"The greatest Japanese author you've never heard of…Mieko Kanai's gift is attention: attention to familial memory, to overheard conversation, to those small glints (sometimes a dagger, sometimes a gift) that can appear in conversations among friends."
"Its great drama lies not in the events it recounts, but in its stylistic fidelity to mental experience."
Times Literary Supplement - Doug Battersby
"A dizzying, kaleidoscopic novel. Bold yet simple, quiet yet choric, Mild Vertigo brilliantly captures the noisiness of a lonely life."
"Mieko Kanai’s writing – encompassing fiction, poetry and criticism – has been sorely overlooked in the English-speaking world, so the new translation of her 1997 novel Mild Vertigo is a welcome arrival. The book is a surrealistic portrayal of quotidian middle-class life in late-20th century Japan."
"A sharp and sleek read that questions what is automated and what it means to be knowing, in a life compartmentalized into ribbons."
"The text generates urgency and momentum by recreating the experience, recognizable to most people, of constant motion and total immersion in information communicated by an overabundance of visual signifiers."
"Like Mrs. Dalloway, Mild Vertigo plunges the reader into the mind of a woman of comfortable means who is trying to make sense of her world even as she is bombarded by a tumult of impressions, memories, worries, constraints. My thoughts began to mimic the buzzy, galumphing rhythms of Natsumi’s interior world. I began to wonder whether I had always thought this way, whether this book was making me aware of the true nature of my mind for the first time. Such is the mesmerizing wonder of Kanai’s prose, as translated by Polly Barton."
The New York Times - Claire Oshetsky
"Mild Vertigo deftly captures the monotony of housework and the loss of self in family life, exploring a generalized sense of dissatisfaction with the options available to women in contemporary capitalism. Kanai’s beautiful and strange prose takes the reader inside the mind of a woman whose world is both mundane and disintegrating."
"Mild Vertigo remains a short but monumental read that captures the human experience in fresh, evocative prose. Under Barton’s assured hand, the philosophical underpinnings of Natsumi’s worldview teeter into sight, fleeting yet profound."
Japan Times - Kris Kosaka
"Mild Vertigo is an immersive, uncanny narrative held taut over eight chapters that contrasts existing and living, seeing and viewing. An enthralling horror story about tedium that pushes the reader tight up against the unmanageable moments of everyday life and the domestic."
"It’s the observations of subtle minutiae that make Mild Vertigo an effortlessly intriguing read. Between a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic."
The Rumpus - Gracie Jordan
"For me, Mieko Kanai’s writing represents one of the high points of Japanese literature. The tiny details giving shape to the everyday, the daily repetitions, the memories that come suddenly flooding back, other people’s voices—all of these described in winding, iridescent prose. Their utter ordinariness, their utter irreplaceability, make for a reading experience brimming with joy from start to finish."
"We do all need homes; we all deserve clean, safe, warm, and welcoming ones. Mild Vertigo ’s detailed attention and moments of beauty honor the work of creating such a space, and its steep descents into unhappiness and revulsion demonstrate the sometimes-staggering emotional cost of doing so. Of all the many things in Mild Vertigo to admire, perhaps the biggest one is that Kanai gets the paradox of domesticity right."
The Atlantic - Lily Meyer
"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."
"Mieko Kanai is not interested in describing objects; she wants to accentuate their amorphous nature."
The Paris Review - Sofia Samatar
"Mieko Kanai is not interested in describing objects; she wants to accentuate their amorphous nature."
The Paris Review - Sofia Samata
★ 2023-03-28
Newly translated by Barton, this brief but piercing stream-of-consciousness novel manages to feel topical more than 25 years after it was published in Japan in 1997. Its eight chapters and 190-odd pages are linked not so much by plot as by tone and theme. Thirty-something wife and mother Natsumi spends her days doing chores, running errands, gossiping with neighbors, and tending to her husband and their two young sons, all the while fighting a vague, nagging sense of ennui. Natsumi resigned from her "easy-but-tedious job" after she’d had her first child and has not worked outside the home since. Her inner monologue, a vivid mishmash of memories and observations, mingles with the events of the book to provide a window into her perspective. While Natsumi acknowledges that her life is not bad per se, she is nevertheless frustrated by its monotony and mundanity. She has visited the nearby supermarket so many times that she has the layout of the store memorized. When she finds an old shopping list in a jacket pocket one day, she's “utterly sickened” to discover that it's nearly identical to the one she wrote on a memo pad moments before. “There was,” she thinks at one point, “something Sisyphean in the nature of 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.” Laden with descriptions of objects and locations, Kanai’s detail-rich sentences offer a specificity of time and place that make the story feel grounded in reality. In portraying Natsumi’s conflicted relationship to her roles as wife, mother, and housekeeper, Kanai considers the potentially reductive effects of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity on personal identity.
