One thing young people and the despondent have in common is myopia. An existential nearsightedness — as persistent as it is understandable — is comorbid with both conditions. The narrator of Izumi Suzuki’s novel “Set My Heart on Fire,” first published in Japan in 1983, is doubly impaired, being both young and miserable. To see the world through her eyes is to behold a very limited view indeed.
Suzuki, who died in 1986, is better known for her excellent and nervy science fiction, which the publisher Verso recently brought out in two translated story collections, “Terminal Boredom” and “Hit Parade of Tears.” “Set My Heart on Fire” is the author’s first novel to be made available in English.
The narrator of “Set My Heart on Fire” has some things in common with the author. These include her sexual magnetism, her doomed marriage to a free-jazz saxophonist, her vocation and her name. (I’ll refer to the narrator as Izumi, for clarity’s sake.) Izumi is in her early 20s in 1970s Tokyo when the story begins, subsisting on a delicious diet of cigarettes and ice cream. Her hair is cut short and tinted green. She wears an obsidian armor of cynicism and travels wearily — so wearily! — along a winding road of highly conditional relationships. The categories of “friend” and “lover” and “enemy” blend together and break apart for no good reason, and not much fun is had.
Suzuki’s writing is glamorous, knowing and effortless, which is to say: cool. Helen O’Horan deserves praise for the delicate art of transferring coolness from one language to another. But one wishes the underlying material evinced a little more effort. The characters are hazily sketched and the dialogue addled. Suzuki jolts the reader in and out of scenes so abruptly that we never quite know what is happening or how much time has passed between vignettes or why we’re talking to some guy named Sleeve Man.
Drugs play a role, tone-wise. Izumi relies on little boxes of barbiturates that she buys semi-legally from a pharmacy that sells anything to anyone, and she prefers the “cool, impersonal inebriation” of sedative pills to alcohol’s clingy and disinhibiting high. The barbiturates offer not recreation, not even close, but a reprieve from what a therapist might call “negative self-talk”: Izumi’s relentless demeaning of her body, character and mind, often in the form of conflating the three.
It’s not a compliment to say that the illogic of a barbiturate daze permeates the prose, with regard to both pacing (syrupy slow, interrupted by jump cuts) and character. Izumi avoids and elides her way through life, enduring violent sexual encounters and heartening conversations with the same flat affect.
Much of the action occurs off the page, with characters filling us in later in dialogue. This has mixed results depending on who is speaking. Suzuki’s female characters tend to be opinionated and sardonic, their banter a fusillade of off-the-cuff music criticism, self-loathing and cruel declarations. Her men are uniformly dimwitted and crude. The reader can’t really fault Izumi when she says she could once “rank boys by their looks so swiftly by then that it felt like a sort of arcane skill,” as the males here do not boast sparkling personalities.
Andrew Ridker, writing for LitHub in 2021, helpfully rooted the author, who was born in 1949, in a disillusioned late-60s cultural moment: “In Suzuki, where there is sex, there is exploitation; where there are drugs, addiction. Only rock ’n’ roll remains unscathed.” Ridker was discussing Suzuki’s short stories, but the observation holds true for the novel. In “Set My Heart on Fire” music is life’s joy; everything else is collateral damage. It is tempting to call the 13 chapters “tracks,” not least because they are named after songs by groups like the Moody Blues and the Zombies.
Music is one thing Suzuki writes reliably well about, or rather, through. Izumi’s is a life felt and understood through organized sound: Nights have reverb, passion is subject to distortion, voices pass through echo-chamber pedals. A pair of lovers might be incompatible because they run at different tempos. A character’s stupidity is efficiently communicated by his assertion that he prefers the Monkees to the Beatles. Much of the dialogue could be song lyrics. Some of it is.
Suzuki is also a keen observer of an era-specific flavor of misogyny — a time and place where “frigid” women were joked about and a man could ogle a chest and say, “C-cup, thereabouts?” without receiving a recriminatory smack across the face.
Still, compared with her bizarre and inventive short stories, this is an underachieving work. There are intriguing idea-seeds strewn throughout, such as the way American music was absorbed and reinterpreted by Japanese youth in the 1970s and ’80s, or the strange purée of second-wave feminism and midcentury sexism internalized by the novel’s cynical female characters.
But Suzuki sticks closely to the narrator’s weary and watery impressions, which are thin enough to evaporate off the page. Autofiction (if we must) is not her format. Still, “Set My Heart on Fire” is a useful conduit to Suzuki’s science fiction. Embracing the constraints of sci-fi mobilized her to slip free of the psychic and material obstructions facing female artists in postwar Japan. Those works are the better-realized artifacts of her long-range vision.
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