Mild Vertigo

by Mieko Kanai, Polly Barton (Translator), Kate Zambreno (Afterword)

In this intoxicating stream-of-consciousness novel, Mieko Kanai tackles the existential traps of motherhood, marriage, and domestic captivity.

The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens.

With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante, and Kobo Abe, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and critic Mieko Kanai—whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan—is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.

Genres: Fiction, Japan, Japanese Literature, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Asia, Feminism

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Mieko Kanai (金井 美恵子 Kanai Mieko?, born November 3, 1947 in Takasaki) is a Japanese writer of fiction, especially short stories, as well as poetry. She is also a literary critic.

Mieko Kanai read widely in fiction and poetry from an early age. In 1967, at the young age of twenty, she was runner-up for the Dazai Osamu Prize for Ai no seikatsu (A Life of Love), and the following year she received the Gendaishi Techo Prize for poetry. While maintaining a certain distance from literary circles and journalism, she has built up her own world of fiction with a sensual style. Along with her fiction, her criticism, which shows off her scathing, acid insight, has a devoted following.

Reviews

[Liong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not enjoy reading it, but maybe some readers could connect with and understand the story. 😥

The story felt boring and focused too much on everyday, mundane things.

It moved very slowly with little happening and talked a lot about small tasks like cooking and cleaning.

The writing style was confusing, and the book's message and feelings were quiet and not obvious.

However, the lessons in this book remind us to notice the little things in life and reflect on our own thoughts.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books whose reputation precedes it, a translation a quarter-century in the making. Kanai Mieko (金井 美恵子) is a writer revered in Japan, although few of her works have found their way into English. Mild Vertigo is Polly Barton's long-anticipated translation of the 1997 original, the title (軽いめまい) variously translated as Light Dizziness or Vague Vertigo before Barton. There’s a sense in which the texts that constitute this novel have been gathered, almost curated, which gives it the feel of being assembled from pre-existing materials. In one sense, that's literally true: the eight chapters were originally serialized in a women's interest magazine before being collected and published as a unit. But even beyond its serialized genesis, some of the text is taken from other sources, most notably the exhibition reviews inserted into Chapter 7. Kanai is a film critic, among other things, and her writing is often in conversation with her cinematic influences, both stylistically and thematically. Kanai's complex prose is captured well by Barton, the circuitous sentences weaving in and out of a close third-person narrative that blends thought, exposition, and repetition. I don't read it as stream of consciousness as it’s labeled in some places. Many reviews highlight the feminist themes, which are undoubtedly present here, but the novel is complex and there's more to unpack. Mild Vertigo is an exploration of how repetition and monotony can lead to disorientation, a critique of bourgeois sensibility unifying the themes. Published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and New Directions in the US.

[Alwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acclaimed poet, critic and novelist Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo is less overtly disturbing or elliptical as the stories of hers I’ve read but it’s still striking and innovative. Originally published in 1997, it focuses on the experiences of a housewife Natsumi who lives with her husband and two small sons in a Tokyo apartment building. Kanai’s depiction of Natsumi is structured through snapshots of her day-to-day activities and interactions: inner monologues mingle with scenes of chance meetings with neighbours, stray thoughts or casual conversations with friends and family. It’s a deceptively simple, sometimes seemingly artless piece; outwardly random and free flowing but actually admirably intricate and painstakingly constructed. As with other works by Kanai, it developed gradually out of pieces published elsewhere yet always destined to be stitched together to form a single narrative.

In many ways Natsumi might seem an unremarkable character, socially slightly conservative, sometimes diffident, sometimes rebellious, her time’s centred on her family but Kanai’s portrait of her makes her incredibly compelling. Kanai’s approach is often very visual and there are numerous episodes that have a near-cinematic quality, as if they’re unfolding in real time. These elements, plus the ways in which Kanai so vividly captures the minutiae of Natsumi’s existence, and an emphasis on time and space, reminded me of work by film-makers like Chantal Akerman - sans her more sensational plot twists. Like Akerman, Kanai’s interested in gender, the domestic, the machinery and practices of femininity, and here she includes, as she often does, detailed accounts of clothing, fashion, and food, all essential to the fabric of Natsumi’s world - it’s no surprise Jane Austen’s one of Kanai’s favourite novelists. Yet Kanai also manages to makes Natsumi’s story immediate, vivid and fresh. Her notoriously long, dense sentences drew me in, everything combining to create the impression of a direct link to Natsumi’s consciousness: her anxieties, her desires and preoccupations. There’s a reflectiveness of the kind I associate with Yuko Tsushima’s work but it's interspersed with some wonderful flashes of unexpectedly biting, understated humour.

Through Natsumi, Kanai seems intent on exploring particular moments of being, repeatedly returning to episodes in which Natsumi’s confronted by a sudden awareness of her own existence, sparking feelings of profound disconnection or connection. The sensations set off by an image or a sound, her apartment building’s community glimpsed in fragments of shared stories; its social hierarchies and collective culture founded on uwasa (gossip and rumour) that both binds and alienates. All those near-indefinable encounters that can suddenly produce a kind of breakthrough, and for Natsumi an accompanying shift in awareness that elicits a visceral, bodily response.

I also really relished Kanai’s meticulous representation of the kinds of taken-for-granted knowledge that women like Natsumi possess, which combine to form a vivid picture of the cultural landscapes she inhabits - the exact layout of the local grocery shop that she visits almost daily, so familiar she can recite its contents from memory. So exact a recollection that it recalled another of Kanai’s favourite writers Roland Barthes and his dissection of overlooked everyday objects and images. Although this isn’t a self-consciously academic piece, Kanai has talked about how her fiction's concerned as much with writing as anything else, and as if to hint at the artificiality of her text she makes an early cameo "appearance" as an unnamed writer from Mejiro, where she’s lived for many years, a place she often returns to in her fiction. Later Natsumi reads this writer’s essays on photography, articles where Kanai discusses the nature and impact of Tokyo photographer Kineo Kuwabara’s style and subject matter and, in doing so, indirectly comments on what she might be trying to achieve with her portrait of Natsumi. A portrait I found so totally absorbing, I was disappointed when it ended. Translated by Polly Barton.

