Mild Vertigo: Book Review
Mieko Kanai: Mild Vertigo (translator, Polly Barton), London: Fitzarraldo, 2023.
I found many reasons to admire it. Prime among them was the consistency of language — and translation — that makes it possible for a reader — even one who lives on a different continent and speaks a different language — to enter into Natsumi’s reality (Kudos to the translator). For this is Natsumi’s interior monologue, or stream of consciousness. In fact, a reader may well recognise aspects of her own patterns of observation, habits of internal thinking and remembering, ways of reconciling internal conflict with a relentless social demand for calm, orderly submission to conventional expectations. Perhaps if a reader is a woman, especially one who has had responsibility for a small household, she will hear Natsumi’s voice with particular clarity, slip into her reality with special ease: the minutiae that occupy a wife and mother in a comfortable apartment in Tokyo — shopping, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, chatting with neighbours and family — will resonate with the minutiae of housekeeping almost anywhere. But very few of us potential readers will be quite unfamiliar with the sense of disjunction that prevails, the sense of being caught in a changing structure of complex, interrelated minutiae that won’t respond to us and won’t slow down.
There are a few pages toward the end of the book when Natsumi gives us her response to a pair of photography exhibitions on view in the same local museum at the same time. Somewhat ironically, this exercise — it “reads” as a kind of art criticism to us, even though it’s still internal monologue — stimulates her to a quite startling level of logical analysis and clarity. She “reads” the two collections as contrasting representations Tokyo, almost a century apart. In order to do it, she draws on her own past experience as a writer and editor — we know because she relates a few memories. At the same time she addresses her aching need to make sense of her own situation. In a deeply imaginative leap, she perceives a contrast between the two groups of photographs, one made in a warmer, more human Tokyo a hundred years ago, the other in a “wired,” robotic contemporary environment.
Suddenly I could perceive the book as an elegant, articulate, agonized description of the the loss of writing, and with it, the vanishing of chronological, historical order. Natsumi remembers having worked among writers and editors, but has abandoned writing as a potential practice; currently, she reads chaotically, sporadically, for entertainment or distraction rather than as a means of enlarging or defending or criticizing or experimenting with an existing sense of self and situation. The moment of greatest clarity and creativity comes through photography — arguably the most closely-related medium — not writing. So far, she is suffering only mild vertigo. But to a reader, it seems unlikely to remain “mild” for long.
