The futuristic post-punk world of Izumi Suzuki
The rediscovery of Izumi Suzuki is, if anything, timely. Her stories are flavored in the tastes and moods of a generation unable to exert the enthusiasm and sincerity of their predecessors. But Izumi takes her insincerity to depths unimaginable, from where it floats up as alien, tampered, and wholly disorienting.
But we can only be glad to find her again. To read her is to be unsettled at the casual prose of insanity. An actor, model, and science-fiction writer, Izumi Suzuki had been a cult-figure in Japan before her suicide at the age of 36 in the late 80s. Virtually unknown internationally, the publisher Verso discovered her seemingly by accident. An editor there had found her mentioned on an academic footnote and dug her up. The result is 2021's Terminal Boredom and 2023's Hit Parade of Tears, a seminal duology of Izumi Suzuki's otherworldly interiors, made possible through a medley of translators. The first collection boasts of six, the second has four, led by the translator Daniel Joseph.
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The characters in her dystopias and alternate-worlds are marked by a predilection for fluidity, by what the critic Genie Harrison aptly calls her stories' "drag-like quality". Nowhere is this more prominent than her story "Night Picnic" from Terminal Boredom, where a family in a distant planet with no knowledge of humanity enact an "ideal" human lifestyle, looking through news clippings and videos to gauge how the humans might have lived. To form a perfect nuclear family, one of the younger "boys" is deemed better off being a "girl". Mom, having learned that women stereotypically take more time to dress, takes two and a half days to get ready for this picnic. Time and space itself casually lengthen. At times, the sun sets while Dad is still having his morning coffee. Izumi writes: "All that mattered was that they went through the motions."
One often has to stand back and remind themselves that these stories have been written decades ago, for it is impressive and surreal in its prescience.
In the title story, "Terminal Boredom", we find a severe lack of ambition in a society where employment is doled out through competitive exams. The young are often shocked at how "energetic" the old people are. Owing to such lethargic extremes, "more and more young people were forgetting to eat, starving to death."
This constant unconcern is more prevalent in the latter collection, Hit Parade of Tears, where the stories are less powerful but nevertheless envelop the reader in a daze of hazy memories and unreliable realities. What starts off as a conventional story of pop music enthusiasts in her story "Hey, It's a Love Psychedelic!" quickly breaks timelines mid-scene, throwing the reader off of their comforts. The characters launch off into reminiscences and memories that turn its head on exposition. Not only do these bring more chaos to the story but also steers the characters farther from the human they want to portray. It is here that Izumi Suzuki's punk-credentials are most bare.
In "Hit Parade of Tears" a husband rambles on to his wife, revealing that he is a century old. It is a fitting story to end the collection as Izumi Suzuki returns to familiar themes of a roleplaying family, a clash of genders, and the smell of malevolent despotism in the background air. Her penchant for her contemporaneous pop culture references (there are mentions of Little Richard, The Blues Project, and movies such as American Beauty) may render her stories dated but that is part of her charm. More than anything, she shows that the key to being an alien is not to be outlandish but to be sickeningly more human.
Shahriar Shaams has written for Dhaka Tribune, The Business Standard, and The Daily Star. He is nonfiction editor at Clinch, a martial-arts themed literary journal. Find him on X @shahriarshaams.
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