Mild Vertigo
By Kanai Mieko
Translated by Polly Barton
Fitzcarraldo Editions (2023)
ISBN-13: 978-1804270387
Review by Laurence Green
Mild Vertigo is a short, slim novel containing both multitudes, and a whole lot of nothing. The paradoxical fascination of the everyday mundane - the busy-body clutter and utter banal domesticity of a very particular kind of middle-class hum-drum existence. This is the life we experience through the eyes of Natsumi and her ordinary, oh so ordinary, life in a modern Tokyo apartment in the mid-1990s.
Living with her husband and two sons, her life on the face of it seems modest - she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends and neighbours - rinse, repeat. Not much happens - but then, this is so very much the point of Mild Vertigo, the mind-numbing inconsequentiality of it all, and yet depicted with the bleakest, darkly observant humour Kanai Mieko can conjure up. In Natsumi’s observations somehow something as matter of fact as a page-consuming list of what she spots in the supermarket (she knows its aisles so well she can map out the position of every item in her mind) takes on a laser-like incisiveness as it needles the uncomfortable power-structures and role of the conventional housewife within Japanese society.
Mild Vertigo’s core format is that of the monologue. Natsumi’s monologue; though her identity as a “character”within the book is largely subsumed within the endless scrolling torrent of words that spill from page to page with barely a paragraph break in sight. It’s an almost but not quite stream of consciousness, as her interior and exterior, dialogue and description, merge in a clever kind of fictional reportage that feels all the more real because it’s wholly comprised of the very stuff of everyday life. The world portrayed is absolutely Japan - but equally the vignettes of petty squabbles, divorces and drunken antics feel like something straight out of a soap opera; and thus are entirely universal in their ability to portray the human condition in all its mediocrity.
Natsumi’s life appears to be a lonely one - her isolation in her confines of the housewife role are probed and digested from every possible angle, whether through the commerciality of fashion choices and outright consumerism, to the seemingly endless need to feed the hungry mouths of her husband and kids. One of the novel’s most innocuous but somehow saddest moments is the insertion of a shopping list for, amongst other things: ‘Table-wiping cloths’ and ‘lunch-box snacks’.
In an urban metropolis like Tokyo, how do we pinpoint our place within the countless millions of other lives around us, all consumed by the same drives? The same impulses? For Natsumi herself, as a character, it is hard to say - but what Mild Vertigo does manage to do, at any rate, is paint into existence a kind of beauty from the assorted ugliness of the everyday. The novel begins to feel like a frozen vignette of a timeless Tokyo - 30 years ago, 100 years ago, now. Old movies portray a pre-war city that, aside from the mass adoption of all the electrical gadgetry we take for granted now, was not so very different from the Tokyo of the 90s or 00s. People act out the same stages of life, going through the motions, driven by a nagging sense of whether there’s anything else - we are all characters on the city’s stage.
Told in eight different segments, each takes as its focus a particular angle or lens by which to ultimately observe the same intermingling of the everyday. One gently mocks the ‘good news’ of a friend’s marriage announcement arriving in the post and the endless list of anniversary gifts that will no doubt follow, year after year. Another pokes fun at advertisements in women’s magazines: ‘Is Being a Wife and a Mother Stopping You from Doing What You Want to Do?’ - There is even a chapter that plays out like a kind of textual equivalent to a documentary film analysing an art gallery and its particular aesthetic appeal.
It’s testament to Kanai Mieko’s skill as an author, and Polly Barton’s masterfully naturalistic translation that sees Mild Vertigo pull all these disparate elements together into a whole that feels like a stunningly straight-talking indictment on everything that makes up modern Japanese society and the position of the housewife within it. Linking everything together is Natsumi - not so much a character, but a vacuum for all of us to occupy.