Description

---

Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes on trips to the supermarket, visits friends and gossips with neighbours. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens. With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante and Lucy Ellmann, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist and critic Mieko Kanai - whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan - is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.

About the Author

---

Born in 1947, Mieko Kanai has worked throughout her life as a writer, poet, essayist and literary and art critic. She has published around thirty novels and short story collections, and her critical essays have been featured in Japanese newspapers and magazines for almost fifty years.