46 pages • 1 hour read
My Year of Meats
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Themes
Biracial Identity
One of the most significant issues Jane contends with throughout her life is her biracial identity. While this identity often leads to negative experiences, Jane learns eventually to capitalize on and appreciate her Japanese American identity.
At first, Jane feels “neither nor there” (9). Her hyphenated name makes her feel that she can never escape a cultural limbo. As a child, she isn’t completely ostracized, but is required to lose when she plays with others. She feels “half” in one world and half in the other and therefore like she doesn’t belong anywhere (9). She even goes so far as to blame her infertility on her biracial identity (152).
When Jane is hired to work for My American Wife! she sees her identity as both a curse and a blessing. She is initially grateful because she believes it’s the reason she was hired. Her ability to be a “cultural pimp” and make nice between the Japanese team and the American team makes her a valuable asset to the project (9). However, as time goes on, she feels that the higher-ups only see her value as a translator and not a creator, holding her back from her dream of directing.
It's not until almost the end of the novel that Jane learns to see her biracial identity as an asset that can propel her future. She thinks: “I had spent so many years, in both Japan and America, floundering in a miasma of misinformation about culture and race, I was determined to use this window […] to educate” (27). By the end of the novel, Jane is able to take her “hybrid vigor” and use it to help others, instead of allowing it to crush herself (43).
The Beauty Myth
While this novel takes place in two different countries—America and Japan—the women in both countries suffer from the beauty myth. No matter what side of the globe they live on, women are often pressured to live up to whatever the current localized version of beauty is. It often keeps the women from being their authentic selves and causes a crisis.
Akiko is perhaps the one in this book who suffers the most from this myth. Her husband believes in an American ideal of beauty while Akiko is frail and “scrawny” (43). Trying to make her fit into the American ideal, John verbally abuses Akiko while forcing her to cook fattening meals in an attempt to get her to gain the weight he desires. The beauty myth reduces women to the realm of objects. John beats Akiko, rapes her, and bats her around like a doll. When she tries to appease him, she attempts to emulate pornography, showing how deeply she has internalized the objectification. Akiko also suffers from an eating disorder, another effect of the beauty myth.
Jane is also a victim of this myth but eventually she rises above it. She is considered extremely tall for a Japanese woman and her figure is gangly rather than voluptuous. Jane quickly comes to realize her differences are not appreciated, but instead of trying to change them like Akiko, she accentuates them. Sure that she will never fit into the ideal, she learns to creates a new ideal for herself.
Bunny Dunn is another victim of the beauty myth in My Year of Meats. When Jane and her crew first meet Bunny, they think she looks ridiculous. She has her boobs and butt on display and her blonde hair is huge and overly styled. Within minutes of meeting Jane and her crew, Bunny can feel their judgment. In response, she simply admits out loud that she is having to contend with the beauty myth. She turns to them and says “You think I don’t realize I look like a goddamn cartoon character […] You ain’t got no idea what it’s like. Why do you think I dress like this? […] ‘Cause if I don’t, I just look fat” (253). It’s clear from Bunny’s comments, as well as from Jane’s and Akiko’s actions, that beauty standards for women are constraining and affect women of diverse backgrounds.
The Americanization of Japanese Culture
Much of this book highlights the ways in which corporate America acts as a bully that tries to convert the rest of the world to its vapid ways. The stated premise of My American Wife! is to inspire “Japanese housewives” to want to mimic American housewives and their “traditional family values” (9). The show is created to satisfy one goal, to sell BEEF-EX American meat to Japan because some of their other markets had dropped off. It broadcasts American marriages, homes, drinks, lifestyles, languages, technologies, and family dynamics into Japanese homes, essentially infiltrating every possible area of life.
However, as Jane knows, the America being pumped into Japanese homes does not truly exist; the show is actually “selling off the vast illusion of America” rather than America itself (9). For example, the show makes Americans seem extremely prosperous, but this is only because BEEF-EX only wants to feature the middle class. When Akiko arrives to America for the first time, she is shocked because “she’d never thought of Americans as poor” before (336). The TV show also pushes an America that is a “frontier” full of “wide-open spaces and endless horizons” (35) when in reality, as Jane points, the country is so homogenized every space and horizon looks the same—an effect of the very corporate reach that Jane finds herself promoting by working for BEEF-EX (35).
Nevertheless, when Jane is able to express her vision of what is worth seeing in America, the effects are positive. For example, watching the portrayal of the happy lesbian couple is a catalyst for Akiko to explore her own sexuality.
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