My Year of Meats (2 page)

“Roll
camera
—
and five,
four,
three
...” Oda slaps me on the shoulder.

“Action!” I call out.

Suzie squeezes her eyes shut. Like a projectile released from a catapult, Fred Flowers’ head lurches forward for the kiss—too fast—and he bangs his teeth hard against his wife’s upper lip. Her eyes pop open.

“Ouch!” cries Suzie.

“
Cut!”
cries Oda.

“Tape change!”
says the video engineer.

Oda shakes his head, disgusted, and walks away.

“I think my lip is bleeding,” whimpers Suzie.

“This is stupid,” growls Fred.

“Okay,” I say soothingly. “Why don’t we all relax for a bit, just take a little breather while the cameraman changes tape.”

“What is this, anyway?” says Fred, standing and stretching his legs. “Is this the beginning? Is this how the show is going to start?”

“No, honey,” explains Suzie. “Don’t you remember? This is the last scene. Of the whole program.”

“Well, if this is the end, how come you’re shooting it first?”

“Well, Fred,” I explain patiently. “In TV, sometimes you have to shoot the endings.first.
”

“Hai!”
I answer, gently easing Suzie and Fred Flowers back down onto the rug.

“Get
them into position.
We’re ready
to go.”

1
.

“Meat is the Message.”

 

I wrote these words just over a year ago, sitting right here in my tenement apartment in the East Village of New York City in the middle of the worst snowstorm of the season, or maybe it was the century—on TV, everything’s got to be the worst of something, and after a while you stop paying attention. Especially that year. It was January 1991, the first month of the first year of the last decade of the millennium. President Bush had just launched Desert Storm, the most massive air bombardment and land offensive since World War II. The boiler in my building had blown, my apartment was freezing, and I couldn’t complain to the landlord because my rent was overdue. I had just defaulted to a vegetarian diet of cabbage and rice because I couldn’t find a job. Politics and weather aside, the rest was fine. I mean, I was doing the starving artist thing on purpose: I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, but who could find work in a climate like this?

When the phone rang at two in the morning, I didn’t bother to answer. It was unlikely to be a job offer at that hour, and I had just gotten into bed and was lying there, rigid, trying to relax against the icy sheets long enough to fall asleep. I didn’t want to lose what little body heat I’d already invested, so I let the answering machine pick up—isn’t that what they are for? But then I recognized the voice. It was Kato, my old boss at the TV production company in Tokyo where I had gotten my first job, translating English sound bites into pithy Japanese subtitles. Now, he said, he had a new program and could use my help. I threw back the covers and dived for the receiver. After a brief conversation, we hung up. I wrapped myself in blankets, huddled over my computer keyboard, and, blowing on my fingers to keep them warm, wrote the following:

I sat back and read it with some satisfaction. It was a pitch for Kato’s new program, a more or less faithful translation of the Japanese text that he had dictated to me over the phone—well, maybe not so faithful; maybe a little excessive, in fact. But I liked it. It would do. I faxed it off to Tokyo and crawled back into bed. As I lay there, shivering, wondering about the new show, I had no way of realizing that what I’d just written would turn out to be some of my most lucrative prose—it would land me a job and keep me both meat-fed and employed for over a year.

My Year of Meats. It changed my life. You know when that happens—when something rocks your world, and nothing is ever the same after?

 

My name is Jane, Takagi -Little. Little was my dad, a Little from Quam, Minnesota. Takagi is my mother’s name. She’s Japanese. Hyphenation may be a modern response to patriarchal naming practices in some cases, but not in mine. My hyphen is a thrust of pure superstition. At my christening, Ma was stricken with a profound Oriental dread at the thought of her child bearing an insignificant surname like Little through life, so at the very last minute she insisted on attaching hers. Takagi is a big name, literally, comprising the Chinese character for “tall” and the character for “tree.” Ma thought the stature and eminence of her lofty ancestors would help equalize Dad’s Little. They were always fighting about stuff like this.

“It doesn’t
mean
anything,” Dad would say. “It’s just a
name!”
which would cause Ma to recoil in horror. “How you can say
Justa name?
Name is very
first
thing. Name is face to all the world.”

“Jane” represents their despair at ever reaching an interesting compromise.