Thanks to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for an ARC

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll begin by commenting on the translation because it’s remarkable. Polly Barton has rendered Mild Vertigo into such beautiful English. I can’t vouch for the translation’s devotion to original meanings but I can say the language here soars. It reminds me of the great prose stylist Steven Dixon’s writing—here is the same sweep of sentence, the same disdain for unnecessary paragraphing, the same reluctance to interrupt the exhilarating forward rush of words with any unnecessary punctuation.

My breathless wonder at the language began with the first sentence and the way it gallops and canters on and on until page 4 of the New Directions edition I read. By the end of that first sentence, I felt in complete empathy with the thoughts and feelings of Natsumi, the Tokyo housewife whose story is told here. It was like I was living inside of her. It’s a remarkable alchemy—empathy created through the recreation of thought-rhythms that reproduce themselves in the heads of readers. Author Kate Zambreno also seems to have been affected by the rhythms and meanders of this writing, so much so that she chose to write her afterword for the New Directions edition in the same mildly vertiginous style as the novel itself.

Natsumi is leading a life of mostly-meek social conformity and her life first felt suffocatingly pointless to me and about as fun as drowning must feel—except she is, for the most part, content. She earnestly believes she is where she wants to be in life, or at least where she belongs, and given who she is it’s impossible to imagine any other life being better for her. You could even go so far as to say that, when she is alone and not thinking anything in particular, she experiences something close to joy, no matter how mundane her life seems on its surface.

The most significant of these moments seem to come when Natsumi happens to be looking at old photographs. It’s in these moments, when Natsumi sees and reacts to photographs, that the author makes a subtle metafictional intrusion into Natsumi’s world. Two of Kanai’s own essays on photography, published prior to this novel’s publication, are printed in full within the novel. Natsumi reads them. Kanai’s essays feel like sign posts she leaves behind for her fictional character to find and to learn from. It’s as if the author herself is reaching into the pages of her novel to shake her fictional character awake and to encourage her to see the wonder of the world around her, however noisy and mundane a life it may seem on its surface.

Make no mistake, this is a challenging read. It demands absolute attention. Its syntax and diction keep surprising. You might think you know where the next phrase of any given sentence is going to take you but you’re probably wrong. You need to be vigilant. You may learn more about feral cats and captive birds than you expected. You may decide not to trust what you learn. You may become restless or bored, in the way Natsumi becomes restless and bored. You may discover this novel means something completely different to you than it did to me. Keep going. This novel may surprise you. It may change you.

My alter ego "Claire Oshetsky" also reviewed this book, for the May 28 2023 NY Times Sunday Book Review, available online here, (gift link/no paywall) and more or less agrees with me.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Japanese novel that consists entirely of the stream of consciousness musings of an ordinary housewife. It was oddly mesmerizing and calming.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2024 Warwick Prize for Women In Translation

Even on hearing that, though, her husband simply made a disinterested mmm noise, and started to read the sports section of the paper, and so although she hadn’t really expected a huge reaction from him, she said, you could at least show a little interest when I’m gossiping about the neighbours.

Mild Vertigo is Polly Barton's translation of Mieko Kanai's 1997 original - that a novel from over 25 years ago from Japan feels highly relevant for today's UK is both a testimony to the power of the work, but also shows how little progress we've made in society.

The novel is told from the third-person perspective, but in the style of an interior monologue, of Natsumi, a Tokyo housewife and mother of two young boys. The vertigo of the title comes from the flat, monotonous life of the housewife–with all its set routines and its absence of change that somehow took an overwhelming toll on the spirit– [and which] really did deprive her of any kind of emotional space, including a trance like state she enters at the novel's opening and close when watching a rope of water running from a tap.

The prose, brilliantly conveyed in Barton's English translation, consists of labyrithine looping sentences, sometime intense at other digressionary (sentences that sometimes the reader needs to revisit to unwind the clauses), with set pieces such as her detailed recall of the layout of the supermarket she visits week after week (she is struck hard at one point where she finds an old shopping list to realise that it is also identical to this week's list).

An earlier overview of the author's work, and this novel in particular, in The Paris Review explained that:

Sections of the novel first appeared as monthly instalments in a glossy magazine about bourgeois homemaking; also included are two reviews of photography exhibitions. Kanai says that these previously published articles and reviews, which appeared in different journals, were written in order to be collected as a novel.

The reviews of the photography exhibitions, by Kuwabara Kineo were for me perhaps a slight misfire to the novel, in that they felt artificially inserted into the prose - the premise being that they are article by an author (Kanai herself) which Natsumi reads at a friends recommendation. The style of the pieces are themselves distinctive (see below) and there is a thematic link to Kanai's view of what the photographer achieves with what she wants to do with her work - but that feels like the author overly spelling things out.

