My Year Of Meats Akiko Analysis

Jane and Akiko: Fertility and DES In the novel, My Year of Meats! Ozeki portrays Jane Takagi Little and Akiko Ueno personal hardships of conceiving a child. The passage taken from chapter 11 describes Akiko being hospitalized after being “battered and bruised” by her husband and later became convinced that she was pregnant and “it was a miracle of sorts” (Ozeki 305-06). In the entry of the passage, Akiko’s states, “I feel wonderful…” gives the allusion of her almost mythical description of her conception. Akiko portrays herself looking at her “cleavages and shiftings.” Akiko watches the “zygote” change into “morula” and then into a “hollowed blastula.” The third stanza depicts her child-to-be, not as an infant, but rather as a “pugnacious morsel of life” that “bores into the wall’s warm embrace” (306) Akiko’s portrayal of

The DES poisoning represents genuine threats to the body while a child is in the utero. Jane displays her own infertility to the regular practices of recommending DES to women who were at risk of having an unsuccessful labor. Jane’s mother had four miscarriages before Jane was conceived, and to anticipate another miscarriage, she was prescribed to DES. Because of the negative consequences on the reproductive system caused by DES, Jane’s mother had her ovaries removed. The side-effects of DES and its multigenerational impact caused Jane to develop a deformed uterus. According to Uncertain Inheritance, there are “evidence that transgenerational effects can impact mating behaviors, with implications for the evolution of populations” (Schmidt 4). When a pregnant woman is presented to a poison, similar to DES, the exposure extends out to herself and her unborn child, as well as the germ lined cells creating the