Mild Vertigo

Kanai (Oh, Tama!) takes on the domestic sphere in this nuanced portrayal of a woman’s domestic routines. Natsumi, her unnamed husband, and their two young boys live in a leafy part of Tokyo in a vast apartment block, their unit “luxuriously spacious for a family like hers.” Echoes of conversations with her college girlfriends linger in her head, prompting her to wonder if they judge her for being a housewife without recognizing the hard work it entails. Kanai casts an unflinching eye on child and spousal care, maintaining a home, and the short-lived pleasures of buying new and expensive things, showing how the unrewarding labor often makes Natsumi want to “toss everything else aside and sleep the entire day.” The novel is cleverly built around dialogue, rendering Natsumi’s world through a chorus of voices: her husband’s, friends’, or neighbors’, all of whom love to gossip, whether about a local curse or about the fate of a couple whose wedding invitation seemed so cheery as to be gauche. Bracingly honest in its take on the limits of satisfaction in a nuclear family, this offers plenty of rewards. (May)