4 stars and recommended

Examples of the prose

An unusually explicit section spelling out Natsumi's frustations

... when Natsumi yelled at her children in a hysterical tone of voice, saying, that’s enough now! how many times have I told you not to do it when Mum has a headache! she imagined she made for quite a sight, with her face all puffed up and her temples twitching from her migraine, which got her thinking that the flat, monotonous life of the housewife–with all its set routines and its absence of change that somehow took an overwhelming toll on the spirit–really did deprive her of any kind of emotional space, and she knew that these feelings were of course tied up with the knowledge that the dinner for the group of the six of them who had been classmates at her private all-girls’ high school for the first and second years, who couldn’t exactly be called a closeknit group but somehow all got along well enough, and who had stayed in touch with one another, even in the third year of school when they were divided into different classes based on what they planned to do after, even after entering university, although they didn’t necessarily meet up often, was coming up next week, and among that group of six former-classmates Natsumi was the only housewife, and when she realized that how this made her feel was small, or somehow inferior, this thought piled on top of the irritability and the buzzing anxiety that made her throat tingle and the headache and the stomachache caused by her PMS, and she felt like she alone was losing out, and grew even more irritated and riled up by her husband, and recalling that she’d originally wanted to have a daughter, she’d feel dissatisfied by the fact that both her kids were boys, and whether it was at primary school or kindergarten, all the Parents’ Association stuff was pretty much assured to leave her feeling sick and tired of everything, ...

A more typical, convoluted passage:

Her uncle, her mother’s elder brother by three years who had died of a heart attack in 1966–he had spent a long stretch in a psychiatric ward and remained single all his life, and passed all of his time idling around at his parents’ house in Yukigaya, and her mother said that he was talented and clever, but he was funny in the head, you had to admit that about him, he really was an odd one, and her father, after saying that she shouldn’t say those things about their children’s uncle (the kind of pronouncement on child-rearing that, if he were determined to make, he should really have made to her mother out of the children’s earshot), said to Natsumi, whose name was made up of two Chinese characters, one meaning ‘summer’ and the other meaning ‘fruit’ or ‘berries’ or ‘nuts’, he definitely was a bit of an eccentric character, but he was the one who gave you your name, there’s something poetic about it, don’t you think, what it means is that, fruit in summer isn’t yet completely ripe but in the autumn it ripens, he explained, and from that point on, in her head Natsumi somehow associated her own name with the persimmons in the garden that nobody came to pick and were eaten by birds, which wasn’t a happy connotation at all, and he then explained that they’d been thinking about Natsuko (‘summer’ and ‘child’) or Natsue (‘summer’ and ‘bay’) or Natsuki (‘summer’ and ‘life’) or Natsumi (‘summer’ and ‘beauty’) but her uncle had come along and suggested that different character for ‘mi’, which means the fruit or nuts that grow on a tree–had, when he was at school, drawn a picture of his mother (Natsuki’s Yukigaya grandmother), and his form teacher–who, when he was younger, had nursed an ambition to become an artist and was to this day an amateur painter–declared it was ‘like a Fauve’, and his mother, who was the subject of this peculiar picture in which she was depicted with a yellow face and red-and-black eyes, holding a red fan and dancing in a summer kimono with a gourd pattern, couldn’t see anything good about it, but the young teacher (who outside of school could be found in a bohemian getup consisting of a beret and Russian peasant shirt, painting oils and reading poetry and smoking a pipe, so that he had been mistaken for a ‘red’) came over to the house and spoke ardently about how they should certainly enter the painting into the children’s category of one of the public art competitions, and when asked what a ‘Fauve’ was, he showed them a copy of the journal Mizue with a reproduction of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon inside and explained that the term related to the Fauvist movement, and literally meant ‘wild beast’, and the art teacher thought long and hard about what to title the painting, The Obon Dance was too run-of-the-mill so they should maybe call it The Dance, although perhaps Dancing Woman was more fitting for this painting, and after going back and forth for a while he eventually decided that Dancing Woman was too artsy and not really suitable for something made by a primary school child and settled in the end on The Dance, and the picture went on to be awarded first prize, Natsumi’s uncle was declared a genius, and although it was now over fifty years ago that it’d been painted, the artwork had been well preserved, put in a glass-fronted frame, wrapped in newspaper and stored in a cardboard box, ...

The opening of one of the reviews of the photography expedition, whereas Kanai speculates, almost fantasises, about who might visit it:

... if, hypothetically speaking, a single woman of thirty-one or thirty-two who worked in the advertising department of a company responsible for the distribution of Western films, or a twenty-six-year-old woman who worked a desk job at a trading conglomerate (who had not entered the company on the career track) and was engaged to be married to a colleague currently working for the Côte d’Ivoire or Amman branch of the same company ended up having an affair with someone whom I don’t have the space here to imagine and consider how she might have met, then, that being the case, the museum is exactly the kind of place that a novelist would conceive of them being invited along on a date to by the copyeditor of a weekly magazine, aged somewhere between thirty-seven and forty-five, ...

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is exactly the sort of book I love. This was a strange but beautiful mixture of short stories and a longer book about one woman (Natsumi) and her family life.

All the stories follow each other but deal with different aspects of Natsumi's married life, her relationship with her friends, her husband, her children and wider family.

It perfectly described her days and her circuitous thoughts as she goes about the mundane tasks. It also explores her dissatisfaction with the more boring parts (eg shopping, which was a seemingly endless description of a supermarket layout - we've all been there - writing our shopping lists as we travel through the store in our mind).

I really enjoyed this book except for the essay part which felt oddly misplaced.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

[Bianca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mild Vertigo is written in the stream of consciousness style, with long, run-on sentences and no paragraphs or dialogue punctuation.
The narrator is a stay-at-home wife and mum of two young children. Her life is monotonous, repetitive and uneventful. She barely sees her husband, who works long hours as it's customary in Japan.
I can't say this was riveting, but it was captivating and unique.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Natsumi describes moments of dizziness and nausea. A feeling of weariness overtakes her as she images her husband and his lover in a conversation about the care Natsumi takes with her husband’s laundry. Then again when she realizes she writes out the same grocery list every time and can recall the layout and placement of products in the grocery store exactly. And finally when preparing tea, she watches the water slowly fill the kettle and zones out.
“This is what people mean when they say deja vu, that's what happens when you become an adult, especially a housewife, you have this feeling of deja vu that leaves you nauseous and dizzy….”
Natsumi reads an essay about the Japanese artist, Kineo Kuwabara, and the descriptions of the photographs seemed to refer to her own life.
“…all the adults, children, and women who here appear detached from the narratives of their own private lives and histories…and yet who seem, in spite of that detachment, as though their lives would not be so difficult to imagine, this all leaves the viewer with a sensation similar to a kind of vertigo.”

