When Domestic Life Is Like a Horror Story

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.

, 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. , 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