Gender and Independence in My Year of Meats Anonymous College

In Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), the main character Jane is an up-and-coming documentarian. She is offered a job on the set of a new television show called My American Wife! and happily takes it. The show is sponsored by a special interest group called BEEF-EX, and they are trying to open up Japan to the meat market. They are doing so by showing Japanese families what traditional American families are cooking at home through the new television show. Jane is a very strong leader and independent thinker, and eventually she starts to manipulate the show into what goes on in America instead of the white picket fence American dream stereotype that the interest group wants to be shown. This causes her many problems although she makes it out alright and the show has a lot of successes. Jane breaks through the typical gender roles of this time by putting her career first and having good leadership qualities, although these same attributes cause her to have other problems in life.

Jane has never fully loved someone because she is too independent and she is too scared to let someone accept her for who she is. She seems not to have normal relationships, and this stems from the fact that she never fully lets love in. In her...