Throughout the novel Natsumi recounts her memories of her, now dead, Yukigaya uncle.
“…her Yukigaya uncle was her mother's brother…he'd gone funny in the head after leaving university and had spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, and had subsequently never found a steady job and idled around at his parents' house instead, reading books until dawn, sleeping during the day, and taking the dog for walks….”

Natsumi remembers the story of a woman’s fall off a balcony and then connects that story to her Uncle’s falls.
“…in the apartment block she'd lived in before there'd been a woman who'd jumped from the balcony of her third floor apartment, but ended up with only a broken leg, and who'd apparently told Mrs. Asakura afterward that she herself couldn't think of any reason for committing suicide, she'd just been hanging out her laundry when she'd happened to look down, and had the sensation of being sucked toward the ground, feeling that it would be easy to jump, and she remembered also how her Yukigaya uncle had done the same thing a lot when he was younger, sometimes he'd get away with just a sprain, but his mother had worried all the time that one day he'd mistakenly end up dying when he had no intention of killing himself, or so Natsumi's mother had said.”

In the third year of elementary school, Natsumi was asked to write about what she wanted to do when she grew up. She wrote that she wanted to “become her Yukigaya uncle or own a bird shop.”
“…it had seemed to Natsumi that not having a demanding job like regular adults was a wonderful thing, and so she'd written that she wanted to grow up to be like him, but of course she wasn't thinking that she wanted to fly down to earth or take off from a high spot like a winged bird….”

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this book is a bit cleverer than I am.

Mild Vertigo is about a Tokyo housewife called Natsumi. In truth, hardly anything happens in the book and the reader is pulled through by the long, dense sentences that mix stream-of-consciousness thoughts with conversation (without distinguishing between the two) as we accompany Natsumi through several episodes.

In fact, the novel comes to us as eight chapters several of which appeared separately, prior to the novel, as instalments in a glossy magazine or as reviews of photography exhibitions. The author says that even though these articles were published in different journals, they were written with the intention that they would be collated together as a novel.

So, even if not much happens, you know you are going to at least curious about how someone can write separate pieces about photography exhibitions and the daily grocery shopping and then bring them together as a pre-planned novel. For one thing, it means that Mieko Kanei, the author of Mild Vertigo, puts in an appearance in Mild Vertigo, even if not as an actual character but as the author whose essays her protagonist reads. You have to think that those two essays/reviews are included to provide the reader with some direction on interpreting the rest of the book. I found the review sections, even though I am a photographer, a bit hard to understand so I think I need to re-read probably the whole book to place the reviews in their context and then to place the book in the context of the reviews.

It sounds like it is a simple book about a Tokyo housewife, but clearly there is a lot more to it than that. The writing style might be a bit of a love/hate thing with the very long sentences that provide no guidance on switches between internal and external events: it can be a bit unsettling to read because sometimes it takes a few phrases to realise you have switched.

For me, it’s a book I would need to read again to try to get to grips with it. But the thought of doing that isn’t off-putting. Which I think all adds up to 4 stars with the potential for an upgrade on a second reading.

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is inside the head of a bored Tokyo housewife. Long, long sentences and paragraphs following her thoughts on all sorts of mundane things. It’s amusing in some parts, boring in others. Interesting look at the role of women in Japanese society and some of the sexism.

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Every day it will start all over again, this Sisyphean maintenance labor, there is so seldom, as Kanai Mieko writes, a way to “punctuate the monotony of everyday living.” In her notes K. wrote that Annie Ernaux’s book on suburbs and consumerism is called Exteriors, in Mild Vertigo, the exteriors are swallowed up, become interiors, like the narrator having totally internalized the layout of the grocery store so much that in a trancelike state at the end she finds herself moving through all of the aisles, reciting all of the offerings at hand.’ – ‘Afterword’ by Kate Zambreno

As a ‘concept’, I think Kanai’s book is brilliant, but that is all. I did not ‘enjoy’ reading this book at all. More painfully so because I kept hoping it would ‘get better’ (for me) but eventually it just became too obvious that I just did not like the ‘style’ of writing at all. While it could be seen as well-written for someone who actually enjoys this ‘style’ of writing, I personally felt so disconnected to it to say the least. I ‘enjoy’ reading the fucked up bits from the work/writing by Bataille because something about it makes it worthwhile. We have our own personal preferences of ‘uncomfortable literature’ – and I suppose each of us ultimately decides which one is worth the discomfort. For me, I don’t think Kanai’s book was worth feeling any ‘discomfort’ for. Excuse the cheeky comparison, but perhaps ‘discomfort’ is only a worthwhile experience when balanced with the right kind of ‘pleasure’. In any case, the obvious fact here is that I’m just not the right reader for Kanai’s book.

‘It wasn’t like anything in particular had happened to prompt these feelings, but she remembered there’d been times when she’d found the prospect of getting in after her husband totally repugnant, it didn’t exactly seem dirty to her, she wouldn’t go that far, but it was an indisputable fact that when a person was in the bath the sweat that emerged from their body’s pores would mingle with the bathwater, and of course she didn’t mind that happening when it was her children’s sweat, but when she’d thought about the sweat from her husband’s body mixed in with the bathwater it had struck her as something distasteful, that was to be avoided if at all possible.’

