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Anglophone readers of Mieko Kanai’s whirling, urgent novel Mild Vertigo will face only one disappointment: There’s not yet much more where it came from. Kanai was born in Japan in 1947 and has written roughly 30 novels and story collections over the course of a career that has also included poetry, criticism, and essay writing, but so far only a fraction of her body of work has appeared in English.
Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton, should generate high demand for more. It is a 26-year-old novel very much grounded in middle-class Tokyo, and yet it manages to feel both universal and of the moment, perhaps because of its workaday concerns: the seduction and despair of consumerism and housework. Mild Vertigo, though, gets its potent immediacy not from its subject matter, per se, but from Kanai’s astonishing ability to write a domestic horror story that somehow doubles as a surprising glorification of domestic life.
Mild Vertigo opens with its protagonist, a stay-at-home mom named Natsumi, obsessing over how to arrange the apartment she and her husband have just bought. Not how to arrange it now: Natsumi, whose children are in elementary school, is already trying to work out how to rearrange their rooms and storage systems to best accommodate her kids as they approach their teenage years. Kanai mixes this fretting with intensely detailed descriptions of the apartment and its contents, as well as Natsumi’s insecurities about her cooking process, her mother’s thoughts about the new apartment, and her decision to replace its old tatami matting with laminate flooring, which “meant that cleaning was simple, and it was also far more hygienic compared to carpet, which makes it easy for dust mites to multiply, and besides, laminate flooring is in fashion, so of course they were going to go for that,” and so on.
Kanai writes about Natsumi’s every decision using an onslaught of clauses—comma after comma, and hardly a period in sight. Considering the differences between English and Japanese syntax, translating her prose surely required a fair amount of rearranging words and re-creating rhythms, which Barton does beautifully. The effect is often hypnotic. Stream-of-consciousness writing tends to be. But unlike many novels of this sort, Mild Vertigo doesn’t stun readers simply by shoving them deep into its protagonist’s head. Rather, Kanai makes clear how genuinely overwhelming it is to approach household life as granularly as Natsumi does. Natsumi herself is alternately entranced, repulsed, and exhausted by the thoroughness and indecision that dictate her domestic routine.
Mild Vertigo is, in a loose, ambient sense, a feminist novel, but it’s hardly the tale of a feminist awakening. Natsumi knows from the start that her obsessiveness about cleaning and decorating is closely linked to the consumerist messages she’s absorbed. In the novel’s opening sentence, she admits to choosing an apartment with a luxurious modern kitchen not out of a commitment to cooking but because the kitchen “looked like the interiors she often saw and admired in the glossy pages of women’s magazines.” But once her family has moved in, she feels that the kitchen is “too good for her.” Although it makes her feel deficient as a wife and mother, she can’t “bring herself to make the kind of meals that would mess up the kitchen.” Maintaining appearances seems more important to Natsumi than any other kind of performance—which helps explain Mild Vertigo’s astounding profusion of visual detail.
[Read: A better way of buying—and wanting—things]
Often, Natsumi’s day-to-day life makes her miserable to the point of disorientation or disgust. She sees that there’s “something Sisyphean in the roster of simple domestic tasks” that she performs over and over; a recurring motif in the novel is the physical sickness she feels on contemplating the sameness of her weekly grocery run, the degree of familiarity she has with the supermarket nearby. Similarly, her aversion to dirty bathwater and stray hairs goes far beyond a desire for a clean home: Just imagining taking a bath in water her husband has already used, as she tends to do, gives her the sensation that the “lines of her body had dissolved and were blending … with another body,” a thought that triggers evocatively written nausea. Her body, imperiled by the grimy bathwater, seems to stand in for her sense of self, imperiled by her role as a wife and mother.
Yet Mild Vertigo is not a work of true body horror. Natsumi’s skin doesn’t dissolve. Nor does she descend, “Yellow Wallpaper”–style, into insanity brought on by the suffocating nature of being a housewife. Indeed, Natsumi doesn’t always hate her life. She certainly isn’t trying to escape it. Mild Vertigo may be a condemnation of the Sisyphean demands of housekeeping, but it also sees something profound in domesticity. Kanai regards Natsumi’s home, outfits, and routines with the same close attention that Herman Melville gave the whaling industry in Moby-Dick or Karl Ove Knausgaard gave his memories in My Struggle.
In doing so, Kanai turns housekeeping into a form of art—showing, in addition to its tedious sides, its magical, beautiful, and outright strange ones. At the end of the first chapter, Natsumi falls into a trance watching water run from her kitchen sink, “sparkling in the light and twisting like a bundle of strings, or rather a snake.” She knows there’s “nothing remarkable about it whatsoever, it was an utterly ordinary thing,” and yet she allows herself to stand at the counter, in awe of the beauty of a stream of water that, on another day, would mean only noodles to cook or dishes to wash. Her ability to key into such moments is a product of her open-mindedness—the same trait that makes dirty bathwater upsetting or, for that matter, a magazine-touted kitchen too tempting to resist. She is so intellectually porous she at times struggles to locate herself.