A subtle, thoughtful portrait of a woman chafing at the demands and constraints of domestic life.
‘I began to wonder whether I had always thought this way, whether this book was making me aware of the true nature of my mind for the first time. Such is the mesmerizing wonder of Kanai’s prose, as translated by Polly Barton.’New York Times
‘In the vertigo lurking at the depths of a very ordinary life, Mieko Kanai succeeds in uncovering the tranquillity and cruelty that exist side by side.’ The Memory Police
‘Mild Vertigo is an immersive, uncanny narrative held taut over eight chapters that contrasts existing and living, seeing and viewing. An enthralling horror story about tedium that pushes the reader tight up against the unmanageable moments of everyday life and the domestic.’Darker With the Lights On
‘A unique form of realism cultured from rhythmic, alert sentences that left my sense of the everyday altered, and made me desperate to read everything else Kanai has written.’Comic Timing
‘A dizzying, kaleidoscopic novel. Bold yet simple, quiet yet choric, Mild Vertigo brilliantly captures the noisiness of a lonely life.’The End of Nightwork
‘Mild Vertigo deftly captures the monotony of housework and the loss of self in family life, exploring a generalized sense of dissatisfaction with the options available to women in contemporary capitalism. Kanai’s beautiful and strange prose takes the reader inside the mind of a woman whose world is both mundane and disintegrating.’They Call It Love
‘Mieko Kanai is not interested in describing objects; she wants to accentuate their amorphous nature.’The Paris 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 , starred review
‘For me, Mieko Kanai’s writing represents one of the high points of Japanese literature. The tiny details give shape to the everyday, the daily repetitions, the memories that come suddenly flooding back, other people’s voices – all of these described in winding, iridescent prose. Their utter ordariness, their utter irreplaceability, make for a reading experience brimming with joy from start to finish.’Weasels in the Attic
‘A sharp and sleek read that questions what is automated and what it means to be knowing, in a life compartmentalized into ribbons.’Keeping the House
‘[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.’Tender
‘This is not a narrative of passive surrender, but a chronicling of a routine lived beat-by-beat among life’s daily provocations.… Between narrator and reader there is a conspiratorial candour and deadpan humour, which is captured deftly in Polly Barton’s translation.’ Irish Times
‘From the first sentence of Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo you’re already in a whirling state of imbalance, thanks to Kanai’s distinctive style and Polly Barton’s mesmerizing translation. The first sentence stretches out across pages — four to be exact — and you’re pulled into the mind of Natsumi, a Tokyo housewife and mother who never feels inclined to name her two young children. It’s a spiraling read of the everyday in all its idiosyncratic, tragicomic edges…Humorous and thought-provoking, literary yet somehow escapist, Mild Vertigo is worth the challenge.’ Japan Times
‘Kanai’s prose has a hypnotic rhythm that takes hold from the start and grips you. You’re there inside her head; she’s inside yours. The final pages build like a sound wall, a cacophony, punctuation rejected, gaining momentum, recalling the final pages of Ulysses – though here the mood, rather than affirmative, is future uncertain.’ Spectator Australia
‘Mieko Kanai’s writing – encompassing fiction, poetry and criticism – has been sorely overlooked in the English-speaking world, so the new translation of her 1997 novel Mild Vertigo is a welcome arrival. The book is a surrealistic portrayal of quotidian middle-class life in late-20th century Japan.’Frieze
‘Mild Vertigo is, indeed, an invasive novel about feeling invaded, a cautionary tale about the domesticity messaging that inundates women that is also an invitation to luxuriate in it. Reading it made me want to both flee my house and clean it.… Mild Vertigo ’s detailed attention and moments of beauty honor the work of creating such a space, and its steep descents into unhappiness and revulsion demonstrate the sometimes-staggering emotional cost of doing so. Of all the many things in Mild Vertigo to admire, perhaps the biggest one is that Kanai gets the paradox of domesticity right.’The Atlantic