‘I was a housewife that whole time, and you know how in Letters to the Editor in newspapers and women’s magazines and so on, you find these letters from housewives, mostly in their twenties or thirties, who say that they have a lot of respect for other women who have busy careers and also manage to have a husband and kids, sometimes even saying this with some envy, but ultimately for them, they say, happiness consists in being a housewife and making a comfortable home for their husband and children — when I read people writing that stuff, I can’t help but feel that it’s sour grapes. Or if not sour grapes, then they have to keep telling themselves this to believe it. Because that kind of happiness is monotonous, it’s boring. Although what’s wrong with being boring, that I don’t know. The thing about being boring, having a boring life, is that you should do it while you still can, if you don’t have time to be bored, you’ll be exhausted.’

Regardless of how I felt or have rated Kanai’s book, I am sure someone else can definitely appreciate this book more than I do (which goes without saying, but I just felt like pointing it out anyway). Not sure if I’ve read many books that are written with a narrator who is a ‘housewife’. This is definitely the kind of narrative I want to read more of, because ‘housewives’ are too often viewed as an ‘inferior’ role for women, and increasingly so. And this is ironic (or is it just awful?) considering that most women at least in East Asia are expected to fill a huge part of that role once they get into a conventionally ‘serious’/committed relationship with men. To clarify, I don’t think all ‘housewives’ find it painful being one, but I think the primary problem comes from the fact that most are hugely under-appreciated and are treated with so little respect (not just from their ‘partners’ but from society). I am pretty sure this is made much worse with the contemporary commodification of feminism. But I am at this point still far too ignorant to discuss, let alone ‘argue’ about this, so – I hope to read, and learn more about this. Anyway, I am glad that there are books written about these issues, because I think they would really help to encourage/open up discussions.

‘And yet, the staggering number of Kuwabara photographs that so vividly capture these lost scenes and memories of passing moments cannot but bring about a peculiar silence, a peculiar surprise in their viewer. The act of casting their eyes on the great bustle formed by the lives of all the various unknown bystanders in these photographs, all the adults, children, and women who here appear detached from the narratives of their own private lives and histories, which they of course all possess, and yet who seem, in spite of that detachment, as though their lives would not be so difficult to imagine, this all leaves the viewer with a sensation similar to a kind of vertigo.’

The ‘photocopies’ (from the semi-final chapter of the book) which are mostly ramblings of art and film (which I usually enjoy) were grating my brain like bloody parmesan (excuse the image – only realised how awful it was after typing it out, but somehow seemed appropriate to leave it there/here). I thought I couldn’t carry on after this point, I don’t know if I want to take a nap more or cry. I mean I don’t actually want to cry, but maybe sigh a thousand times until my lungs just shrivel up like a couple of dried plums. To continue reading feels a little masochistic at that point, but I wasn’t about to quit when I had only a chapter left. At least I can properly say that the writing doesn’t resonate with me having read every line in the book.

‘I guess you don’t do the dishes very often, but what if you’re brushing your teeth, say, do you not ever just find yourself staring at the water as it rushes down the drain? And it’s strangely pleasant, that feeling, of course it’s no big deal, but you kind of zone out, as if you’re dreaming, although it’s not any dream in particular that you’re having. And then you come back to yourself with a jolt as you realize that you’re wasting water, I guess you just wouldn’t understand it as a man, especially one who so rarely does any form of housework, Natsumi said to her husband, and her husband raised his eyebrows in a way that suggested both slight irritation and a modicum of concern, making a face that meant, what are you trying to say, exactly? And of course she was utterly used to that expression of his, but the thing was, she wasn’t saying it to convey a sense of dissatisfaction or anything, it was just a minor sensation — the feeling of comfort and hollowness that came from looking at the water flowing from the tap and thinking of nothing, letting oneself fall into a daze — that she was trying to explain, and she couldn’t help but feel faintly irritated by the way her husband met that explanation with a suspicious look.’

Kanai’s writing (even though better in every way; and has far more substance) in some way reminded me of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow . I just found them sort of ‘lacking’ in terms of plot, structure, style, characterisation, – everything. While I am keen to read more books with a similar concept to Kanai’s, I really hope the next one I read is one that would actually fuck me up a bit, you know? In any case, I am still immensely thankful for the review copies from Fitzcarraldo Editions (if not my favourite, then definitely one of my top favourite publishers). If you need to refresh your literary palate after finding Kanai’s achingly disappointing, I would recommend Bora Chung’s (everything, but specifically) Cursed Bunny to refresh one’s literary palate. ‘The Head’ in particular is such a memorable one in the collection. Not just a random rec, but I personally think that there are some overlapping themes in Chung’s and Kanai’s books.

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrator of the Japanese writer, poet, and art critic Mieko Kanai’s 1997 novel is a housewife, and so when we first dip our toes into her stream of consciousness, it is her house that we find her ruminating about: that apartment in Tokyo, “with its large, open-plan kitchen and windows with sizeable balconies to both south and east sides,” with its kitchen island and breakfast bar, it is the center from which the staid monotony of her middle-class life radiates outwards—despite the fact that there has never been, she tells us, “any particular passion for cooking” on her part. The kitchen, we are told, is a feature straight out of glossy women’s magazines meant to pacify her nagging mother, but it is also a space we, as readers, are repeatedly returned to while traversing on the cruise ship of her dizzying internal monologue, her ever so slightly vertiginous experience of trying to locate herself in the minutiae of a sedated, lonely life where everything happens over and over again, and yet nothing does. 