[Read: What we gain from a good-enough life]
Among Kanai’s achievements is her ability to make Natsumi’s porousness into a worldview of sorts. Midway through Mild Vertigo, a friend of Natsumi’s clips and photocopies a review of a photography exhibition for her, which Kanai includes in full. Initially, the essay seems bafflingly unrelated to the novel’s themes, but gradually, the critic begins to praise the open, lingering quality of the photographer’s gaze, admiring the “placid sensuality and supremely personal curiosity [the photos direct] at a particular momentary scene.” It’ll hardly be lost on readers that Natsumi’s gaze has precisely the same quality. In fact, by this point in the novel, they are likely to have picked up a bit of it, if only temporarily.
Mild Vertigo comes with an afterword by the American novelist Kate Zambreno, whose work tends toward the dreamy and meditative. She is, perhaps, an especially porous reader and writer; she seems to soak up so much of Natsumi’s perspective that her essay, which is loosely about the overlaps between Mild Vertigo and her own life in 2020s Brooklyn, reads like an admiring imitation of Kanai’s novel. (For writers, imitation is not only a form of flattery but also a valuable tool.) At no point does Zambreno reflect seriously on the differences between being a housewife in 1990s Tokyo and a working writer in contemporary New York, which is frustrating, but her contribution effectively shows “the interior of an experience of a novel like this, how a novel invades you, as much as you invade it.” Mild Vertigo is, indeed, an invasive novel about feeling invaded, a cautionary tale about the domesticity messaging that inundates women that is also an invitation to luxuriate in it. Reading it made me want to both flee my house and clean it.
Mild Vertigo captures a truth that’s hard to acknowledge, let alone discuss. For many, many women, home and marriage mean restriction and confinement, and yet many, many women love and glory in their marriages and homes. Context—cultural, personal, temporal—changes this tension without erasing it. A realist might suggest that this cognitive disconnect cannot be erased without significant structural changes in nearly every country across the globe; a cautious optimist would perhaps add that, in an egalitarian future, men and women might share the burdens of this enigma equally. We do all need homes; we all deserve clean, safe, warm, and welcoming ones. Mild Vertigo’s detailed attention and moments of beauty honor the work of creating such a space, and its steep descents into unhappiness and revulsion demonstrate the sometimes-staggering emotional cost of doing so. Of all the many things in Mild Vertigo to admire, perhaps the biggest one is that Kanai gets the paradox of domesticity right.
In classic fables and fairy tales, no predator—and perhaps no villain—makes more frequent appearances than the wolf. Greek antiquity gives us the Boy Who Cried Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood famously gets eaten by a wolf, and yet another one blows down the Three Little Pigs’ houses. Wolfish, the writer Erica Berry’s debut, looks both at these invented wolves and at the real ones that have, of late, returned to her home state of Oregon; she also examines the more contemporary wolf metaphors—lone-wolf terrorists, warriors as wolves—that many people use to describe, or perhaps justify, their fear of other humans.
Berry has suffered badly from fear of that “symbolic wolf”—a term she gets from the veterinary anthropologist Elizabeth Lawrence. This is Wolfish’s true subject. Her wolf is a male one, created by a string of disturbing encounters with men and by a lifetime of messages—explicit and subliminal alike—that tell girls and women to perceive men as threats. One of Berry’s projects is dismantling this idea, both to defuse the danger it creates for poor men and men of color and to free herself from the anxiety it creates. She writes of realizing that the “calm I chased on human streets would not come from pepper spray but from metabolizing, and contextualizing, the things that had scared me in the past.”
Among the book’s strengths is Berry’s awareness that, as she puts it, “my wolf is not your wolf.” Berry combines memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism, weaving in others’ voices to remind readers that her perspective is only one of many. For some—such as the writer Cyrus Dunham, who fears not being able to honestly explain their gender identity to others—the wolf represents deceit. For others, the wolf, endangered as it long has been, symbolizes the terrifying destruction that humans have wrought on our environment; a conservationist tells Berry that he is “so worried about our collective future” that he and his wife don’t want to have kids. Berry’s braided approach renders Wolfish both a vulnerable self-investigation and a wide-ranging exploration of fear—and, ultimately, an antidote to it. She makes a stirring case for walking alongside the symbolic wolf.
Wolfish has its share of real animals. Berry devotes one chapter to a childhood wolf sighting—imagined, it turns out, not real—in Yellowstone National Park, and another to a research trip to the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, where wolves unable to live in the wild are kept and cared for. She writes about a cousin in Montana who posed on social media “grinning with a boyfriend as they held up the freshly killed carcasses of what looked like two dead wolves,” and travels to a county in eastern Oregon where a resurgence of wolves has created a furious split between people who want to protect the wolves and people who see conservation projects as a form of government overreach. OR-7, an Oregon-born, radio-collared wolf whose thousand-mile quest for a mate made the news in the early 2010s, appears in nearly every chapter, his trek giving the otherwise sprawling book a measure of shape.
