Mild Vertigo, Part I

in which a book about a housewife is making me feel dizzy

But first, some mild housekeeping:

In the past week or so, while I’ve been prioritizing my writing time in favor of my aforementioned rewrite, I have been thinking of you all, especially when I get an email letting me know that I’ve lured in a new “free subscriber.” I’ve been thinking, re: my subscribers: I hope they’re not disappointed with my output. I hope they know that I still have things I want to write about and share here. I have also been telling myself, thanks to my friend, Kara (whose brain surgery went well!!) that: “There’s no rush.” I’ve been telling myself that both with the rewrite and also with posting here. Why does it always feel like there’s a rush though? (Partially because of money, right? Since one’s output typically relates to one’s income.)

Which brings us to this update: I’m lowering my monthly subscription rate! Mostly because I’ve been supporting some places at the $5/month level and that feels more doable for me financially, and well, I’m hoping you might feel similarly. And then, with this price reduction, I also won’t feel bad if I don’t post here as often as I have been and/or if I post more for just the paid subscribers. (If you are already paying at the $7/month price, your rate will automatically go down. And thank you so, so much for the support!)

---

I want to tell you about a book I read and then over the past few days, reread, partially so I could write about it but also because I really wanted to better understand what the author was trying to say, while of course keeping in mind that maybe she wasn’t trying to say anything. Maybe she was just telling a complicated story with no discernible “lessons.” And yet… I feel like she’s taught me something. Ha.

The book is Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai. It was first published in 1997 in Japan, but it was only very recently (2023) translated from the Japanese into English. I came across it via a review in The New York Times titled, “The Contagious, ‘Mild Vertigo’ of a Middle-Class Housewife.” The subtitle added, “a wife and mother’s monotonous days are punctured by quiet revelations.” Sold. I didn’t read any further. I scrolled down to see the book cover, screenshotted the image and then, requested it from the library.

Months later, I got the beloved “Your holds are ready” email from the library. This was over the holidays though, and by the time I actually got to the library, turned the corner and crouched down to my specific spot on the holds shelf, it wasn’t there. They’d sent it back from whence it came. But in, what you could maybe call Mild-Vertigo-esque fashion, I re-requested it! This time, it only took a week or two before I got another email saying it was in! And this time: I picked it up.

It’s a slim book that I don’t think won me over right away. Three-quarters of the way through reading it, I described it to Matt as “kind of demanding.” Each page is one giant block of text with nary a paragraph break (let alone a gif).

Not-so mild vertigo

And while the book is written entirely from the perspective of our main character, a housewife named Natsumi, there are no quotation marks, or even line breaks to demarcate one character speaking from another, so that sometimes you have to read half a page of what you think is Natsumi thinking only to realize that it’s actually someone else speaking. You could say that it’s enough to make you disoriented.

What I liked about it from the start though, is that there is this tension between the book and its main character. What I mean is that the author, Mieko Kanai, has chosen to write a book about a housewife and from a very close, third-person point of view, i.e. we are intensely within Natsumi’s head. She is our star character. And yet, our star is constantly demeaning either her thoughts themselves or the role of the housewife. In the very first chapter, after a rare space break in the text, the first line is, “It’s not a big deal or anything.” You must keep reading to discover that this is a line of dialogue, that she’s talking to her husband and describing to him how she sometimes gets mesmerized by the stream of water as it pours out of the faucet while she’s washing dishes.

She’s curious about herself and at the same time, she trivializes this curiosity. A bit later, she thinks, re: watching the stream of water:

there was nothing remarkable about it—that was the whole thing, there was nothing remarkable about it whatsoever, it was an utterly ordinary thing—and yet for some unknown reason she kept staring at it, and falling, again for some unknown reason, into a kind of trance.

To be fair, Natsumi also subtly trivializes her husband. In that same first chapter, as she describes their apartment where they live with their two children, she refers to the one room as her husband’s “study”—just like that, using the otherwise unused quotation marks. It’s funny because as she describes what’s happening in the “study” it is not anything resembling book-learning, but more of a place where he can deposit the things he doesn’t use, like “something called a Super Gym DX (made in Taiwan), which promised ‘Real Results from Everyday Training.’” The description of this apparatus goes on and on and becomes funnier and funnier.

I think at this point, after chapter one, I was won over, that is: committed to finishing the book. Not to necessarily see what happened to or with Natsumi plot-wise, but rather because I wanted to know what Kanai was ultimately saying about housewives and/or gender roles and/or culture-at-large. Are housewives stupid or is society stupid for the way we treat housewives? Do housewives deserve our sympathy because we as a culture expect someone, nay need someone to take care of the kids and preferably, to do so wholeheartedly or are housewives just privileged women who are coddling their kids and partner and who should really be more productive and get back to “work”?

It's funny writing out these questions because they really are SUCH good questions and it’s kind of what the bulk of my work both professionally and personally has dealt with. So much so that I’m feeling dizzy.

Going to stop here and see you soon(ish) for Part II! (Maybe you can request this book from the library in the meantime?)