Sisyphean Domesticity: On Mieko Kanai’s “Mild Vertigo”
Mieko Kanai, transl. Polly Barton | Mild Vertigo | New Directions | May 2023 | 179 Pages
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.”
Mild Vertigo was first published in 1997, with some chapters first appearing as installments in a Japanese women’s magazine, Katei gahō (“Home Illustrated”)—the kind of magazine that Natsumi would have read. The literary scholar Atsuko Sakaki has suggested that publishing in such a magazine, typically associated with domesticity, femininity, and intellectual irrelevance, represents a “transgression of the boundary between material and intellectual.” This fluidity is common in Kanai’s work: she is also a film and photography critic, and her novels frequently include cinematic references and reflections on photography as an art form.
Mild Vertigo makes the tension between the material and intellectual explicit. It’s a novel where commodities are paramount in people’s lives, where brand names hold an undeniable allure. A restaurant is described as a place where “at any given time two people there will be wearing Issey Miyake's Pleats Please.” Natsumi’s grocery shopping lists are written on “Muji A6 paper.” These objects quietly furnish scenes where Natsumi cares for her husband and two sons, does the laundry, washes the dishes, makes small talk with neighbors. Taken out of context, these details might indicate a novel that is insubstantial, uncritical in its fetishization of capitalistic desires. But what they reflect instead is the deadening quality of Natsumi’s domestic life, with its excess of materiality and lack of meaningful activity. In one scene, Natsumi reflects on her near-daily routine of going grocery shopping:
By now she was so utterly bored with this type of shopping that she could picture in her mind the way that the goods were laid out before even leaving her house, could visualize how she would go in and, across the aisle from the vegetable section immediately to her left-hand side—containing salad and green vegetables, root vegetables, tomatoes, and cucumbers—were the fruit, the mushrooms, and the dairy products […] it was on Tuesdays that she went there, because that was Fish Special day, which meant the cases were lined with polystyrene trays of tuna or red snapper or yellow-rail or octopus sashimi […] and in the meat section beside it, polystyrene trays containing semiprepared cutlets, yakitori, diced steak on bamboo skewers, meat-stuffed cabbage rolls, hamburger patties, chicken, ground beef, ground pork (with a label reading Guaranteed 80% Lean Meat) […] and on the shelves beside that were a huge quantity of ready made curry roux, various kinds of seasonings, Chinese and ethnic ingredients, ready-made rice porridge in packets [...] all the different kinds of miso paste, all the different kinds of salt, all of which she could list from memory just like that […] [it] made her feel utterly sickened.
Mild Vertigo is full of these relentlessly sprawling sentences. They occupy whole paragraphs, even pages, often acting as containers for unwaveringly detailed lists of objects. Despite the abundance of nouns—impressing and exhausting the reader—there’s an unsettling void at the center of these sentences. Because there’s no real pleasure in enumerating all this abundance: it’s a dissociative technique that lets Natsumi escape the vague, formless despair she feels returning to the supermarket, “picturing it all half-unconsciously.” These specific objects seem to let her ignore her indistinct feelings. An inchoate despair is the dominant mood of the novel, as Natsumi’s feelings of emptiness, dizziness, and vertigo collide against her Sisyphean rituals of domesticity.
It’s almost a relief when Natsumi lashes out, in acerbic conversations with her husband where other marriages and other households are judged with vituperative intensity. Anything she despises is pathetic: a man who brags around the office about his wife’s homemade tempura is “totally pathetic,” as is the wedding announcement for a young couple with the words GOOD NEWS!! printed on it. “There’s a pushiness to it,” she tells her husband; “frankly speaking, there are plenty of people in this world who don’t think marriage is anything to be celebrated.” She recognizes the marital malaise underneath her reaction: “she had never felt herself to be unreservedly, defenselessly happy” in love. The question of happiness—and the conditions required to attain it—looms large in the novel. Natsumi’s mother, a housewife as well, has one theory: “happiness is for everything to be mediocre and uneventful.” But it is the eventless repetition of her life that Natsumi finds intolerable. An ad Natsumi encounters suggests a different definition of happiness. She simply needs to occupy herself with some ambition, some activity:
In an advertisement for a women's magazine in that morning's newspaper she saw the words Is Being a Wife and a Mother Stopping You from Doing What You Want to Do? parading in great big letters across the page, and in slightly smaller print, Do you find that your days get eaten up by the constant struggle to keep up with the housework and childcare, and you end up putting all the things you wanted to do and the dreams for the future you once had on hold? When you think about yourself, are you sometimes visited by the lonely feeling that the world is moving on without you, or a sense of panic about whether you're good enough as you are? If so, this issue can change all that. We showcase the women who have made the things they want in life happen.
