Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo is a slice-of-life novella whose short length belies its Proustian ambitions. The narrator, a housewife living in an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs, engages in extended meditations on her home, family, friends, neighborhood, and place in the world.
I don’t use the word “Proustian” lightly, as Kanai’s prose demands patience and concentration. The endless sentences gallop and sprawl across pages, sweeping the reader along in an exquisitely crafted flow of thought and sensation that has been brilliantly translated by Polly Barton.
