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3.0 

Mild Vertigo

By Mieko Kanai & Polly Barton &
Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai & Polly Barton &  digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

In this intoxicating stream-of-consciousness novel, Mieko Kanai tackles the existential traps of motherhood, marriage, and domestic captivity

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.

81 Reviews

3.0
“There are particular sections or quotes from this book I found to be very striking, and stuck with me as expressing feelings and experiences I recognised with great incisiveness. I don't mind a 'plotless' book, and the meandering writing style with it's many tangents and odd asides really did work to capture a certain feeling of a dazed lack of control and repetitiveness. But God, sometimes it was so tedious. There's like an entire page listing everything in her local grocery store, and a section that's just a pretentious essay on a photography exhibit I have no interest in. Again, this feeling of tedium works at times to convey the monotony and depersonalization of modern domestic housewifery, but often it was just not something I wanted to read, and became unpleasant and irritating”

About Mieko Kanai

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.

Polly Barton

Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, and Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds. Her second book, Porn: An Oral History, is forthcoming.

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