A more conventional novel might not state its central conflict so unambiguously. Confronted by these words, Natsumi lists out the different lives available to her. Among friends and acquaintances, there are mothers who have exhibited lacquerware, made hand-dyed garments, opened a baking school, a kaiseki restaurant, sold real estate, taught kimono-dressing. A different novel would have Natsumi become one of them—disaffected housewife turned girlboss? Disaffected housewife turned cultural critic?
But Kanai hasn’t written that novel. Natsumi’s attempts to change her life fail in quiet, unremarkable ways. Once both of her sons are in elementary school, Natsumi considers looking for a part-time job. But when she asks her old classmates from university (all working women) for help, they rebuff her. Her domestic life seems to resist all attempts at change:
She found that she was just as busy as ever without really being able to say what occupied her days, and all that formless time sliced up into sections slipped past before she knew it.
Her childcare responsibilities are replaced with new demands. Natsumi’s mother calls: she’s undergoing cataract surgery, and her first concern is not for her own needs, but for Natsumi’s father, who has been insulated from doing any housework or cooking. Could Natsumi take care of him? It is an event that forecloses any escape from the “flat, monotonous life of a housewife . . . that somehow took an overwhelming toll on the spirit.”
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At times we can glimpse another world beyond the material one that Natsumi feels trapped in—an intellectual world centered around photography, culture, and criticism. Perhaps the most significant event in Mild Vertigo is one drawn from real life: the 1993 joint exhibition of two photographers, Kineo Kuwabara and Nobuyoshi Araki, at the Setagaya Art Museum. Natsumi visits the exhibition with her parents, who grew up in the kinds of working-class neighborhoods that Kuwabara photographs. Natsumi is drawn to Kuwabara’s work, which “had given her such a peculiar feeling . . . she had felt so much empathy for [the subjects] that it had startled her.” After she speaks to her friend Setchan—an unmarried, working woman—about this, Setchan promises to photocopy two essays about Kuwabara for Natsumi to read.
The essays were written by Kanai herself and originally published in two different magazines. As Kanai wrote in the postscript to Mild Vertigo, her intention was always to incorporate these essays, and the fiction installments published in a women’s magazine, into one novel. In Mild Vertigo the essays are reprinted in full and attributed to an unnamed novelist. They stand apart from the inexhaustible and exhausting inventories of objects in the novel, instead presenting a sharp critical gaze. Kanai compares the two photographers and judges Araki—more well-known outside of Japan—as “really quite dull.” But Kuwabara is praised for his photographs of people, “in which their small moments of joy and varied kinds of despair and loneliness have been gently captured.”
I’ve read these essays three times now. Each time, the contrast between Kanai’s unhurried confidence and the hesitant, formless quality of Natsumi’s own voice becomes more painful. They suggest an alternate life for Natsumi—one where she is not a housewife but a writer. In the second essay, a man and woman on a date are discussing Kuwabara’s photography. The woman is an editor at a publishing company; the man is a film buff who subtly patronizes her. But when the woman makes a statement about what makes Kuwabara’s work remarkable, the man “looked visibly impressed, as if to say, I’d always thought you were a bit dumb, but you come out with some unexpected things sometimes.” This woman—perhaps it’s Kanai herself—is still vulnerable to being underestimated. But she has found a place for herself in a literary world, a place where her opinions can be taken seriously.
How different this is from the life Natsumi leads! Her phenomenological observations on seeing water stream from a tap are ignored by her husband; her attempt to discuss a film by Truffaut with a friend of hers, a single working woman, is met with her friend’s “usual contempt” for her intelligence. These responses lead Natsumi to withdraw, to hesitate in matters outside of the domestic sphere. Natsumi responds to photographs with merely a peculiar feeling, an affect that she can’t fully define.
