Kanai Mieko
YXXX says her writing is a major achievement (アチーブメント) in Japanese
I finished Mild Vertigo. Yes, her writing is incredible, and the essay that she wrote about Kuwabara and Araki (which I believe appeared in an issue of Deja-vu, because YXXX commissioned it!) is one of the most striking pieces of criticism I have ever read. I feel a resonance between the way that Kanai writes about Kuwabara’s photographs and the photos taken by Fusako Kodama in her book 千年後には・東京, which also seems to capture something about the time and place of Tokyo around 1991-1992 in a flat, unpretentious way that I feel Kanai would respond to. Is it possible that she actually would have written something about Kodama’s work? I wonder.
In any case, Mild Vertigo (despite maybe some reservations about the translation) is a quite incredible work, it builds an entire world of tension from the world of a Setagaya, Odakyu line housewife, it is doing something extremely special indeed, one of the best novels I have written in a while.