Skillfully translated to English by Polly Barton 25 years after it was first published in Japan, Mild Vertigo is in fact an invocation of a seemingly timeless and all-too-familiar Sisyphean figure that straddles both comfort and disorientation and is unable to sink into either state. Kanai’s protagonist Natsumi is, in her own words, “a housewife of no particular refinement.” She left her job shortly after marrying, has tasked herself with caring for two small children and a stolid husband, and makes so many trips to the supermarket that its layout is etched on the back of her eyelids: she can recite the contents of the shelves at will, see herself move through the aisles as if in a trance. Hers is a small existence: the house, neighbours, and in-laws; the group of friends from school she sees once in a while; “the roster of simple domestic tasks that she had to get through day in day out, a sense that however much she did there was never any end in sight.” She is “no stranger to the impression that her life was boring, mediocre and eventless,” but this, for her, is a “feeling that existed separately from any feeling of dissatisfaction.” However small, however crammed with monotony and routine, this is her life—this is her life, and she makes of it what she will, even if it isn’t very much, and changes not a fraction over the course of the novel.

In fact, Natsumi’s inner monologue, blending seamlessly with traces of her day-to-day interactions with friends and family, reveals a depth of experience not betrayed by the epithet that is “housewife”. There is, of course, a certain stupor that her unending labours induce in her. She often finds herself staring at water running down the tap, and struggles to explain to her husband “the feeling of comfort and hollowness” that comes from watching the smooth rope of it go down the rain. But that dreamlike state, numb and “thinking of nothing,” is only part of her tale; bound as she may be by her domestic routine and all the labour that maintains and reproduces that domesticity, she inhabits a certain freedom in the mind, a space within which she may form and reform beauty and hold it up to light on her own terms. Every so often, while washing the dishes, allowing a photograph to open up the dam of memory, or watching a lace curtain ripple in step with the breeze, Natsumi comes to a moment of soundless revelation, profound if also fleeting, to wake her up again. She may not have the vocabulary of the school friend who works as a magazine editor, but meditates on art and madness through memories of her Yukigaya uncle, a child prodigy-turned-invalid who never quite measured up to his promise. And though her life is marked by conformity—to traditional gender roles, to the consumerism that underpins the idea of a domestic haven—she is capable of thinking critically, be it in relation to gender and the specific routines of femininity, the irreconcilable alienation and intimacy of grocery shopping, or the unmanageable, indefinite nature of her existence.

There is certainly something to be said about the manner in which this novel—with its specific kind of unremarkable narrator and her unremitting stream-of-consciousness, conveyed in four-page-long sentences—manages to not only arrest but also retain the reader’s attention in the absence of a conventional plot. In Mild Vertigo, as in other great stories about the quotidian, the interiority, is a transformative space capable of revealing a richness ordinarily hidden from our eyes, and Kanai’s Natsumi is a study in such illuminating subjectivity. Though her protagonist’s thoughts are often elliptical and concerned with keeping up appearances (when imagining the possibility of her husband having an extramarital affair, she is most concerned about what the shoddy, hole-riddled state of his underwear will say about her own competence as a wife), Kanai gives her mental descriptions a visual, cinematic quality that hints at the Woolf-like imagination contained within a character who is otherwise more reminiscent of Clarissa Dalloway; and perhaps also, for readers in the West, of the narrator from Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport , a 2019 stream-of-consciousness novel about a housewife in Ohio (indeed, Polly Barton’s English translation here sometimes makes use of the same syntactical devices as Ellmann’s book).

But it is not just Natsumi who cuts a Woolfian figure here: Kanai’s work is as concerned with writing and reflections thereon as it is with the burdens of womanhood, and it is perhaps as an attempt to spotlight this fact that she inserts herself in a cameo role as an unnamed writer from Mejiro, whose essays (in reality, the author’s own essays on the photo-exhibitions of Japanese street photographer Kuwabara Kineo, which were featured in various journals before the publication of Mild Vertigo) are reproduced within the narrator as material that the protagonist takes to reading. In this way, Kanai injects the novel with oblique commentary about what she may be trying to achieve in writing about a character like Natsumi, while also stating an awareness of the ways in which actual housewives may engage with her projects.

The last section of this windingly lyrical novel begins with Natsumi opening the door to find her impossibly drunk husband staggering in. She is weary in this scene, annoyed at having been woken up at two in the night, but is also aware of the power she wields even in her supposedly helpless role—in all senses of the word—as wife and mother, confident of the wisdom she possesses even as she is often given to adopting “the persona of a housewife who knows little of the ways of the world.” Later, we see her buy some novels by Irish Murdoch and Edna O’Brien from a second-hand store, “ostensibly dramatic adventures in which romance played a defining role, and, on top of that, seemed to be exploring religious morality and the meaning of existence.” She ultimately decides against reading them: it is not just that the worlds of those novels and the reality she inhabits are very far apart, but also that she knows “she would doubtlessly carry on living this kind of uneventful life with no opportunities to meet any men other than her husband, in a permanent state of tedium.” The housewife, in this moment, does not seek the escape provided by such novels. She is content to lead the life that has become her lot, happy to dwell in those moments of philosophical clarity that come to her at the kitchen island. Meanwhile, we as readers are left to wonder if she would perhaps want to read a book like Mild Vertigo instead: a book that casts its attention on someone like her, which echoes the resounding dullness of her own reality, and celebrates it as a quiet success in its own right.

[This piece originally appeared in The Cardiff Review.]

[Beige · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad I read this. While it is centered on the thoughts of a woman who has chosen a mundane life of middle-class domesticity, the narrative is anything but mundane. It is swirling and propulsive, at times even dizzying. I kept marvelling at what a monumental feat it must have been for Polly Barton to translate.

Normally I wouldn't post a quote this long from a book, but it's a great example of the kind of wiggly path Kanai takes to make a point. Here is (only a part of!) her character's internal debate about whether it's worth the effort to try and keep her husband's white underwear white....

