Mild Vertigo

April 10, 2023
Kanai (Oh, Tama!) takes on the domestic sphere in this nuanced portrayal of a woman’s domestic routines. Natsumi, her unnamed husband, and their two young boys live in a leafy part of Tokyo in a vast apartment block, their unit “luxuriously spacious for a family like hers.” Echoes of conversations with her college girlfriends linger in her head, prompting her to wonder if they judge her for being a housewife without recognizing the hard work it entails. Kanai casts an unflinching eye on child and spousal care, maintaining a home, and the short-lived pleasures of buying new and expensive things, showing how the unrewarding labor often makes Natsumi want to “toss everything else aside and sleep the entire day.” The novel is cleverly built around dialogue, rendering Natsumi’s world through a chorus of voices: her husband’s, friends’, or neighbors’, all of whom love to gossip, whether about a local curse or about the fate of a couple whose wedding invitation seemed so cheery as to be gauche. Bracingly honest in its take on the limits of satisfaction in a nuclear family, this offers plenty of rewards.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
Consumed by the minutiae of caring for a family, a Tokyo housewife ekes out a perfectly ordinary but profoundly unfulfilling existence. Newly translated by Barton, this brief but piercing stream-of-consciousness novel manages to feel topical more than 25 years after it was published in Japan in 1997. Its eight chapters and 190-odd pages are linked not so much by plot as by tone and theme. Thirty-something wife and mother Natsumi spends her days doing chores, running errands, gossiping with neighbors, and tending to her husband and their two young sons, all the while fighting a vague, nagging sense of ennui. Natsumi resigned from her "easy-but-tedious job" after she'd had her first child and has not worked outside the home since. Her inner monologue, a vivid mishmash of memories and observations, mingles with the events of the book to provide a window into her perspective. While Natsumi acknowledges that her life is not bad per se, she is nevertheless frustrated by its monotony and mundanity. She has visited the nearby supermarket so many times that she has the layout of the store memorized. When she finds an old shopping list in a jacket pocket one day, she's "utterly sickened" to discover that it's nearly identical to the one she wrote on a memo pad moments before. "There was," she thinks at one point, "something Sisyphean in the nature of the roster of simple domestic tasks that she had to get through day in day out, a sense that however much she did there was never any end in sight." Laden with descriptions of objects and locations, Kanai's detail-rich sentences offer a specificity of time and place that make the story feel grounded in reality. In portraying Natsumi's conflicted relationship to her roles as wife, mother, and housekeeper, Kanai considers the potentially reductive effects of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity on personal identity. A subtle, thoughtful portrait of a woman chafing at the demands and constraints of domestic life.

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