Berry writes evocatively about these real wolves, yet she seems consistently drawn away from the wolves themselves and toward humans’ responses to them. Her writing is richest when she fully commits to examining wolf metaphors and the ways in which we turn even very real wolves into symbols. On a return visit to eastern Oregon, she speaks with a Forest Service ranger who tells her that the wolf-conservation arguments from Berry’s first trip have evolved into broader debates about the role of government in individual lives. “The new wolf is the face mask,” he says. A comparison of wolves to face masks is hardly one of the traditional metaphors Berry set out to investigate, and it seems to fascinate and alarm her in equal measure.
Still, Wolfish focuses primarily on wolf metaphors that have been handed down over time. Berry returns frequently to the story of Little Red Riding Hood, a stand-in for women like herself who have learned to fear predatory male wolves—which is to say, predatory men. A key difference between literal wolves and wolves as metaphors for our fears is that, in general, even wolf-fearing humans know how unlikely they are to be killed by one. As Berry writes, “To call a death by wild wolf a freak accident is almost to understate it.”
By contrast, in Charles Perrault’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which is the basis for most contemporary iterations of the tale, the Big Bad Wolf’s attack is anything but random. Indeed, it is promised, so long as you understand that the wolf is meant to be read as a man, and Little Red as a girl who, by straying from the route to her grandmother’s house, invites that man to attack her. “Perrault’s story,” Berry observes, “is not meant to teach boys. You cannot train a wolf. Only the girl has the lesson to learn. Only the girl can keep herself safe.” Contained in the parable is a regressive notion of female responsibility: It is Little Red’s duty to control and conceal herself, lest her female presence excite a man to violence. Anyone raised as a girl, or around girls, is likely to recognize this idea.
To Berry, the harmfulness of this paradigm—that women are to blame if they suffer male predation—is evident. It generates fear and distrust pervasive enough to stifle not only female sexuality but also the development of female minds. A more difficult question, for her, is whether fear of men is useful. She wishes to consider it “residual from a world that told me I was a victim” and, as a result, does not “want to risk crying wolf.”
[Read: On rape narratives and the surprising value of plot]
Yet Berry cannot silence her sense that Little Red’s story has a “bulb of truth.” On a multiday train ride across the country, a man sits next to her and begins talking, inappropriately and somewhat incoherently, about his ex and his struggles with addiction. When, apprehensive, she moves to a different car, the man brings her a notebook’s worth of hastily written letters suggesting that Berry may be an “evil person” but could potentially still “help [him].” She shows a conductor, who gives her a lockable sleeping car to wait in until the man can be removed from the train. In retrospect, Berry can neither deny the utility of her fear nor decide how valuable it was. Was the man a “lone wolf,” poised for violence? Was he simply lonely and ill? Or was he, like real wolves, a being “that could be both feared and feared for?”
Feminists have long struggled with the question of what male behavior to fear—or, to put it more dramatically, the question of whether women need to be on guard against all men. Berry writes about a childhood friend who, upon hitting puberty, was warned by her mother not to put on makeup or dress nicely if she planned to take public transportation: Doing so would invite attention, the logic went, which was inherently dangerous. Many parents, consciously or not, teach their children such lessons, inviting them to fear the opposite sex, or people of other races or backgrounds, or the world beyond what the parents know. (Consider the extreme example of a recent Curbed piece about Upper East Siders who don’t let their adolescent kids outside alone.)
In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, the academic Katherine Angel notes that rhetoric that emphasizes fear of the unknown over the potential richness of exploration “doesn’t allow for ambivalence, and it risks making impermissible—indeed dangerous … the experience of not knowing what we want.” Indeed, it turns recipients into 21st-century Little Reds, charged with avoiding the wolf through social savvy and personal knowledge more perfect than that which anyone could reasonably attain.
Berry, like Angel, wants to fight for exploration and ambivalence. She sees them as tools for alleviating fear. Another of her proposed tools is the diminishment of myopia. At the British wolf trust, watching visitors and researchers react to the wolves living there, she sees that to “understand an animal exists neither to kill you nor cuddle you is to untangle your ego from its life—to see it as complex and wild, worthy of existence independent of your feelings about it.” She does not explicitly connect this revelation to how humans might approach one another.
But considering real wolves always brings Berry back to the symbolic one, and considering human responsibility to wild animals helps her reassess our responsibilities to one another. In the case of wolves, we can mitigate danger through land-management strategies that create habitats for both wolves and their natural prey. It isn’t so easy to know how we can mitigate the dangers we pose to other humans, but Berry ends Wolfish resolving to neither ignore her fear nor live in thrall to it—an approach that comes from conservationists’ perspective on wolves. Only by managing and mitigating fear and its causes can we get what Berry truly wants: “a world where we could all stay.”
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