Izumi Suzuki – Set My Heart On Fire (1983, translated by Helen O’Horan 2024)

“I’m passionate, of course. Passion is something that occurs naturally. Yet when the time comes, I make it occur artificially. That seems different to ordinary enthusiasm. Distorted. There’s something forced and unnatural about it. I can cool it down at will. For me there’s little distance between loving and hating someone. You’d think I had extensive acting experience. My true self and my performed self, when I get them well mixed up, are indistinguishable from each other.”

Long-time Hive readers will know that I am a huge fan of Izumi Suzuki, the Japanese science fiction writer and actress who wrote and published innovative speculative fiction in Japan throughout the 1970s until her tragic suicide in 1986. Verso published her first short story collections to be translated into English with Terminal Boredom (2021) and Hit Parade Of Tears (2023), both of which I deem to be essential. So it’s fitting that they continue the Suzuki renaissance by publishing her first ever novel to be translated into English this year, Set My Heart On Fire. Set My Heart On Fire, originally published in Japanese in 1983, is less speculative than her short stories and more a semi-autobiographical novel. But it explores the same themes of drugs, sex, gender and extreme alienation that make her short stories so striking and powerful, with the same frankness and power. And throughout, there is the same sense of collapsing subjectivity, the paranoid sense that the reality around Suzuki is a cheap sha that will soon be washed away. Translator Helen O’Haran, who worked on stories in both Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade Of Tears, does an excellent job of capturing Suzuki’s voice and sustaining it through the whole novel. Overall, it’s another essential piece of work from one of the 20th century’s most underrated and iconoclastic authors. Suzuki fans everywhere in the anglophone world rejoice!

Set My Heart On Fire follows Izumi, a fictionalized version of Suzuki, in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, as she follows the underground Japanese rock scene, self-medicates with drink and drugs, and has casual sex with musicians. In particular, Izumi has settled on sleeping with as many members of Green Glass as a way of coping with the deep existential ennui she feels at all times. Things take a turn for the worse once she meets Jun, a character based on Suzumi’s real-life husband, avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe. Jun is selfish and abusive, and the ironic detachment which has guided Izumi through her life so far sees her sucked into a loveless marriage with him. Can Izumi wake up from the nightmare she’s sleepwalked into, or will her abusive marriage destroy her youthful nonchalance?

If it were written today in English, we might categorise Set My Heart On Fire as autofiction, although in Japan it fits into the lineage of the I-novel, an older literary tradition in which emphasizes the inner feelings and perspective of the author over the stricter recording of life facts in an autobiography. Set My Heart On Fire certainly draws heavily from Suzuki’s real life experiences, with Izumi’s relationship with Jun in particular a mirror of her troubled relationship with Abe. But Suzuki, like Anna Kavan, that other unique visionary of the 20th century that I frequently find myself comparing her with, rejects consensus reality. Suzuki’s extreme ennui expresses itself as a kind of voluntary withdrawal from her own life that is almost science fictional in its estrangement. Throughout Set My Heart On Fire, Suzuki watches Izumi watching herself with this terrible, cold detachment, her reliance on drugs and alcohol a symptom of this stark indifference rather than the other way round:

“But the same night will continue on. Today is just yesterday, continued. Tomorrow is just today, continued. Day breaks, night falls, day breaks. Night probably falls again. The little details differ, sure. But for the most part, everything is pretty much the same, and I feel neither more nor less sluggish today than I did last Thursday. I am sluggish. But still compelled to dance. Provided there’s some variety to the music.

I’m trapped inside an invisible cage, you see. I can’t leave it. I feel so hollow and futile it makes me sick. It’s easy, though.”

This unique perspective is both Izumi’s strength and her weakness. It allows her to wryly view humanity from the outside, giving her an uncanny wisdom as she comments on the foibles of human interaction that no doubt fed into Suzuki’s science fiction writing. But it also reduces her to a spectator in her own life, allowing her to get caught up in the force of Jun’s abusive personality. There’s an added element of tragedy in that the young Izumi, even before her experiences of abuse, can only imagine an early death for herself as the logical endpoint of her bleak perspective. The end of the book, in which an older Izumi, having survived her marriage to Jun, looks back on the lost potential of her life, is particularly heartbreaking.

Suzuki’s frank depictions of casual drug use and sex would have been shocking in the context of the conservative Japanese society in the 1970s and 80s, something that the novel also shares with her science fiction. The subculture around Japanese rock music of the 70s, when bands were moving away from the sanitized Group Sounds towards the noisier, more experimental and more idiosyncratic Japanese psychedelic rock as celebrated by Julian Cope in Japrocksampler (2007), which Suzuki was a part of through the avant-garde theatre of Tenjo Sajiki, is a fascinating era of history that is underexplored, and its exciting to get an insider’s view of it from someone who was there at the time. The casual sex, alcoholism and drug taking was very much taboo in Japan, all of which Suzuki explores with brutal honesty. Similarly, Izumi hangs out with a cast of well-developed and likeable outcasts from Japanese mainstream society, from female music journalists to gay men, all of whose experiences make up the tapestry of Suzuki’s 1970s Tokyo. Suzuki’s estranged explorations of the gender dynamics between herself as Izumi and the male musicians she sleeps with is particularly well done. Suzuki brings a feminist perspective to her writing about sex, displaying Izumi as a woman who very much has carnal desires. Izumi proactively expresses and explores her sexuality, and is frequently disappointed by the men she sleeps with. In a particularly memorable sequence, Izumi finally tracks down Joel, the beautiful but flakey lead singer from Green Glass, and is invited back to his room, their romantic encounter is interrupted by his visiting cousin who is more interested in forcing her to watch A Hard Day’s Night than taking the hint and leaving so they can have sex. This leads Izumi to reflect on the sexist disparities between how men and women are allowed to express desire, and how this frequently leads to sexual frustration for women whilst privileging men. This gets most brutally explored in Izumi’s relationship with the abusive Jun, who turns her life into a living nightmare from which she has little recourse to escape.

Set My Heart On Fire is a remarkable and powerful work that will no doubt increase Suzuki’s literary stature in the anglophone world. As much as her short stories, it displays her talent for wry observations about the human condition and spell-binding, hallucinogenic writing. We are indebted to Verso and to O’Horan for bringing this singular work into the English language. I can only hope that we are in for more of Suzuki’s work coming in translation in the years to come. 

Set My Heart On Fire is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org