revisit that pain in my leisure time. But the other side of that coin is that I'm a writer, and I won't be able to write anything meaningful unless I tap into the very pain that I run from. I know that. I've known if for a long time. Whenever I talk to Bruno about it, I end up in tears. Not because he pushes me to face it, but because just talking about having to face it scares me. I've never been more afraid of anything in my entire life.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

My last two posts were quite heavy, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to go there with this blog. But ultimately, those thoughts and feelings are a part of my life and I don't want to hold back. I will not, however, dwell on such thoughts either. I'm trying a new concept out: Feel my emotions when they come along and then let them go when they've been thoroughly exhausted. It's kind of a Buddhist thing and a major shift from my Catholic upbringing. The Catholic thing didn't work out for me too well, so this is a new attempt at understanding the ways of the world. I'll let you know how it works out for me.

This weekend was very nice. Bruno and I were going to go do a bunch of fun things but rain was predicted so we opted to just run errands and then nest at home. It was great. Bruno made soup Saturday night and we opened up a bottle of wine. During our errands we had picked up one of those game consoles (not electronic- wood) that has chess, checkers, Chinese checkers and about a billion and one other games. We popped in a Modern Jazz Quartet CD and played Chinese Checkers all night. It was the perfect night!

After Bruno was all tuckered out and went to bed, I stayed up until 4 in the morning finishing off the book that I was reading. I couldn't put it down! If you enjoy reading, I highly recommend Haruki Murakami's books. I have only read two: Sputnik Sweetheart & The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. I'm working on The Elephant Vanishes which is a series of short stories and Norwegian Wood just arrived in the mail today. Murakami is the most amazing writer and inspires me in so many ways. He is a Japanese writer who is influenced by both the pulp detective stories of the 40's and the beat writers of the 60's. His work is unlike anything that I have ever read and I'm certain that it will be studied in Universities for years to come.

I started The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles last week and it took me 5 days to finish it because it was so long (over 600 pages). Usually I can just plow through a book like that in a day or two, but his writing is so beautiful and complex that it requires that you take more time to digest it. The story is the weirdest story that I've ever read. It's about a married 30-year-old guy who quits his job at a law firm for no good reason other than he's bored with it. He becomes a house-husband of sorts and busies himself with the chores and cooking. The book opens on a weekday morning. The guy is cooking spaghetti and the phone rings. It's a woman who claims to know him (but she won't tell him who she is) and asks for just 10 minutes of his time. After only a few minutes she breaks into phone sex and he hangs up. The phone rings again and this time its his wife. She wants him to go out and look for their missing cat, Norboro Wataya. He doesn't find the cat. When he gets home the phone rings again. It's a psychic named Malta Kano and she has information about his missing cat and invites him to meet her for tea. When he goes, Malta gives him all sorts of cryptic information but tells him nothing about where his cat is. For the next 100 pages or so the main character searches for the cat until his wife goes missing too. He works with the psychic and her sister, Creta Kano who is a prostitute of the mind, to find his wife.

The book is an epic, to be sure. It goes back and forth between present day Japan and WWII. The WWII stories were the most fascinating to me. I was surprised by this because I'm not a big fan of war fiction, but this was so different. I also don't know much about WWII from the Japanese perspective, so I was intrigued by that aspect.

I can't urge everyone I know enough to run out a read this book! It was AMAZING!