Publishers Weekly
09/02/2024
Suzuki (Terminal Boredom) delivers an alluring if uneven tale of sex, drugs, and music. The action opens in 1973, when narrator Izumi is 23 years old and immersed in a drug- and sex-filled underground music scene in Tokyo. Izumi, a former model and occasional writer, is portrayed as sensual and nihilistic, addicted to pills and sex (“Each night I gave myself up to those white pills. Or into the arms of a man. I just wanted to be held by something”). At first, the narrative is as aimless as she is. The first half is bogged down by a repetitive succession of Izumi’s dialogues with her friends and lovers—centered largely on music, romantic interests, and casual philosophizing. It is only when Izumi meets Jun, the unstable free jazz musician who soon becomes her husband, that Suzuki finds her footing, and the second half is lifted by the penetrating and beautiful story of Izumi and Jun’s catastrophic marriage, along with her longing for the halcyon days of her youth, which leads to a profoundly bittersweet conclusion. Despite the bumpy ride, there’s a sustained appeal in the novel’s hard-up glamor. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"The work and messages of Ursula K. Le Guin, the author’s longer-lived contemporary, come to mind. Both Suzuki and Le Guin knew that gender roles are a matter of costume or control, affect or affliction. The terms we use to define humanity are often inhuman"
—Catherine Lacey, New York Times
"Suzuki's unique sensibility, which combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Her work-populated by misfits, loners, and femmes fatales alongside extraterrestrial boyfriends, intergalactic animal traffickers, and murderous teen-agers with E.S.P.-wryly blurs the boundary between earthly delinquency and otherworldly phenomena."
—New Yorker
"Wild and restless ... I can't think of anyone I'd rather read than this countercultural icon of the Japanese literary underground."
—Frieze
"Suzuki's distinctly misanthropic voice enlivens these narratives of women whose mundane lives are altered - sometimes humorously, sometimes catastrophically"
—Washington Post
"Suzuki’s full-length Set My Heart on Fire takes place in the counterculture of 1970s Tokyo, full of rock and roll, drugs, and transgression. It’s a world Suzuki knew intimately: the punk icon was deep in alternative music and film scenes during her short but brilliant life. If you like the bang and crash of loud music, and the passion and desire it inspires, you don’t want to miss Suzuki’s writing."
—James Folta, Lit Hub; Most Anticipated Books of 2024
"This is a novel about rock and roll and the obsession it inspires, set mostly in the quiet, late-night spaces where young people define their world through music....This novel is short and engrossing, and a great addition and counterpoint to Suzuki’s short stories that Verso has already put out. While this novel doesn’t have any of the speculative sci-fi elements of her stories, Set My Heart on Fire has the same dreamy, almost dazed tone."
—Emily Temple, Lit Hub
"Suzuki blazes new emotional territory in this semi-autobiographical, instant cult classic…Viscerally translated by Helen O'Horan, Set My Heart on Fire follows its narrator, also named Izumi, through Tokyo's 1970s underground psychedelic-rock scene…A captivating example of Izumi Suzuki's virtuosic control of language and insight into the heart of gendered power dynamics."
—Shelf Awareness
"An intimate, candid portrait of a 20-something woman navigating the tumultuous world of music, partying, and relationships in 1970s Japan..Vivid and unflinching."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in ’70s Japan."
—The Millions
"Best known for her short science fiction, Izumi Suzuki’s posthumous novel is a unique and thrilling tale of life and music in Japan’s 1970s demimonde."
—Nick Mamatas, The Fabulist
"As vivid and visceral as the rock and roll culture it describes"
—AnOther Magazine
"Izumi Suzuki innovatively encapsulates modern anxieties which are born of the standards of yesterday, and which overbearingly coddle the possibilities of tomorrow."
—Maria Farsoon, The Skinny
Kirkus Reviews
2024-09-28
An intimate, candid portrait of a 20-something woman navigating the tumultuous world of music, partying, and relationships in 1970s Japan, originally published in Japanese in 1996.
In Suzuki’s first work to be published in English, Izumi—whose name suggests a stand-in for the author herself—is restless in relationships. She takes up with men for a few months, seeking validation or an end to her ennui, but quickly gets bored. Seemingly at random, she steals the guitarist boyfriend of one of her friends, a music journalist named Etsuko, but the friendship outlasts the relationship. Izumi reflects on the rock music of the era and pines for Joel, the bassist of a legendary band called Green Glass. She even manages to meet up with Joel, though their attempt at a relationship is, for reasons not entirely clear, never fully realized. Fatefully, Izumi is drawn to Jun, a man so complicated and intriguing that she’s ensnared in his deluded—and at times dangerous—ideas of desire and commitment; she laments that Jun “completely ignored [her] wishes and well-being. He didn’t think [they] were different people with different feelings in the first place.” Izumi claims she has no character: “I’m just not a protagonist,” she says. “…I’m like water. I flow easily into any vessel and take its shape.” And again: “Sometimes I even wished I were more flat and frictionless.” At times, these proclamations can feel awkwardly self-aware; her endless fixation on men becomes tedious and perilous.
Vivid and unflinching, if at times somewhat derivative.
