"If you don’t have time to be bored, you’ll be exhausted."
And other semi-scrutable gems from Mieko Kanai's Mild Vertigo
Hello! Picking up where I left off, which was attempting to decode / discover what the author Mieko Kanai is saying about housewives / domesticity / cultural expectations born out of one’s gender and socioeconomics in her novel, Mild Vertigo. C’mon! It’s going to be fun! (Sometimes.)
As I read the last chapter, I had that itchy feeling of having almost realized a goal. Soon, I’m going to be done with this book and will therefore be one step closer to understanding what this very smart author is saying!
Of course, I then finished the book and was like: Wait, what is she saying?
From the cover, I knew the book included an “Afterword by Kate Zambreno” and I was very much looking forward to reading that. Maybe Kate will tell me what Kanai is saying about housewives? Are they good or bad? (A.k.a. Am I good or bad?)
I was also aware that I had yet to read The New York Time’s review that led me to the book in the first place. But if you’re a regular here, you will remember that I’ve grown tired of outsourcing my opinions to other people. Plus, I really wanted to know what I thought Kanai was saying.
And so, before I read Zambreno’s afterword, I went back through the book, studying it like I was taught to do in seventh grade English: by transcribing key sentences from the text onto index cards. (Were you taught to do this?) (I didn’t really do this. What I did was type the lines into a Word doc.)
Ironically perhaps, the following lines from chapter two evoke a similar idea, of becoming accustomed to being accommodating. In this scene, our main character, the housewife, Natsumi, is in one of her neighbor’s apartments and has just complimented the woman’s tidy interior while debasing her own:
it struck [Natsumi] that it must be a full ten years now since she’d developed the ability to say things she didn’t think at all as if she really meant them, to pass off very standard pleasantries with a serenity that remained unshaken even if the person she was talking to knew she didn’t really mean what she was saying
This reminds me of a tiny book I read last year called Lying by Sam Harris. In it, Harris makes the argument for never lying. Ever. White lies, like complimenting someone’s apartment when you don’t really mean it, can make for smooth relationships, no doubt. But they can also degrade these relationships and, in time, like it’s alluded to in the above lines, these tiny lies can degrade the relationship with your self.
In chapter four, the stakes are raised in terms of the havoc caused by Natsumi’s uneasy relationship with herself, her lack of self-understanding. She’s on the phone with her mom who offers to take Natsumi shopping, “to splurge” on something as a way to “release” some stress. This comment from her mom sends Natsumi off into her head. She admits that she does have stress she wants to relieve but she’s also seemingly critical of this desire to relieve it because she’s just a housewife. The stress seems to come from the monotony itself, which is only broken up by “what you might call ‘family occasions.’”
This thought then recalls a frustrating conversation with her friend Setchan. Setchan works full-time and lives alone:
there’s things that you can’t understand when you’re in that situation, in other words coming out with the same cliches that housewives always say to single working women—to “free women”—and once she’d said this she started to believe what she was saying, to think that it really was true and there was of course no way that Setchan would understand what she was feeling, and not only that, but she didn’t even understand her own feelings exactly, or how to articulate them, so that when she said, someone as fortunate as you are could never possibly understand, she felt like she’d actually said something real
That last line—“she felt like she’d actually said something real”—is so interesting to me. Because it begs the question: Is it not real? And if it isn’t real that Setchan “could never possibly understand,” then, is the reality that Setchan could understand? But before Natsumi can take this line of thought any further, she’s back in that conversation with her mom, agreeing to go on a shopping trip.
It's like Natsumi gets close to some kind of truth about herself, but she doesn’t stay with it long enough to actually get there. Which makes me think about what in life allows for self-discovery? My first thought is: therapy. And then my second thought is: some sort of crisis or event that causes upheaval, that forces a new perspective.
Which brings us to this amazing moment where Natsumi’s mother says:
The best way for everything to be is placid and uneventful, without incident of any kind…
It’s just so funny in terms of a novel, which implies plot, which implies, at the very least, a sequence of events. And yet, at the same time, isn’t that what most of us want? For everything to be peaceful and without incident. And maybe especially regarding your domestic life?
Natsumi’s mother goes on, talking about the divide between housewives and married mothers who work outside the home. She seems to be annoyed by housewives who say they are made happy (which implies a kind of fulfillment) by this role and this role alone. She says:
Because that kind of happiness is monotonous, it’s boring. Although what’s wrong with being boring, that I don’t know. The thing about being boring, having a boring life, is that you should do it while you still can, if you don’t have time to be bored, you’ll be exhausted.
To which, if this weren’t a library copy, I would have written down in the margin: LOL and YES!
All of these aspects of the book come to a head in chapter seven, which is titled “Female Friends.” A favorite topic of mine. In it, Natsumi goes out to dinner with a group of her friends from (what sounds like) high school. There’s a great moment where she not only decides to wear the “splurge” purchased for her by her mother—a pale-colored, silk blouse she worries in the immediate aftermath was a bad, impractical choice—but on the way out of the apartment, her husband and kids are impressed by her outfit. She’s leaving the domestic space! She looks different and the people from her daily life notice.
