Border Crossers: Adopting Oppression and Empowerment Across Cultures in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

       The idea of a universal morality has often been seen as a racist paradigm that ignores the complexities of different cultures. Thus, we turn to the border crossers. Our foodways, gender roles and identities are all rooted in our culture and become inseparable as each factor informs another, yet it is the border crossers, those who belong to multiple cultures, who have the unique opportunity to mediate. My work focuses on four central characters in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and explores how they, as border crossers, illustrate the adoption of oppressive and/or empowering ideas with regards to women and/or nonhuman animals as they work to reconcile the conflicting influence of Japanese and American culture within themselves. Providing an image of American and Japanese cultural duality, this novel presents a cast of characters whose values begin to change through their work on My American Wife!, a Japanese television series sponsored by an American meat lobby organization. In this novel, culture and values are wedded, yet when Joichi, Akiko, Oh, and Jane begin growing intimate with their opposite culture, they’re left with a decision: will they stake a claim as border crossers or submit to foreign forms of oppression?