On Mieko Kanai’s “Mild Vertigo”

Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo opens with a deceptively ordinary scene. We are in a Tokyo suburb in the 1990s, thirty minutes from Shibuya. Natsumi, a housewife and mother, has just moved into a new apartment with her husband and two young sons. In the novel’s opening sentence, which runs for four pages, her attention sweeps from room to room, producing an inventory of objects and emotions. Pride: the kitchen, with its imitation-marble kitchen counters, “looked like the interiors she often saw and admired in the glossy pages of women’s magazines.” Anxiety: at seven years old, “it wasn’t exactly new [but] it didn’t feel like a relic either.” Class anxiety: the previous apartment, merely two bedrooms, with an undesirable layout that made the whole place feel “impoverished” to Natsumi’s mother. Resentment, too: the obnoxiously obtrusive home gym that Natsumi’s husband bought and never used—a frustration that Natsumi is determined to suppress, to “stop obsessing over.”