Set My Heart on Fire, by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Helen O’Horan | Verso, Nov. 12, 2024 | 192 pp | Buy this book on Bookshop.org
Here is a tip: Read authors, not genres. When a favorite author writes across several genres, read all their work, not just the stuff stocked on the usual shelf.
This is easier said than done, partially because publishers are keen to generate predictable profits (which requires homogenous product mixes), and partially because writers themselves are keen to identify themselves with a genre rather than with … their own selves. It’s embarrassing, really, to see authors market themselves as exemplars of a single little phrase a Vice President of Marketing convinced Amazon to input into its tentacular algorithms.
Japanese writer Izumi Suzuki, whose science fiction work has been discussed in these pages before, was an author whose work was always relentlessly personal, whether or not aliens landed. Set My Heart on Fire, translated into a very British English by Helen O’Hara, is an “I-novel,” the Japanese tradition of autofiction. No cosmic beings or genre tricks, but like her SF, this book contains plenty of Izumi Suzuki.
Set My Heart on Fire is about a woman named Izumi, who made a living as a model, who was very into the Japanese underground and Western popular music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who, after several years of running through lovers — over one hundred, she says to one who wondered if she wasn’t practically a virgin — falls in love with and marries an avant-garde musician who treats her utterly terribly. “Don’t hit me anymore?” Izumi asks her husband Jun at one point, to which he responds: “Okay, I won’t,” but “what will I fill my days with, then?”
Broadly speaking, there are two modes of autofiction: the intensely memoiristic, in which every tiny incident is described and pored over, and the sensory, in which the narration often progresses without the narrator remarking upon it. Izumi the author tilts toward the latter. Izumi the character lives her life, but hardly records it. Existence is a blur: conversations with her music journalist friend, hangouts with her gay male confidant, sperm shooting into her from her kind lover Joel or the awful-yet-compelling Landi. “I’m a female drag queen” she says of herself, and her presentation as a member of her gender. And there is music, always music, in these pages, just as in the author’s science fiction.
The years fly by. Jun appears roughly halfway through the story and consumes it. In one chapter they’re married and Izumi is physically falling apart. Turn the page, they have a child. Turn the page, he is completely insane. Turn the page, he is deceased. “There was a memorial for Jun, but I didn’t go,” Izumi remarks, “because I hate jazz people.” Sometimes Izumi is utterly reasonable.
SF readers often seem worried that literary fiction is “depressing” or “self indulgent.” They perhaps will be prone to dislike Set my Heart on Fire, even if they enjoyed the two volumes of Suzuki SF short stories previously translated. They should read this novel anyway; what is unique and thrilling about those tales fills the pages here. Fire!
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