My Year of Meats Chapters 5-8

Aaron Stokke
Sadashivan – Representation
MYOM Chapters 5-8

Meanings in Epigraphs

At the beginning of each chapter of My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki, there is an epigraph from The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon. Each epigraph ranges in length, but all of them do in some way pertain to the chapter that follows. In no chapter that I have read so far is this more apparent than in just the second chapter, The Clothes-Lining Month.
The epigraph at the beginning of the second chapter begins: “When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands-women who have not one exciting prospect in their life yet who believe that they are perfectly happy-I am filled with scorn.” This epigraph basically states that Shonagon is not a typical woman, that she is unhappy at the prospect of being another cookie-cutter wife; she wants to make a name for herself. This statement holds true to the characters in this chapter.
A good example of a character that pretends to be happy blindly serving her husband is that of Suzie. In this chapter, Suzie invites the Japanese documentary film crew into her life to film her making her “famous” rumpu rossuto. Suzie’s dish had very few steps in it, although she goes through a lot of effort in making it seem more complicated than it really is. By attempting to make her dish seem more complicated, Suzie fits into Shonagon’s scorn of women portraying themselves as happy and without the existence of anything exciting in their lives. Suzie then, after falsely portraying her life as more complicated than it really was, found out that her husband had been hiding an affair from her. Suzie seems like the kind of person that Shonagon would truly detest. Not only does she lead a completely boring life, but she also blindly serves a creep like her husband who chose to tell not only Suzie but the whole world of his adultery on television.
Another example of a situation that fits into Shonagon’s epigraph is that of Akiko. Akiko is a woman who lives a sheltered and abused sort of life. Akiko’s story is a sad one; she had been married for only a few months when her marriage started to take a turn for the worst. Without a job, or anything exciting in her life, Akiko is forced to watch television for her kicks. Akiko wanted nothing more than to please her husband, but because she no longer menstruates, she cannot give him the only thing that he wants, a son. Akiko’s situation fits into Shonagon’s epigraph because even though she is terribly unhappy, she still goes through the motions and presents herself as a happy and productive member of society.
Every chapter so far has had an epigraph before it, and every epigraph has had a connection to the chapter that follows it. I will make sure to look for the connections between every epigraph and the chapter that follows it from now on, perhaps these connections will help me to better understand the messages hidden in the novel.