"she was starting to have the feeling that the very act of washing another person’s underwear was degrading, which ruffled her, but, hypothetically speaking — and you have to laugh at the very thought (for some reason this phrase of her mother’s popped into her head) because there was no way such a thing was possible — if her husband was presented with the opportunity to have extramarital sex, either as a casual thing or a serious affair — no, she thought, of course I can’t come out and say categorically that this type of thing would never happen, but if I had to place a bet, I’d bet that it wouldn’t, imagining as she thought all this her husband away on business — then, although it was questionable whether most women would actually think about closely examining the underwear of the men that they were having adulterous sex with, she couldn’t really say for sure either way, but this was completely hypothetical anyway, and if this hypothetical woman happened to be looking, Natsumi thought as she stretched out her body leisurely in the bathwater that the chamomile bath salts had dyed to the color of incredibly pale arrowroot tea and that had nobody else’s dirt or sweat mixed in with it, only her own, rinsing away the sweat running down her face and neck with water she’d scooped up in both hands, well in that case, then, of course, seeing his dirty underwear the woman would think, this man’s wife isn’t doing a proper job — and that would naturally apply to everything, not just to the way that she did her laundry, but her approach to all domestic tasks — and then she would start to feel some sympathy toward him for having a slacker for a wife, the kind of woman who in the past would have been called “slovenly,” and might begin to think that she wanted to take better care of this man, or else, on the contrary, she would see in that sad, graying underwear something too uncomfortably close to the realities of life and get turned off by the whole thing, but either way, really, it has nothing to do with me (it is, after all, his washing technique of flinging everything in together that’s to blame), but for the most part, the kind of woman who causes trouble for married men, going by what I’ve seen and heard, harbors a malicious prejudice toward “the wife,” and so if “the wife” in question happened to be a housewife, then any such woman would of course assume that the housewife was an entity who would without question wash her husband’s underwear, without even a second thought, and so the graying underwear would be deemed nobody’s fault but my own, and that idea makes me mad, so it’s probably better, in the long run, to have him wear underwear that’s properly washed, she thought"

artist: wang zhiyuan

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m afraid I admired this book more than I liked it. The stream of consciousness style is excellent and as a reader you really get inside the head of a housewife, but in the end it didn’t really grab me. I’m sure others will love it though.
Thank you Fitzcarraldo and Netgalley for the ARC.

[leti lo yeti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bello! Sicuramente ha uno stile molto sconnesso, a volte non proprio facile da seguire (mi ha ricordato le descrizioni che certe persone che soffrono di ADHD fanno del proprio disturbo), ma mi è piaciuto, e in certi tratti anzi l'ho trovato proprio divertente.

Consigliato principalmente a chi è già familiare con la letteratura giapponese, ma anche a chi vuole immergersi in un'altra quotidianità.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down

I sometimes find it challenging as a reader when a book completely succeeds in achieving what it sets out to do - such as creating a distinct voice or reading experience - but by doing so gives the reader an experience which is so immersive, on the verge of being claustrophobic - that being stuck in the protagonist's head or life is not the most pleasant experience. Examples that come to mind at the extreme end of the spectrum are American Psycho, perhaps Lolita could be another.

This is where I struggled with Mild Vertigo: Mieko Kanai has so successfully got into the head of this housewife that it creates a stultifying reading experience. I struggled to separate this almost oppressive reading experience from the writing skill clearly on show here. Perhaps one I might appreciate more on a re-read, but another interesting fiction offering from one of my favourite indie publishers.

Thank you to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.

[Willow Heath]

Mild Vertigo is a small but dense literary Japanese novel, originally written in the late ’90s, that presents us with a protagonist who is deeply compelling in her unremarkability.

Natsumi is a middle class Tokyo housewife with two sons. Her life is defined by her routines, her familial and neighbourly connections, and her physical space.

We follow her along in these routines as she gossips, makes private observations, and loses herself in long trains of thought.

My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/japanese-lite...

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really wanted to like this book but I found it so boring. It follows the life of a housewife in her apartment and is just split up into stories of things she does in her day and thoughts she has. The writing is a bit difficult as it’s just stream of consciousness and really rambly, with sentences going on and on for pages. None of it ever hooked me and I never really felt anything towards the book, just ambivalence. It’s marketed as for fans of Clarice Lispector and Ella Ferrante but I don’t really see the comparison as those novels are heavy with emotion and identity crises whereas this book was very flat compared to those authors. Sad I didn’t enjoy it as I wanted to like it but really was not for me.

[Camilla tra le righe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Questo libro è GENIALE e l'ho amato tantissimo.
Nonostante ciò vi giuro che non sono certa di quanto lo consiglierei.

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Fiztcarraldo Editions and Netgalley for providing an ARC to review.

Written in the late 1990s and translated here by Polly Barton, Kanai has created a stream-of-consciousness novel that centres of the daily life of Natsumi, a full-time 'housewife' and mother living in suburban Tokyo.
The prose follows Natsumi's thoughts and feelings which are recorded here in long, winding sentences with numerous sub-clauses as she appears to drift through her life interacting with her neighbours, shopping in the local supermarket and talking to her husband. Despite this, what appears to to be both a simplistic and unremarkable narrative delicately exposes the inner life of a woman, and in a wider context, women, who are either unfulfilled, trapped by circumstance or their own ennui or dissatisfied with life. In this respect, the book is a feminist examination of the life of not just Japanese women living in a certain time period, but all women who find themselves spectators in their own life, looking in on it as if from outside. Natsumi is the only one of her group of friends who doesn't work and this causes her some anxiety, yet those who do work seem equally as dissatisfied with their work, their relationships or their friendships with each other.