In spite of the Little, my dad was a tall man, and I am just under six feet myself. In Japan this makes me a freak. After living there for a while, I simply gave up trying to fit in: I cut my hair short, dyed chunks of it green, and spoke in men’s Japanese. It suited me. Poly-sexual, polyracial, perverse, I towered over the sleek, uniform heads of commuters on the Tokyo subway. Ironically, the real culture shock occurred when I left Japan and moved here to New York, to the East Village. Suddenly everyone looked weird, just like me.

Being racially “half”—neither here nor there—I was uniquely suited to the niche I was to occupy in the television industry. I was hired by Kato to be a coordinator for
My American Wife!,
the TV series that would bring the “heartland of America into the homes of Japan.” Although my heart was set on being a documentarian, it seems I was more useful as a go-between, a cultural pimp, selling off the vast illusion of America to a cramped population on that small string of Pacific islands.

As a coordinator, I was part of the production team that shot fifty-two half-hour episodes of
My American Wife!
for the Beef Export and Trade Syndicate, or, simply, BEEF-EX. BEEF-EX was a national lobby organization that represented American meats of all kinds—beef, pork, lamb, goat, horse—as well as livestock producers, packers, purveyors, exporters, grain promoters, pharmaceutical companies, and agribusiness groups. They had their collective eye firmly fixed on Asia. BEEF-EX was the sole sponsor of our program, and its mandate was clear: “to foster among Japanese housewives a proper understanding of the wholesomeness of U.S. meats.”

This was how we did it:
My American Wife!
was a day-in-the-life type of documentary, each show featuring a housewife who could cook. My job description, according to Kato, went something like this:

“You must catch up healthy American wives with most delicious meats.”

His English was terrible, but I got the picture: Fingers twitching on the pole of a large net, I would prowl the freezer sections of food chains across the country, eyeing the unsuspecting housewives of America as they poked their fingers into plastic-wrapped flank steaks.

Travel, glamour, excitement it wasn’t. But during that year I visited every single one of the United States of America and shot in towns so small you could fit their entire dwindling populations in the back of an Isuzu pickup—towns not so different from Quam, Minnesota, where I grew up. I remembered the scene.

It all came back to me during a pancake breakfast in a VFW hall in Bald Knob, Arkansas.

It was our first shoot. I met my Japanese crew at the local airport. A brass band was playing when I arrived, and the ticket counters were decorated with proud banners of spangling stars and stalwart stripes. Yellow ribbons festooned the departure lounge, and Mylar balloons floated like flimsy planets over the cloudlike tresses of blond girls in pastel who had come to say good-bye.

At the center of all this effusion were the callow recruits, with brand-new crew cuts and bright-red ears, dressed in the still-unfamiliar pale of desert camouflage. Babies were pressed to their clean-shaven cheeks. Mothers’ breasts heaved like eager battleships, while the soldiers’ fingers lingered over ramparts of stone-washed thigh. Many tears were shed.

My Japanese team was shocked. Stumbling off a twenty-hour flight from Tokyo, jet-lagged and confused, they ran smack into Gulf War Fever. In modern-day Japan, militarism is treated like a sexual deviation—when you see perverts practicing it on the street, you ignore them, look the other way.

Then, at the pancake breakfast where we had been filming, a red-faced veteran from WWII drew a bead on me and my crew, standing in line by the warming trays, our plates stacked high with flapjacks and American bacon.

“Where you from, anyway?” he asked, squinting his bitter blue eyes at me.

“New York,” I answered.

He shook his head and glared and wiggled a crooked finger inches from my face. “No, I mean where were you
born?”

“Quam, Minnesota,” I said.

“No, no ...
What
are you?” He whined with frustration.

And in a voice that was low, but shivering with demented pride, I told him,
“I... am
...
a
...
fucking...
AMERICAN!”

A final note:

The eating of meat in Japan is a relatively new custom. In the Heian Court, which ruled from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, it was certainly considered uncouth; due to the influences of Buddhism, meat was more than likely thought to be unclean. We know quite a bit about Japanese life then—at least the life of the court and the upper classes—thanks to the great female documentarians of that millennium, like Sei Shōnagon. She was the author of
The Pillow Book
, which contains detailed accounts of her life and her lovers, and one hundred sixty-four lists of things, such as: