Posts from the ‘Mieko Kanai’ Category

Mild Vertigo

Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo (New Directions, 2023) is a little miracle of a novel about the daily life of an average suburban Tokyo housewife, written in a kind of flattened prose in which nearly all emotions of the characters are tamped down or ignored. All that seems to matter are the details of the day’s minutiae. Kanai even seems to want to forego the possibility of any kind of writerly style. Mild Vertigo reads like a kind of anti-literature, as if its prose were meant to appear slightly boring. Which makes sense, since the book represents what Natsumi, the apparently random housewife with a husband and two children, thinks and hears over a period of days or weeks (time is not really determined in the book). Natsumi’s mother uses the famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—as proof that happiness for everyone is meant to be “mediocre and uneventful, it’s the same in any household—and it’s boring.” To which Natsumi replies, “I’m okay with that.”

Somehow, Kanai makes it gripping to follow Natsumi along as she goes about her routine day, making dinner, washing dishes, eating out with friends, gossiping with neighbors, riding the underground, and so on. The opening sentence is four pages long and describes the apartment that Natsumi and her family have just moved into. Natsumi especially liked the fact that “the front door didn’t open directly into the kitchen, there was instead a proper vestibule, even if it was slightly cramped, which led to a hall, and a door with glass panels framed in white wood separating the hall from the main living space, which meant you could avoid having visitors unexpectedly catching a glimpse of your chaotically messy kitchen. . .” Later on, the book spends nearly five pages during which Natsumi recalls a conversation about washing underwear. And yet disturbing undercurrents flow through the novel—rumors, dinner discussions that casually move into unforeseen and unpleasant directions, conversations that turn mean. People are committing suicide, jumping out of windows. A neighbor reportedly “murders” a stray cat by pouring boiling water over it. It seems to Natsumi that a surprising number of her acquaintances are having affairs. One gossip even tells her about a supposed ring of housewife prostitutes.

Thus, it is perhaps not unsurprising that at unpredictable moments, when there is a disconnect between the image of a safe, boring suburbia and reality, Natsumi experiences a bit of mild vertigo. Sometimes, these moments can be “strangely pleasant,” as it is the time she is washing the dishes.

. . . it’s as she’s rinsing off the soap under the tap that she finds herself there, a plate held in her hand, staring fixedly at the running water. The rays of morning light pouring in through the window make the rope of water streaming from the tap twinkle and sparkle, and the water sends spray spattering about the sink as it’s sucked down into the drain, flowing continuously, ceaselessly, not exactly noisily but creating a slight reverberation as the water and the air echo through the pipes, and the water spills over the rim of the plastic tub, making a faint trickling noise.

It’s not a big deal or anything, but do you ever find that happening to you? 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 who so rarely does any housework, Natsumi said to her husband.

But at other times, Natsumi’s vertigo takes on more serious dimensions.

When she sat down on the sofa, the bleak view of the suburban residential landscape—a whole forest of apartments and commercial buildings in mismatched gray and beige that went on uninterrupted for as far as the eye could see aside from a few spots of green here and there where trees were growing—which you saw from the window when standing up would disappear, 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, she began reeling from side to side, so she closed her eyes, and when she looked away from the sky there were orange disks 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 gray one, stuck to the raised gray acrylic fabric as if slicing into it, glowing into the light.

In a way, Kanai’s writing mimics Natusmi’s cooking. “She couldn’t bring herself to make the sorts of meals that would mess up the kitchen.” For the most part, Kanai doesn’t want to draw any attention to her writing. It wants to be invisible. Kanai even takes a sly poke at her own project when she has a neighbor of Natsumi’s complain about a fiction-writing class she has just taken at the local Culture Center. “The teacher droned on about how important it was to include all kinds of descriptions of things” in fiction, said the neighbor, who quit the class and switched to a screenplay-writing class “where the story developed solely through the dialogue between characters.” But whenever Natsumi has an episode of vertigo, Kanai’s pen perks up and we get a moment of glorious prose, as in the last example, where the focus shifts cinematically from the landscape outside Natsumi’s window to the back of her eyelids to the stray hairs on the back of the couch.

But there is another way in which Kanai (and her translator Polly Barton) work brilliantly with words. It has to do with the way in which Kanai creates complex scenes. Once again, my example, which comes at the very end of Mild Vertigo, feels cinematic. Natsumi stops at a used bookstore in Tokyo and finds herself attracted by the “crass illustrations” on the covers and the rather lurid sounding blurbs of novels by two women she has never heard of—Edna O’Brien and Iris Murdoch. She “had an impulse to read just this kind of turbulent, romantic novel that veered so wildly from reality for once” and so she buys both books. Ready to return home, she stops for coffee in the train station and accidentally leaves one of the books on her table. When a young man catches up with her to return her book to her, she suddenly realizes “how genuinely rare an event it was for a housewife to speak to any other man than her own husband.” As she contemplates this while riding the train homeward, she remembers that when she was young she certainly wanted to be “sexually desirable,” but “now, she wasn’t even conscious of the fact that she was being treated as a sexless middle-aged woman.” In contrast to Natsumi’s inner conversation, some nearby teenage boys are complaining loudly to each other that the girls their age are too aggressive. “We haven’t even done anything and already it’s I love you I hate you and all that shit.” It’s better to get porn videos than real girlfriends. And on the other side of Natsumi are some women in their sixties talking about fish sausage and what day their garbage is collected, and then both conversations become blended for a few pages, giving us a magnificent mashup of three generation’s concerns simultaneously. Ultimately, Natsumi tunes everyone else out and starts to think about what to make for dinner that night. “She started visualizing how the supermarket looked inside, how she would go in and, across the aisle from the vegetable section immediately to her left-hand side containing salad and green vegetables. . .” After two full pages of mentally roaming the aisles of the supermarket, “her field of vision began to sway slightly in a way that was different from the vibrations of the train, as if she were experiencing a kind of mild vertigo.”

Mild Vertigo is one of those plotless books you can read simply for the pleasure of submerging yourself in someone else’s life for a few hours, while you watch a master writer create magic out of thin air. It has some common touch points with Danielle Dutton’s 2018 novel Sprawl, which I wrote about in March of this year. (Keep in mind that Mild Vertigo is a translation from Japanese into English, which makes it very difficult to make definitive statements about the nature of the original writing style.) Both are novels that have deeply critical views about suburbia and modern life in general. And in both novels the main characters are completely caught up in their milieu and are therefore relatively oblivious to any of its downsides. I’ve described the writing in both books as having a kind of “flatness,” although what I mean in each case is a bit different. In Kanai’s book “flatness” means displaying little or no emotion. In Dutton’s book “flatness” means that no one sentence is privileged above another, so there really aren’t any hints that direct the reader to the author’s intentions. It’s up to the reader to decide where the emphasis or drama lies or if there is any at all in Sprawl. This flatness, this refusal of the author to bare her soul through the mouthpiece of her book’s narrator, which I am seeing more and more of in novels, can be seen as the polar opposite of the immersive self-exposure of autofiction.

Mieko Kanai. Mild Vertigo. NY: New Directions, 2023. Translated from the 1997 Japanese original by Polly Barton.