Ferial Haffajee speaks to visiting Asian-American author Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki is so like her lead character, Jane Takagi-Little, that I call her “Jane” several times in the course of our interview. She doesn’t mind the gaffe, adding that her best friend refers to the character as “Ruth”.
Takagi-Little, the narrator of the novel My Year of Meat (Picador), is a charming subversive – a mixed race, green-haired, walking contradiction of a woman. She takes readers on a journey through small-town America. It’s a trip chock-a-block with issues: food safety, race, identity, lesbianism, vegetarian-lesbianism, American imperialism and the universal themes of love, friendship and heart- break. The whole gamut competes vividly for the readers attention.
Ozeki, in Johannesburg this week as part of her world tour, is a tall bundle of American-Japanese energy. “I just indulged and let myself go,” she says, adding that her novel was fuelled by new passions as she went along.
She started the book armed only with a series of anecdotes. One of the opening sequences is a favourite. Takagi-Little is a television producer with a crew of two: Suzuki and Oh make the reader’s acquaintance when they are presented aiming darts at the crotch of a Hustler magazine pin-up stuck to a motel wall.
Meat was initially only a metaphor: women are cattle; the media is a sausage factory churning out twisted, processed truths. “But then I realised that the meat stuff had to be researched.”
What her research turned up was an industry where the use of hormones and other growth-producing chemicals can have adverse effects on its consumers. Just how adverse is shown to shocking effect in the novel.
Novels laced with issues like this one risk being didactic -for accomplished novelists it is a delicate lacing exercise. Says Ozeki: “For readers to understand, they must have a base of knowledge. You can’t overload them with information.”
In her book tour, the author has found that different parts of her multimedia novel (it is written in a combination of prose, faxes, memos and film scripts) appeal to different countries, and the various issues involved reach different constituencies. The Americans were drawn by the issue of food safety, the Germans identified with her pooh- poohing of American cultural imperialism, and, in South Africa, reviewers have remarked on her treatment of race.
Ozeki is mixed-race. Her experience of living in two worlds has helped her understand what she calls “cultural miscommunication” and stereotyping. Our rainbow nation with its looming thunderstorms is just waiting for a novelist like Ozeki to hold up a mirror and help us laugh at our little pigeon-holes and assumptions.
But she’s on to other things already. By this weekend the author the meat industry must love to hate is about to tackle other holy cows. Her next novel is called Kaboom! and it’s about the nuclear industry and its legacy.