Kanai Mieko (1947-), arguably the most able and strategically aware writer of poetry and prose fiction in contemporary Japan, demonstrates a keen consciousness of corporeality-or the body's command of space-manifest in gesture, fashion and other rhetorical measures not limited to speech and writing, which one might attribute to her intimacy with French new wave film. Constant references to material and physical detail, which makes her work appear deceptively accessible, do not remain simply descriptive: they are purposely selected and arranged in order to subtly communicate the semiology of space as articulated by Jean Baudrillard, coordinating and coordinated by the rhetoric of the verbal. In this paper, I will show how the everyday life of Natsumi, a middle-class homemaker of a family of four living in a Tokyo apartment complex, is critically engaged rather than mimetically represented in Kanai's omnibus novel, Karui memai (1997; Light Dizziness).
Despite the negligible sense of belonging that Natsumi possesses, the neighborhood constantly permeates her household: cats, birds, rumors, odor, noise, phone calls, letters, and subscriptions to a variety of utility services. The combination of insularity and porosity of the apartment unit dictates the way that Natsumi registers and makes sense of reality. The location of the story (in the heart of the city of Tokyo and yet consisting of private residences rather than night clubs), unlike that of City Noir, enables the author to portray the daytime everyday life of a given character, which epitomizes banality. I will thus present this novel as a showcase of the interface of the physical and the cognitive, a vocally explored area in cultural studies today, and one that promises to incite a self-reflexive inquiry into what we do with language and what we do otherwise.