Ozeki always enamors me with her writing style, to quote her own words: she has a 'neither-here-nor-there-ness'. I feel as though My Year of Meats' genre perfectly fits that description with parts of it reading like a thriller, others a film, a romance,a documentary and even a vast but sharp social critique all in one. It follows the charming Jane Takagi who embodies growth, anti-fragility and most importantly the truth, transparency, and sincerity in the face of a beef industry's propagandizing and a 90s Japanese TV production's sexist and racial biases. I always feel as if Ozeki can perfectly encapsulate the incomplete and imperfect humanity of any character and every story, never playing up any character while never downplaying any character however insignificant and this story is no exception to this. It is perfectly imperfect, complete in its incompleteness, and still relevant to the pharmaceutical and meat industry today, where scientists continually treat animals (humans included) as profitable business opportunities and mere exploitable tools where the effects of bioaccumulation and biomagnification eventually lead back to themselves.

Her montage style in this book is to die for. Time felt completely connected in this book despite her split narratives. It felt as though the story was not cofnined within a spatio-temporal vacuum: time did not exist as something outside of the characters rather the characters were experiencing time as being or being-time as Dōgen would put it. I think Ruth has mastered such writing with time.

The grievous topic of diethylstilbestrol was something I didn't expect to find in this story nor something I knew about before the story, but it was a joy to learn about and to commiserate with Jane Takagi's condition as a DES daughter through all her struggles and other characters who suffered from the meat industries corner-cutting practices.

Another fascinating thing about this book was Ozeki's addition of her conversation at the end of her book as an interviewee for some saucy questions about the book and how it was written. Also the bibliography... this book is such a gift and I'm happy that it will be forever a part of me both consciously or unconsciously.

I was surprised after finding out that this was her debut novel because of how well-established her writing feels in this book even when compared to her more recent publications. I loved this book and may well be planning to re-read it in the near future.