Izumi Suzuki – Hit Parade of Tears (2023, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Helen O’Horan and Daniel Joseph)

“Hey, it’s pretty common these days. Some psychologist just wrote a book about that. There are tons of people out there experiencing the world like they’re fictional characters, living out their lives with no backstory until somebody – a voice or another character – comes along to fill in the blanks.”

“Then again, all human beings are just actors. Everyone’s a fake. It’s one thing if you’re aware of it, but some people seem convinced the role they’re playing is the real them. They’re the worst.”

Long-time readers will know that when Verso published Terminal Boredom, the first English translation of Izumi Suzuki’s short stories, in 2021, my only complaint was that at seven stories it was too short. Imagine my delight at discovering that this year Verso are publishing Hit Parade of Tears, another collection of eleven more of Suzuki’s unique and compelling stories. Suzuki’s output is slim enough that any extra material is a bonus, but rather than reading like Terminal Boredom’s cut-offs, each of the stories in Hit Parade of Tears could easily stand beside the ones in the previous collection. On the one hand, given that both sets of stories would have easily fit into a single volume, this makes the decision to split them in two all the more perplexing. But on the upside, we have another absolutely vital collection of stories from one of Japan’s most powerful and idiosyncratic writers made available to us in English. Hit Parade of Tears perfectly demonstrates Suzuki’s sharp social satire, her singular voice, and her unique aesthetics brought from her work as a model, actress and doyen of Japanese avant-garde cinema. The minor qualm that once again Hit Parade of Tears leaves us with no introduction or notes illuminating Suzuki’s remarkable life and the broader context in which her work appeared aside, this is another essential read for anyone interested in original and boundary-defying SF. The eleven stories within are mesmerising feminist explorations of gender, alienation and treacherous states of reality that could not have been written by anyone else.

Hit Parade of Tears leads off with ‘My Guy’, which reminds the reader that as well as being starkly inventive and challengingly bleak, Suzuki is also frequently sardonically humorous. Indeed, Suzuki’s humour is on display throughout. ‘My Guy’ tells the story of a woman who is impregnated by an alien man’s kiss, an inversion of the male fantasy of making out with hot alien women that crops up in so much Golden Age SF written by men. Instead of focusing on the glamour and romance of space adventure, Suzuki immerses the reader in the perspective of the woman whose mundane life is disrupted by extra-terrestrial romance and then is left to raise the kid by herself. Similarly wry explorations of gender roles occur in ‘Trial Witch’, where a wife is given temporary magical powers, which she uses to turn her cheating husband into a series of increasingly ridiculous shapes until he winds up stuck as a sentient giant piece of beef jerky. 

Gender relations form a throughline of much of Suzuki’s fiction, though other stories represent a darker take on this theme. In ‘The Covenant’, bored schoolgirls turn the murder of the sleazy businessman who tries to prey on them into a secret ritual with devastating effects. ‘Hit Parade of Tears’ explores aging and toxic nostalgia through the relationship of a 180-year-old man and his wife who is doomed to live a normal lifespan. And ‘I’ll Never Forget’, a highlight of the collection which particularly recalls the stories of James Tiptree, Jr, tells of the alien woman Mari and her brother Sol, who are Meelians, and their fraught relationship with their human lovers in the wake of an interstellar war. The story expertly reveals through its character interactions the tragedy that befalls Meelian/human relationships because Meelians, unlike humans, are incapable of forgetting anything or having changes of hearts. The alien perspective allows Suzuki to comment on humanity’s fickleness, both in its destructive, colonialist dealings with alien cultures and at the heart of its interpersonal relationships. The spectre of Tiptree also hangs heavily over ‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’, in which a dysfunctional crew of a spaceship transporting trafficked aliens to be kept as pets meets its match in an alien that appears as a helpless baby. Suzuki mines much dark humour from how humanity’s parental instincts, one of our few saving graces, wind up being the loophole the aliens can use to avoid humanity’s worst colonialist, extractivist impulses.

Other stories reveal Suzuki’s unease with society’s pressures to conform. ‘Full of Malice’, ‘After Everything’ and ‘The Walker’ are all brief but deeply powerful and disturbing explorations of this particular strain of alienation. Numbed protagonists stalk through altered post-apocalyptic landscapes, unable or unwilling to relate to the people they encounter. ‘Memory of Water’ tells the story of a woman so at odds with the conformist behaviour society expects of her that she splits personalities and her more adventurous personality eventually leaves. These stories offer a compelling but frightening insight into Suzuki’s headspace during her most creative period, and knowing her tragic fate makes these stories all the more disturbing. 

‘Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!’ is perhaps Suzuki’s most impressive and thought-provoking story, and one in which all her obsessions and concerns finally coalesce. The story is structurally the most ambitious thing she ever wrote, a complex time-travel tale in which Reico, a rock-music lover who feels conflicted about the directions her life took, is thrown across different alternate versions of her life by a sinister, faceless time criminal. As Reico is catapulted across various alternate tributaries her life could have flown down, she is reminded of the connections she missed, the opportunities that fell through. Although her circumstances change, the feelings of disappointment and resentment remain. It is typical of Suzuki’s dark world view that her protagonist cannot improve her life, only be left with different but ultimately similar feelings of regret. 

Hit Parade of Tears is an essential companion to Terminal Boredom, and both collections together finally provide the English-reading SF fan with a near-comprehensive view of Suzuki’s remarkable writing career. The publication of these two volumes should see Suzuki take her rightful place as a key author of speculative fiction, one who pushed the boundaries of what the genre could do in bold and inventive ways, and a fearless confronter of her own anxieties and fears. 

Hit Parade of Tears is available now from Verso Books.