Slight dizziness and strong feelings – Mieko Kanai is a Japanese Virginia Woolf for the 21st century

What a wonderful title for a book that couldn't be more surprising: "Slight Dizziness". Of all people, the most intellectual Japanese author you can imagine, Mieko Kanai, writes about the not-at-all-exciting everyday life of a housewife. And she seems so deeply relaxed that you can't help but be amazed. The whole thing in floating loops, sentences that go on for pages, touching on islands of memory and bringing up the most varied associations as if in a swiping motion.

How does Mieko Kanai manage to make you read on involuntarily, torn between a certain desolation of the circumstances, the rather dull everyday monotony of a married middle-class mother of two sons in her late thirties in a somewhat bourgeois western district of Tokyo, and the fascinating cascades of stream-of-consciousness-like illuminations of the near and far surroundings? Above all, however, the inner psyche of the almost forty-year-old housewife Natsumi, who lives with her perfectly normal family in the daily grind of Tokyo, is suddenly bathed in hard and soft light, in a mélange of very sensual-concrete and strangely blurred perceptions.

Who has ever watched themselves so closely while washing the dishes, when the water runs down the drain? "It feels kind of good, not like you're dreaming, but then you come to your senses with a jolt because you're wasting water, you probably don't understand it, especially since you hardly do any housework, Natsumi said to her husband, who raised his eyebrows, slightly annoyed but also a little worried, as if to ask what she was actually trying to tell him with that, of course she knew that expression all too well . . . ".

A woman who ponders the word for faucet and knows that there is absolutely nothing mysterious about running water, and yet she falls into a kind of trance "just by looking at it." Or take the narratively cleverly stacked memories, where screenwriting as a way to earn a living, macho attitudes of women, drunkenness of all kinds, Truffaut's film "The Woman Next Door" and a strange trepidation when looking at historical photos become the subject.

Everything flows seamlessly into one another, but each individual narrative element is so coherently put together and vividly present that it becomes etched in the reader's memory and creates a kind of social panorama made up of various emotional states, social classes, and individual and collective memories.

The basic framework of her text, says Mieko Kanai in the afterword, was written in 1968. She had worked it out into a book before the turn of the millennium. The time horizons of the phase of strong growth in the sixties and the saturated but also stagnating consumer world of the nineties flow into one another. They are layered even deeper historically in two chapters in which texts on photo exhibitions about Tokyo in the thirties up to the post-war period are reflected in the reactions and associations of the woman and her friends, oscillating between nostalgia for a time that none of them experienced themselves and multiple distances; even the unsaid and uncommented melt into the perspective-broken images of the last decades up to the present.

This results in a dazzling, profound view of the metamorphoses of a global metropolis in the 20th century from a female perspective, in which so much seems to be captured, from the traumas and dreams of people up to the present day, and on a level that at first seems incredibly banal.

Who is this author who can keep us so interested with everyday stories like the “cat curse” surrounding the fishmonger’s wife, as well as with wedding preparations, class reunions or glances at supermarket shelves?

Mieko Kanai, born in 1947, caused a stir at the age of 19 with her poetry and her short story "Love Life" and won her first prizes early on. The background to her narrative and essayistic oeuvre, which has been growing ever since, is a wide range of reading, which ranges from 19th century European novels to the classics of modernism and Latin American literature, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Manuel Puig, as she once explained. With her highly reflective and sharply observant, cool perspective, she questioned some standard ideas about gender categories or "feminine" writing early on and scoffed in 1983: "I can't stand hearing the term 'women's literature' anymore. There is still no such thing as 'men's literature' . . ."

Mieko Kanai was far ahead of her time in this respect and more than that. She is now one of the most important literary voices in her country. Nevertheless, she is very aware of her roots in local writing styles and highlights Taeko Kono (1926-2015), the author of "Boy Hunt" and "Riskante Desires", as an inspiration.

The amazing thing about contemporary Japanese literature is that, since the 1950s at the latest, it has boasted a steadily growing number of female authors who have gradually transformed the literary landscape with truly bold designs. There are still plenty of discoveries for us to make, because Kanai is not at the beginning, but in the middle of it, so to speak.

The texts of the youngest generation that are popular in this country were written on the shoulders of many giants. Mieko Kanai is undoubtedly one of them. Her mastery is evident in the apparent casualness of the condensed images of consciousness, their seemingly natural immediacy - a quiet literature without gestures or messages.

The mini-conflicts and nano-dramas, which are inconspicuous but underpinned by wit, well-dosed irony and subtle humor, are all the more impressive when reading, as are the thought comments inserted at lightning speed in the cacophony of voices in conversations between schoolchildren and old ladies on the subway that are overheard by chance. This is unmistakably great literature. One could also exclaim: We are dealing with a Japanese Virginia Woolf for the 21st century!

Mieko Kanai: Slight dizziness. Novel. Translated from the Japanese by Ursula Gräfe. Bibliothek Suhrkamp 1556, Berlin. 175 pp., Fr. 34.90.