Staff Pick
The slice-of-life within Mild Vertigo offers the reader a startlingly similar reality to their own. A calm surface, only just barely disturbed by the creeping sensation of having been here before, done all of this before — not in a dramatic, Groundhog-Day sense, but of looking at your grocery list and realizing it's an exact copy of the one before, and the one before, and the one before. The way Natsumi's stream of consciousness highlights the burden of preserving identity and selfhood within motherhood and late-stage capitalism is painfully relatable and flawlessly done. Recommended By Charlotte S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"[Mieko Kanai is] not interested in describing objects; she wants to accentuate their amorphous nature....Sections of the novel first appeared as monthly installments 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. Written in order to be collected. The exhibition reviews, the advice flipped through in a women's magazine: always a novel." — Sofia Samatar, author of Tender
Review
"Laden with descriptions of objects and locations, Kanai's detail-rich sentences offer a specificity of time and place. A subtle, thoughtful portrait of a woman chafing at the demands and constraints of domestic life." — Kirkus Reviews
Review
"In the vertigo lurking at the depths of a very ordinary life, Mieko Kanai succeeds in uncovering the tranquility and cruelty that exist side by side." — Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police
About the Author
Born in 1947, Mieko Kanai is a novelist, poet, essayist, and critic. She has published around thirty novels and short story collections, and her critical essays have been featured in Japanese newspapers and magazines for almost fifty years. In the English-speaking world, she is perhaps best known for her story "Rabbits," a gory retelling of Alice in Wonderland where a young girl puts on a suit made of freshly skinned rabbit fur.