Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai

Author:Mieko Kanai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corp.
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:01+00:00

Chapter Seven – Female Friends

Her husband also played the video games on the NES that the kids were so crazy about, arguing that they were surprisingly good for relieving stress, and said that since their children were growing up to live in the internet age, in the future they would use computers as a matter of course, and therefore, it made sense if they did their gaming on the computer to begin with, not on a console that plugged into the TV, but the kids had to keep up with the other children, which meant they wanted to play the games that everyone else in their respective classes were playing, and of course they didn’t understand what their father was talking about, but that didn’t stop them from getting carried away in the belief that although Mom didn’t know the first thing about games, Dad understood and was on their side, and as a rule Natsumi loathed the hysterical high-pitched melodies made up of those ludicrously monotonous electronic noises, and when she was feeling frazzled before her period, the sound of this beeping would make the very innermost chamber of her head throb, and she’d develop a nauseous feeling in her chest. Once her period began, her irritation eased, and the noise of the NES would blend in with the hysterical racket from the TV and all the other kinds of daily clamors, so that it was no longer just that particular isolated irritant, and it wasn’t as if she’d been actually diagnosed with premenstrual syndrome, but then the doctor whom she’d been seeing since she was a child was a woman who treated complaints from every branch of medicine including gynecology, internal medicine, pediatrics, and neurology, if you came down with a cold she would tell you to wrap yourself up in blankets and stay in bed, not to watch TV or read, if you got a bad stomachache from overeating she would tell you to avoid foods like gyōza and hamburgers and to eat plain udon, she’d give you just three days’ worth of medicine and no injections, and even if all that was excusable, when you went to her with bad period pain she would say, the pain you’re experiencing feels worse because you resent your period, spouting the kind of outdated sexist dogma that would definitely not be voiced to a patient complaining of any kind of pain other than period pain, and would prescribe only painkillers and tranquilizers, and as far as Natsumi’s reading went, it seemed that ultimately most gynecologists thought the same, going by the understanding that whether the subject at hand was period pain or menopause it was just a matter of grinning and bearing it for a while, it was clear that it would pass naturally in time, and what was crucial was your zest for life, approaching things with a positive attitude, or in other words, your state of mind was the most important thing, apparently it all boiled down

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