This nameless affect was articulated by the French literary theorist and critic Barthes, who wrote in Camera Lucida that a photograph has the power to produce “an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken.” Kanai is a devotee of Barthes (an untranslated work of hers is named after Camera Lucida), and Natsumi’s encounters with photography depict this agitation beautifully. Early on in the novel, her parents bring out a family photo depicting Natsumi’s mother and uncle. Natsumi is attentive to the formal qualities of the image—how people are arranged, who is gazing at the camera, who is turned away. And the awareness that nearly everyone in the photo has passed away “gave her a very peculiar feeling.” She is drawn to photography’s capacity to capture a fleeting moment and imbue it with immediacy. It is a quality that Kanai, in her critical essays, praises Kuwabara’s photographs for, their ability to “capture these lost scenes and memories of passing moments” and, in doing so, “bring about a peculiar silence, a peculiar surprise to their viewer.” In a later scene, Natsumi’s father shows her a family photograph where “she saw, although she had no memory of the occasion, her own self wearing a sleeveless white dress…which had been made for her when she was in the second year of kindergarten.” Instead of nostalgia, she experiences a sense of distance and estrangement from the past. Kanai takes this theme up in the essays included in the novel as well: “people cannot really lose themselves in sweet nostalgia for a bygone era by looking at Kineo Kuwabara’s photographs.” For Natsumi and Kanai, photographs do not return the viewer to a known, familiar past. Looking at them establishes a new relationship to the past, one where, in Kanai’s words, the photograph can “peel off a thin layer from light’s time.”
The character (Natsumi) and critic (Kanai) encounter the same medium, the same photographer, the same exhibition. But the contrast between Natsumi—whose stream-of-consciousness narration easily names the objects in her life, but not the feelings produced by an artwork—and Mieko Kanai pierces me. Natsumi, despite continually returning to this “peculiar feeling,” is unable to be the critic; she is merely the character that conveys an esteemed critic’s perspective.
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After reading Mild Vertigo, a very peculiar feeling attached itself to my domestic life. My fridge was empty, so I had to go grocery shopping right after I finished the novel. It was evening, the sunlight loosely folding itself into shadows along the street. The grocery store was brimming with cherries, peaches, nectarines, kale and broccoli and other cruciferous greens, radishes and turnips, fresh herbs, cheeses wrapped in paper, spreadable cheeses, bread, wine. Kanai’s novel had defamiliarized the shopping experience for me; I now moved through the aisles keenly aware of the superabundance. I picked out some vegetables, paid for them, returned home, and stood in the kitchen. I prepared dinner.
And as I did, I began to think about what my domestic life contained, though of course it wasn’t anything like that of a Japanese housewife living in 1990s Tokyo—I was unmarried for one thing, and childless, so I was preparing a dinner just for myself, a luxury that Natsumi experiences only once in the novel. But if either of these things changed, would I also experience the kind of delicately repressed despair that Natsumi struggled with—that intolerable feeling of malaise that ran all the way through the novel, that was present even in the unrelenting ending, with Natsumi returning home on an Odakyu Line train, groceries in hand, coming to terms with the feeling that her life might remain “in a permanent state of tedium”? I was making a salad. I arranged the small heads of gem lettuce on the cutting board and made neat, clean cuts to trim the stems, and I kept thinking: maybe it was too unsubtle a reading to imagine that what Kanai was presenting was the constrained loneliness of a domestic life, where others were fully dependent on you without recognizing it, in contrast to the exhilarating vitality present in an intellectual life, whatever form it might take, but certainly one where your opinions could be taken seriously. I pulled apart the lettuce leaves and swept them into a colander, with a sudden burst of vigor—because if I had to be just a housewife to a husband and two sons, who were utterly dependent on me cooking and tidying and laundering to facilitate their lives, and if to my friends I was also merely a housewife, someone who would have little to say on film and photography and the greater world beyond the home—well, if all this were true, I began to wonder what kind of formless existential terror I might feel in the kitchen, in the closed and containing domestic interior, washing the vegetables I’d just purchased at the kitchen sink, watching the clear, pure water flow out of the tap, streaming and splashing against the stainless steel sides, and whether it wouldn’t feel as if my self was hollowing out and disappearing, in a formless rush of other people’s expectations, down the drain.