Ruth Ozeki incorporates the older genre of diary literature in her book, My Year of Meats, in order to give the reader a more personal insight into the life and personality of Jane Takagi-Little, one of the characters in the book. Diary literature is an older genre used by Heian court lady and writer Sei Shonagon in her well-known work, The Pillow Book. Ozeki opens up each chapter with a short passage from Shonagon’s book and relates it to the rest of chapter, and Shonagon is also a source of inspiration for the character Jane.
Ozeki uses the first-person narrative of diary literature when she is telling Jane’s story, which allows the reader to connect with Jane and directly read her mind and feelings as she tells her account of her year as a coordinator for “My American Wife”. Jane also goes into her background. She tells us she is biracial, half Japanese and half white, and throughout the narrative the audience sees how she struggles with this but also has come to accept it, and even embraces it. Her struggles mostly come about how other people treat her, for example when an American WWII veteran asks her, “What are you?” she replies, “I…am…a…fucking…AMERICAN!” and it is obvious that she is offended by this question, even though as a biracial person, she probably gets this question often (7). The audience also sees how she is proud of being half and sometimes feels “brand-new—like a prototype” as the world will all be eventually all racially mixed (9).
Jane tells the reader that she admires Sei Shonagon, who inspired her “to become a documentarian, to speak men’s Japanese, to be different” (9). Just as Shonagon wrote in the “Chinese writings” only used by men back in the Heian era, Jane speaks in men’s Japanese, and dares to be different in Japan, a society which has more emphasis on conformity and tradition compared to American society.
The third chapter of My Year of Meats opens with a passage from The Pillow Book, “A thief has crept into a house and is now hiding in some well-chosen nook where he can secretly observe what is going on” (17). Jane relates to this thief as she “slip[s] in and out of darkened rooms and steal[s] from people’s lives” but also calls Shonagon the “master thief” (18). In diary literature, the author is not only limited to her own life, but also any lives she comes in contact with, whether the other party wants to or not. Jane can be seen as a modern parallel to Shonagon, who observed and wrote about the happenings in the Heian court as she viewed them without sugarcoating her language, just as Jane accounts her Year of Meats with direct feelings along with her experiences with her Japanese bosses and American families she worked with, withholding no indiscretion.
Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book is an inspiration for My Year of Meats, both to the style and also to the character in the book.
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