My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki Read Free Book Online

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.
    Darkness in a place that does not give the impression of
being very clean.
A rather unattractive woman who looks after a large brood of
children.
    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.
    A woman who falls ill and remains unwell for a long time. In
the mind of her lover, who is not particularly devoted to her,
she must appear rather squalid.
    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.

JANE
    “His name is Joichi Ueno,” I explained to my ex-flight attendant PA. “That’s pronounced ‘Wayno.’ He likes to be called John.”
    The flight attendant groaned. I shrugged. Actually, I was the one who had given him the nickname, during the initial planning meetings for the show. Kato told me he was so proud of it that he insisted on using it all the time, even to his colleagues in Japan.
    “Listen,” I continued sternly. “Don’t give him attitude. This is the big man, the Chief Beef. I’m giving you a major responsibility here. I want you to pick him up at the airport and fall in love with him, and more importantly, I want him to fall in love with you. Got it? Your job is to take care of him, keep him out of the way. You are uniquely suited to this assignment. The two of you have similar tastes.”
    As the representative of the ad agency in charge of marketing the meats, Ueno was my de facto boss. He was a real hands-on kind of guy and he always showed up for the commercial shoots. Each episode of My American Wife! carried four attractive commercial spots for BEEF-EX. The strategy was “to develop a powerful synergy between the commercials and the documentary vehicles, in order to stimulate consumer purchase motivation.” In other words, the commercials were to bleed into the documentaries, and documentaries were to function as commercials.
    We had bigger crews for the commercials. I didn’t coordinate them, since I am a documentarian, but I was asked to help out, in order to reinforce