I then found myself really enjoying the drama of the dinner itself. Her pleasure in wearing the new blouse is mitigated by the realization that she’s a bit sweaty and therefore, she’s created a chore for herself because it’s dry-clean only. Meanwhile, each woman is asserting themselves in their particular way, making subtle class jabs at one another.
But then, the focus shifts abruptly, with hardly a warning and nary a chapter break, to this dense review of a photography exhibit. There is of course some context for this review / essay, which is that Natsumi and Setchan had talked about this photography exhibit in an earlier chapter, and during this conversation, Setchan had said she was in possession of a review about it. And then, at this girls’ dinner, she pulls out a photocopy from her bag and hands it to Natsumi.
The word that keeps coming to mind to describe this essay is: inscrutable. While trying to get through it, I flipped ahead, hoping that it wasn’t much longer than the two pages in front of me, only to find that it was very long and there was actually another essay after that. In total: sixteen pages of this high-brow review/critique that I didn’t want to read!
What? And: Why, Mieko Kanai? Why?
But I wanted to finish the book, so I suffered through the pages, motivated by the hope that the essays would start to make sense or, worse case scenario, once I got through them, Natsumi or another character would enlighten me on why I was supposed to care or what I was supposed to take from them.
Fifteen pages later, in the last section titled, “Mild Vertigo,” you do maybe sort of get this. Natsumi at least mentions the essay and has an interesting, semi-vulnerable exchange with Setchan about it. Natsumi tells her that the working women in the essay reminded her of Setchan. And Setchan seems to be a bit flattered by this comment because her response is to admit that if she didn’t have to work and could be a housewife, she would:
I’d lie around being blissfully bored, I’m the type who’s always hated going out to work, I’d much rather stay put at home…
This is an interesting moment if not somewhat cliched, but in my opinion, this short conversation is not enough to warrant the long, inscrutable pages I worked so hard to scrute. (I know scrute isn’t a real word).
Even now, just going on for this long about this novel, my musings don’t even come close to sixteen book pages, and I feel like I’ve probably lost readers. So interesting. To have the confidence to write a whole book about a housewife and then also sixteen pages of an art review. To take up that much space.
Hmmm.
In the final pages of the novel, she has gone to her parent’s place to help take care of her dad while her mom has cataract surgery. A stand-in housewife (as her dad could have managed on his own). While there, after seeing her father enjoying a book, she becomes inspired to do the same. She picks up two, not because she’s heard of the authors, Edna O’Brien and Iris Murdoch, but because the cover illustrations seem approachable, like the kind in “women’s magazines” and because they’re less than half price. #practical But notably, these are important female authors. And Mieko Kanai I’m sure knows this. I’m assuming she even looks up to them as they were both born well before she was.
In the typical style of the novel, while Natsumi is on the train back home, we are let into her thoughts:
and she thought to herself, wasn’t it actually quite an extraordinary thing, when both the Iris Murdoch and the Edna O’Brien books—although she hadn’t even started either of them—were ostensibly dramatic adventures in which romance played a defining role and, on top of that, seemed to be exploring religious morality and the meaning of existence, why then were the world of the romance novel and the reality she inhabited so far apart,
Yes! Exactly, Natsumi. These books and your life aren’t so far apart. Your life is interesting and important and worthy of your own deep attention!
But then, quickly, Natsumi reverts, becomes small:
suddenly that fact, which was of course nothing at all to wonder at… the words, “mm, that figures” formed on her lips, as if it were not in fact her own life that she was thinking about but someone else’s,
Mm, that figures.
Soon her thoughts are taken over by what the people around her on the train are saying. Soon, she’s thinking about what to make for dinner. Soon, she’s visualizing the grocery store and its contents in shocking specificity. Soon, she’s left feeling dizzy.
p.s. In case it wasn’t clear / if you’re just joining me here, all these illustrations are from an abandoned illustrated memoir project of mine called Resume Gap.
p.p.s. I actually have MORE to say about this book, if you can believe it, but will save it for next time. (I also want to read other reviews of this book, like this one in The Atlantic.) Until then. xoxx
Scrute!! New word please. Please change this post’s title to”Scruting Mieko Kanai.”I really love this post’s long and winding way (which I hope you take as a compliment of journeying, not an “Amelia’s lost her way” vibe, lol). I particularly really like this as a mode of how we can go deeper into the experience of our lives: “some sort of crisis or event that causes upheaval, that forces a new perspective.” In some circles like coaching and therapy (and probably some zen business book haha) this can be called a ‘catalytic event.’ It kicks off a new search for meaning, disrupts the self so the self goes digging for a way that feels better. Anyhoo, I obviously agree, based on recent experiences in my life! (Ha) Sending love and also happy to see these illustrations. (And lol housewives loll around in in bed all day.) That line about saying things that smooth a social relationship is very intriguing/ good … xoxoxo
Ironically perhaps, the following lines from chapter two evoke a similar idea, of becoming accustomed to being accommodating. In this scene, our main character, the housewife, Natsumi, is in one of her neighbor’s apartments and has just complimented the woman’s tidy interior while debasing her own:
Essential in Japanese language, not self debasing or accommodating