Within the book is an essay on two male Japanese photographers, written in a critically academic style which provides a contrast to the winding prose of Natsumi's narrative but ultimately comes to emulate Natsumi's position. The exhibition, based on a series of photographs taken over a period of years in Tokyo, leads the author, who must be Mieko Kanai herself in an essay that might have been published independently to the book, to state:

" The act of casting their eyes on the great bustle formed by the lives of the great various unknown bystanders in these photographs, all the adults, children and women who here appear detached from the narratives of their own private lives and histories, which they of course all possess, and yet who seem, in spite of that detachment, as though their lives would not be so difficult to imagine, this all leaves the viewer with a sensation similar to a kind of vertigo."

This is subtle and clever novel. The writing style won't agree with everyone but for a reader who is prepared to read between the lines there is much to discover here.

[Stacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A divine translation of a captivating book. What a treat!

[Tommi · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5]

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

and what lay stretched out beyond the open window was the summer sky, dazzling in its blueness — the kind of sky that seemed like it could suck you right in — and she felt her head growing hazy, despite lying down she began to feel quite dizzy, and it was hard to say whether it was her whole body or just her field of vision, but whichever it was began reeling from side to side, so she closed her eyes, and when she looked away from the sky there were orange discs on the back of her eyelids as if they'd been branded there, and on the backrest of the sofa, she saw two or three of her husband's thin, black hairs with a brownish sheen, together with a single grey one, stuck to the raised grey acrylic fabric as if slicing into it, glowing in the light. [49–50]

[Joe Cahill · Rating 2 out of 5]

The final chapter of this book has the main character, a housewife named Natsumi who is living in residential Tokyo with her husband and two sons, on her way home from visiting her elderly parents in Meijiro (just around the corner from where I went to uni funnily enough). As she sits on the Odakyu line train home, she listens in on the humdrum conversations of four highschool boys opposite her and three elderly women sitting next to her. These conversations are written out on the page simultaneously as a block of text with no punctuation. Seven people participating in two separate pieces of alternating dialogue with nothing to break it apart.

Once natsumi gets bored of listening to this, she ends the narration of the novel with a list of every single item in her local supermarket. This isn't the first time she does this though, it's pages and pages and pages and PAGES of lists of things on shelves at her local supermarket. This was done a few times like it was a joke.

There's also completely unnecessary chapter about LOVE YOU TOKYO, a 1990s photography exhibition by Kieneo Kuwabara which had nothing to do with anything. If I wanted to read about that I'd have bought the pamphlet.

Two stars for this book being the most insane thing I've ever read.

[Till Raether · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

No plot, no character development, just an atmosphere of flimsy discontentment attached to or revolving around a fictitious essay on an actual photography exhibition. Exhilarating prose (always love Barton's English flowing like a breeze) in super long sentences.
Avoid if you are fond of paragraph breaks.

[David Fleming · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I found the stream of consciousness in this novel a bit dull. This might have been one of the points that the author was trying to make? But it made finding the motivation to keep reading quite difficult.

There were definitely moments where I could see the value in this book, and I’m glad so many others have, but I couldn’t get into it…

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though originally published in 1997, this new English language translation of Mild Vertigo is as relevant today in its focus and unpacking of daily ennui, the round-robin of tasks to be accomplished each day, the way our minds spin and whirl, how our conversations are never direct lines but branch off, even the open-plan kitchen in the narrator's apartment is still trendy today. We are with the narrator, often in her mind, Natsumi, in her 30s, married to a nice-enough man, a calm man, also a man who no longer washes his own clothes, and goes off to work, leaving all the life requirements of shopping and bathing and feeding their two young sons to her. Memories of her childhood, of an uncle, conversations with her mother, with her friends, her brother, her husband, the neighbors in their apartment complex, the issue with the stray cats that someone feeds in their complex, an article comparing two photographers, and through it all, through her reality of life and motherhood and marriage and everything else, Natsumi goes about her days, finding a marketing list in her pocket in an old coat she hasn't worn in a long time and realizing nearly everything on that list is on the list she has just written, her ability to articulate the aisles and what's on the shelves in the market where she shops, the reality of motherhood, of marriage, of being a housewife versus a career woman, and more. A stream of consciousness of sorts, which is hard to do, done so well here. We are with Natsumi - I often laughed following her thoughts as she goes about her days, interacts, or doesn't, thinks, her thinking branching off. She's a terrific character and the whirl of her thoughts made me think about the whirl of my own thoughts, and the repetition of her days made me think of what I repeat each day. Fresh and often funny and deep and the whirl and swirl a little nausea-inducing. Terrific. And the afterword was clever, written in the style of the novel, another woman in the whirlwind of domesticity.

[ellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in middle class Tokyo, Mild Vertigo is a study in interiority, both architectural and psychological. Kanai captures the ennui of Natsumi's domesticity in prose which forces us, the reader, to live the agonising repetitiveness of her existence—the studied politeness of her conversations with neighbours, the minutiae of food preparation, and the growing resentment she feels towards her husband:

She didn't want to immerse her body in water that contained all the dirt that had oozed out of his pores along with his sweat, she didn't feel that way when they were having sex and their bodies were pressed so tightly together that there was sweat running down in the gap between their two sets of skins, but when she imagined the dirt and sweat that had come from her husband's pores mixing with the dirt and sweat that had come from her own pores within the bathwater, she found it revolting, as though the contour lines of her own body had dissolved and were blending, through the boundary with another body and the pores in the skin, with something else - and worse, these contaminations taking place while immersed in dirty warm water - which left her feeling unpleasant, and slightly sick. (46-47)

The long, carefully-paced sentences from which Kanai constructs her novel are incredible; not only stylistically, but also through their sheer, vertiginous lightness: never outstaying their welcome, but never allowing you to forget, even for a moment, the power of their complex weight.

[Axelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

gewoon leuk! je moet je een beetje aanpassen aan haar manier van schrijven maar zo tof boekje