Natsumi is a 40-something housewife who lives in an apartment in Tokyo with her two sons and husband. She finds herself drifting through her life. She's bored, wonders how and why she got to this point, and feels inadequate most of the time. She spends a fair bit of time second-guessing herself. Her husband is rarely home and she spends a great deal of time by herself, wondering how to fill that time. She has a few gossipy encounters with neighbours, and visits her parents, but her one big outing is a get-together with friends from college. Mostly she feels like she is going around in circles. She sometimes gets somewhat hypnotized by things like water flowing from the tap. As life goes on around her, she sometimes experiences feelings of 'mild vertigo.'

This is a quiet book. It's written in the third person, yet takes place entirely in Natsumi's head. It feels like there is a reporter residing there recording her thoughts. This seems appropriate because Natsumi herself seems to be an observer of her own life. She is a bit dissociated from her own experiences.

This is an excellent book. Once I started it and entered Natsumi's head, I was eager to see how her thinking process unfolded. The writing and the translation are wonderful. I thought the structure of the book worked very well. Natsumi's feelings, uncertainties, and frustrations were evoked in a powerful way. This is a book that will stay with me and I highly recommend it.

'Mild Vertigo' presents itself in an elaborate stream of consciousness. The sentences are extremely long and, quite frankly, rambling. The author is telling a lot on these pages, though most of it trivial. Little personal (like you expect from a japanese novel), but also litte atmospheric, I found myself easily distracted and tired.
It all depends on you loving or hating this very unique way of story telling.

I am so glad that in recent years we've had the chance and privilege of reading literature from Japan. This is a remarkable story about an "unremarkable" character named Natsumi who lives in Tokyo with her husband and two sons and lives her ordinary, middle class life where "nothing" happens, but we know that's not the case. Thanks to fitzcarraldo for giving me the opportunity to read the book. I enjoyed it immensely.

Acclaimed poet, critic and novelist Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo is less overtly disturbing or elliptical as the stories of hers I’ve read but it’s still striking and innovative. Originally published in 1997, it focuses on the experiences of a housewife Natsumi who lives with her husband and two small sons in a Tokyo apartment building. Kanai’s depiction of Natsumi is structured through snapshots of her day-to-day activities and interactions: inner monologues mingle with scenes of chance encounters with neighbours, stray thoughts or casual conversations with friends and family. It’s a deceptively simple, sometimes seemingly artless piece; outwardly random and free flowing but actually admirably intricate and painstakingly constructed. As with other works by Kanai, it developed gradually out of pieces published elsewhere yet always destined to be stitched together to form a single narrative.

In many ways Natsumi might seem an unremarkable character, socially slightly conservative, sometimes diffident, sometimes rebellious, her time’s centred on her family but Kanai’s portrait of her makes her incredibly compelling. Kanai’s approach is often very visual and there are numerous episodes that have a near-cinematic quality, as if they’re unfolding in real time. These elements, plus the ways in which Kanai so vividly captures the minutiae of Natsumi’s existence, and an emphasis on time and space, reminded me of work by film-makers like Chantal Akerman - sans her more sensational plot twists. Like Akerman, Kanai’s interested in gender, the domestic, the machinery and practices of femininity, and here she includes, as she often does, detailed accounts of clothing, fashion, and food, all essential to the fabric of Natsumi’s world - it’s no surprise Jane Austen’s one of Kanai’s favourite novelists. Yet Kanai also manages to makes Natsumi’s story immediate, vivid and fresh. Her notoriously long, dense sentences drew me in, everything combining to create the impression of a direct link to Natsumi’s consciousness: her anxieties, her desires and preoccupations. There’s a reflectiveness of the kind I associate with Yuko Tsushima’s work but it's interspersed with some wonderful flashes of unexpectedly biting, understated humour.

Through Natsumi, Kanai seems intent on exploring particular moments of being, repeatedly returning to episodes in which Natsumi’s confronted by a sudden awareness of her own existence, sparking feelings of profound disconnection or connection. The sensations set off by an image or a sound, her apartment building’s community glimpsed in fragments of shared stories; its social hierarchies and collective culture founded on uwasa (gossip and rumour) that both binds and alienates. All those near-indefinable encounters that can suddenly produce a kind of breakthrough, and for Natsumi an accompanying shift in awareness that elicits a visceral, bodily response.

I also really relished Kanai’s meticulous representation of the kinds of taken-for-granted knowledge that women like Natsumi possess, which combine to form a vivid picture of the cultural landscapes she inhabits - the exact layout of the local grocery shop that she visits almost daily, so familiar she can recite its contents from memory. So exact a recollection that it recalled another of Kanai’s favourite writers Roland Barthes and his dissection of overlooked everyday objects and images. Although this isn’t a self-consciously academic piece, Kanai has talked about how her writing is concerned as much with writing as anything else, and as if to hint at the artificiality of her text she makes an early cameo appearance as an unnamed writer from Mejiro, where she’s lived for many years, a place she often returns to in her fiction. Later Natsumi reads this writer’s essays on photography, articles where Kanai discusses the nature and impact of Tokyo photographer Kineo Kuwabara’s style and subject matter and, in doing so, indirectly comments on what she might be trying to achieve with her portrait of Natsumi. A portrait I found so totally absorbing, I was disappointed when it ended. Translated by Polly Barton.