When Domestic Life Is Like a Horror Story
Anglophone readers of Mieko Kanai’s whirling, urgent novel Mild Vertigo will face only one disappointment: There’s not yet much more where it came from. Kanai was born in Japan in 1947 and has written roughly 30 novels and story collections over the course of a career that has also included poetry, criticism, and essay writing, but so far only a fraction of her body of work has appeared in English.
Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton, should generate high demand for more. It is a 26-year-old novel very much grounded in middle-class Tokyo, and yet it manages to feel both universal and of the moment, perhaps because of its workaday concerns: the seduction and despair of consumerism and housework. Mild Vertigo, though, gets its potent immediacy not from its subject matter, per se, but from Kanai’s astonishing ability to write a domestic horror story that somehow doubles as a surprising glorification of domestic life.
Mild Vertigo opens with its protagonist, a stay-at-home mom named Natsumi, obsessing over how to arrange the apartment she and her husband have just bought. Not how to arrange it now: Natsumi, whose children are in elementary school, is already trying to work out how to rearrange their rooms and storage systems to best accommodate her kids as they approach their teenage years. Kanai mixes this fretting with intensely detailed descriptions of the apartment and its contents, as well as Natsumi’s insecurities about her cooking process, her mother’s thoughts about the new apartment, and her decision to replace its old tatami matting with laminate flooring, which “meant that cleaning was simple, and it was also far more hygienic compared to carpet, which makes it easy for dust mites to multiply, and besides, laminate flooring is in fashion, so of course they were going to go for that,” and so on.
Kanai writes about Natsumi’s every decision using an onslaught of clauses—comma after comma, and hardly a period in sight. Considering the differences between English and Japanese syntax, translating her prose surely required a fair amount of rearranging words and re-creating rhythms, which Barton does beautifully. The effect is often hypnotic. Stream-of-consciousness writing tends to be. But unlike many novels of this sort, Mild Vertigo doesn’t stun readers simply by shoving them deep into its protagonist’s head. Rather, Kanai makes clear how genuinely overwhelming it is to approach household life as granularly as Natsumi does. Natsumi herself is alternately entranced, repulsed, and exhausted by the thoroughness and indecision that dictate her domestic routine.
Mild Vertigo is, in a loose, ambient sense, a feminist novel, but it’s hardly the tale of a feminist awakening. Natsumi knows from the start that her obsessiveness about cleaning and decorating is closely linked to the consumerist messages she’s absorbed. In the novel’s opening sentence, she admits to choosing an apartment with a luxurious modern kitchen not out of a commitment to cooking but because the kitchen “looked like the interiors she often saw and admired in the glossy pages of women’s magazines.” But once her family has moved in, she feels that the kitchen is “too good for her.” Although it makes her feel deficient as a wife and mother, she can’t “bring herself to make the kind of meals that would mess up the kitchen.” Maintaining appearances seems more important to Natsumi than any other kind of performance—which helps explain Mild Vertigo’s astounding profusion of visual detail.
[Read: A better way of buying—and wanting—things]
Often, Natsumi’s day-to-day life makes her miserable to the point of disorientation or disgust. She sees that there’s “something Sisyphean in the roster of simple domestic tasks” that she performs over and over; a recurring motif in the novel is the physical sickness she feels on contemplating the sameness of her weekly grocery run, the degree of familiarity she has with the supermarket nearby. Similarly, her aversion to dirty bathwater and stray hairs goes far beyond a desire for a clean home: Just imagining taking a bath in water her husband has already used, as she tends to do, gives her the sensation that the “lines of her body had dissolved and were blending … with another body,” a thought that triggers evocatively written nausea. Her body, imperiled by the grimy bathwater, seems to stand in for her sense of self, imperiled by her role as a wife and mother.
Yet Mild Vertigo is not a work of true body horror. Natsumi’s skin doesn’t dissolve. Nor does she descend, “Yellow Wallpaper”–style, into insanity brought on by the suffocating nature of being a housewife. Indeed, Natsumi doesn’t always hate her life. She certainly isn’t trying to escape it. Mild Vertigo may be a condemnation of the Sisyphean demands of housekeeping, but it also sees something profound in domesticity. Kanai regards Natsumi’s home, outfits, and routines with the same close attention that Herman Melville gave the whaling industry in Moby-Dick or Karl Ove Knausgaard gave his memories in My Struggle.
In doing so, Kanai turns housekeeping into a form of art—showing, in addition to its tedious sides, its magical, beautiful, and outright strange ones. At the end of the first chapter, Natsumi falls into a trance watching water run from her kitchen sink, “sparkling in the light and twisting like a bundle of strings, or rather a snake.” She knows there’s “nothing remarkable about it whatsoever, it was an utterly ordinary thing,” and yet she allows herself to stand at the counter, in awe of the beauty of a stream of water that, on another day, would mean only noodles to cook or dishes to wash. Her ability to key into such moments is a product of her open-mindedness—the same trait that makes dirty bathwater upsetting or, for that matter, a magazine-touted kitchen too tempting to resist. She is so intellectually porous she at times struggles to locate herself.
[Read: What we gain from a good-enough life]
Among Kanai’s achievements is her ability to make Natsumi’s porousness into a worldview of sorts. Midway through Mild Vertigo, a friend of Natsumi’s clips and photocopies a review of a photography exhibition for her, which Kanai includes in full. Initially, the essay seems bafflingly unrelated to the novel’s themes, but gradually, the critic begins to praise the open, lingering quality of the photographer’s gaze, admiring the “placid sensuality and supremely personal curiosity [the photos direct] at a particular momentary scene.” It’ll hardly be lost on readers that Natsumi’s gaze has precisely the same quality. In fact, by this point in the novel, they are likely to have picked up a bit of it, if only temporarily.
Mild Vertigo comes with an afterword by the American novelist Kate Zambreno, whose work tends toward the dreamy and meditative. She is, perhaps, an especially porous reader and writer; she seems to soak up so much of Natsumi’s perspective that her essay, which is loosely about the overlaps between Mild Vertigo and her own life in 2020s Brooklyn, reads like an admiring imitation of Kanai’s novel. (For writers, imitation is not only a form of flattery but also a valuable tool.) At no point does Zambreno reflect seriously on the differences between being a housewife in 1990s Tokyo and a working writer in contemporary New York, which is frustrating, but her contribution effectively shows “the interior of an experience of a novel like this, how a novel invades you, as much as you invade it.” 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 captures a truth that’s hard to acknowledge, let alone discuss. For many, many women, home and marriage mean restriction and confinement, and yet many, many women love and glory in their marriages and homes. Context—cultural, personal, temporal—changes this tension without erasing it. A realist might suggest that this cognitive disconnect cannot be erased without significant structural changes in nearly every country across the globe; a cautious optimist would perhaps add that, in an egalitarian future, men and women might share the burdens of this enigma equally. 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.