Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English is about the people and culture that made up Tokyo’s alternative club and music scenes
‘You’re pretty fucking weird.’ That’s how the narrator of this book, twentysomething Izumi, is described by her friend Etsuko. And she is. Izumi Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English (the Japanese original was published posthumously in 1996, following the author’s suicide, at the age of thirty-six, in 1986) is about the people and culture that made up Tokyo’s alternative club and music scenes during the 1970s. And it’s about a central character, only in her twenties but by midway through the novel struggling to hold on to what she perceives of as youth, whose own desires only surface gradually from a fog of casual sex, drunkenness, apathy and ennui. And a more general measuring-up of the differences between deep love and superficial attractions.
Suzuki is best known as a writer of sci-fi stories. A pop-cultural icon, she had previously been a model and actress, featuring in photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki. Her life has been the subject of novels and films but her work has lingered in the shadows, only appearing in English in recent years. The book is divided into thirteen chapters, each named after a song of the time (among them, The Moody Blues’s Nights in White Satin and Brenton Wood’s Gimme Little Sign, both 1967). She encounters rebels and oddballs who are into Western music but can’t get hard unless the girl is at least half Japanese. Indeed, in a reversal of the gender stereotypes of the time, her men are sensual, occasionally sexually freakish, but not much beyond that. ‘Most of what Landi said made little sense,’ she writes of one. ‘But so what? His penetrating, metallic voice and clear-cut pronunciation alone had a powerful enough effect.’ Izumi (the character, although there are biographical overlaps with the author) is attracted to musicians who are thin, beautiful, creative and famous, but is nevertheless conscious of wanting to be more than an appendage hidden in the shadow of their genius. ‘Who needs love if it means losing yourself inside it?’ she remarks. What follows is a remarkable quest for love and agency in a world that seems to dictate that achieving the former requires a woman to surrender the latter.
Set My Heart On Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Helen O’Horan. Verso, £11.99 (softcover)
