Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons:she does the laundry, goes on trips to the supermarket, visits friends and gossips with neighbours. Tracing the conversations and interactions she has with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her internal monologue,Mild Vertigoexplores 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 Lucy Ellmann, 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.
Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons:she does the laundry, goes on trips to the supermarket, visits friends and gossips with neighbours. Tracing the conversations and interactions she has with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her internal monologue,Mild Vertigoexplores 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 Lucy Ellmann, 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.
Born in 1947, Mieko Kanai has worked throughout her life as a writer, poet, essayist and literary and art 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.
'[Mieko Kanai] 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.' -Sofia Samatar, author of Tender
'A dizzying, kaleidoscopic novel. Bold yet simple, quiet yet
choric,Mild Vertigobrilliantly captures the noisiness of a lonely
life.' - Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author ofThe End of Nightwork
'Mieko Kanai'sMild 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.' - David Hayden, author ofDarker With the
Lights On
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