Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo is a slice-of-life novella whose short length belies its Proustian ambitions. The narrator, a housewife living in an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs with her husband and two young sons, engages in extended meditations on her home, family, friends, neighborhood, and place in the world.
I don’t use the word “Proustian” lightly, as Kanai’s prose requires patience and concentration to read and appreciate. The endless sentences gallop and sprawl across pages, sweeping the reader along in a flow of thought and sensation that transcends time and place as the narrator’s focus wanders. This is no breezy stream-of-consciousness nonsense, however, as each sentence is exquisitely crafted and brilliantly translated by Polly Barton.
As with Proust, there’s a certain comfort and emotional satisfaction in the act of paying such close attention to the mundane details of daily life, but Kanai’s narrator has a strong sense of irony. Gendered double standards aren’t a primary concern of this novel by any means, but an underlying frustration still shapes the narrator’s relationships and observations on what it means to be a housewife.
Mild Vertigo (originally published in 2002) doesn’t set out to upset or challenge the reader in the same way as much of Kanai’s earlier writing, but it nevertheless operates with an absolute lack of sentimentality that I find extremely refreshing, especially on the more literary end of the “slice of life” genre. Due to the dense nature of Kanai’s prose, it took me a surprisingly long time to read this short book, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 