Mieko Kanai
Born in 1947, MIEKO KANAI is a novelist, poet, short-story writer, essayist, and critic. Her novel MILD VERTIGO was called “mesmerizing” (NYT), “monumental” (Japan Times), and “urgent” (The Atlantic).
For me, Mieko Kanai’s writing represents one of the high points of Japanese literature. The tiny details giving shape to the everyday, the daily repetitions, the memories that come suddenly flooding back, other people’s voices—all these described in winding, iridescent prose. Their utter ordinariness, their utter irreplaceability, make for a reading experience brimming with joy from start to finish.
— Hiroko Oyamada
Platonic Love
Fiction by Mieko Kanai
Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton
A cat who looks like Orson Welles and is the grim reaper. A murder in a secret society of chivalric knights in a high school. An utterly disturbing tale involving rabbits and fathers. These short stories by Mieko Kanai, first published in Japan in the 1970s, are teeming with transgressive sexuality, nightmares, knotty family ties, endless labyrinths, and metafictional themes that seem to unfold into illogical but deeply satisfying puzzles.
Finally translated into English by the brilliant Polly Barton, these stories are an important (and previously missing) piece of the Japanese literary canon, bridging the eroticism of Tanizaki and the surrealism of Kobo Abe with the contemporary literature of Haruki Murakami, Hiroko Oyamada, and Sayaka Murata.
Mild Vertigo
The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. 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 Kobo Abe, 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.
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For me, Mieko Kanai’s writing represents one of the high points of Japanese literature. The tiny details giving shape to the everyday, the daily repetitions, the memories that come suddenly flooding back, other people’s voices—all these described in winding, iridescent prose. Their utter ordinariness, their utter irreplaceability, make for a reading experience brimming with joy from start to finish.
— Hiroko Oyamada
