Another Girl, Another Planet: The Brief Life and Literary Legacy of Izumi Suzuki
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Born in the same year as Haruki Murakami and widely known for her volatile relationship with free-jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, as depicted in Koji Wakamatsu’s film Endless Waltz (1995), Izumi Suzuki’s avant-garde writing has remained elusive until recently. Information about her is extremely scarce, but here is what we know. Before winning a writing contest, Suzuki worked as a key-punch at a local city hall. After moving to Tokyo at 21, she worked as a bar hostess, model, and as an actress in pink films by Wakamatsu. She was photographed by infamous erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki – these images, which were collected into a book that translates as “Izumi, this bad girl” would later become the covers of her translations into the English vernacular: Terminal Boredom (2021) and Hit Parade of Tears (2023), a nod to the final stories within each curated collection.
She took her own life in 1986, at the age of 36. Abe had died eight years prior by accidental overdose and, in the years after, Suzuki had been extremely productive with her writing - following his death, she supported their daughter Azusa by publishing stories in sci-fi magazines, which were in their prime. She, along with other female writers at the time, were treated as outsiders or “tourists” (coined by critic Nozomi Ōmori) to the gendered community and excluded from the canon of Japanese science fiction until the ‘80s.
Though Hayakawa Shobō’s renowned S-F Magazine published her first short story, “The Witch’s Apprentice” (published as “Trial Witch” in Hit Parade of Tears) in a special women’s issue alongside Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. Le Guin and Yūko Yamao, the literary world was purely a boys club.
As a pioneer in the second generation of science fiction writers that emerged during the 1970s, Suzuki’s writing reverberated the mundane encounters and occurrences of the everyday with kitchen-sink realism. In the short story “You May Dream” translated by David Boyd, two acquaintances meet for coffee and discuss an extreme government program that attempts to curb overpopulation by allowing people to live within the dreams of others. After acquiescing to her friend’s request, the protagonist is plagued with exhaustion at carrying her sensitive friend’s consciousness and emotionality on her shoulders, and yearns to feel absolutely nothing amidst the overwhelm. She then makes a decision that comes a little too easy: self-imposed alienation. Suzuki writes, “It doesn’t bother me that I’m not going to see them anymore, not even a little. Different kinds of people belong in different kinds of worlds. And, lucky enough for me, mine’s a world within reach.”
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Her stories are imbued with a specific type of social ambivalence – an aloof nihilism that shows us that although society knows no bounds, all relationships are inherently impossible. This social dissonance within the mundane is emphasised by extraterrestrials, cryosleep and a subdued yearning for connection. It’s obvious that Suzuki was extremely lonely, and only through her writing was she able to connect with others. In the titular story Terminal Boredom, translated by Daniel Joseph, the only remedy to a society driven to the brink by screen addiction and unemployment is advancements in neuroscience.
“Her stories are imbued with a specific type of social ambivalence – an aloof nihilism that shows us that although society knows no bounds, all relationships are inherently impossible. This social dissonance within the mundane is emphasised by extraterrestrials, cryosleep and a subdued yearning for connection.”
“All the shitty stuff stops bothering you. Like, you realise that there’s a simple way of dealing with everything that’s been weighing on you up till now. You can just tack on an illogical ending to the story, like a deus ex machina for life,” one character says to another, in order to convince her to submit to the lack of distinction between reality and fiction. Detachment is a given and it’s easy to find a strange form of catharsis within Suzuki’s deeply imaginative cyberpunk worlds that are nostalgic and anchored in the past. She shows us that the realities of everyday life are never far away, despite advancements in technology and the various opioids we distract ourselves with. We live in a world that is absurd, alienating and disturbing, and Suzuki apathetically beckons us to find our own dwellings within this intrinsic estrangement.
Suzuki’s disenchanting tales are focused on society, gender politics and Western pop culture’s influence on Japanese society. Her writing was informed by major socio-political movements that emerged in Japan, such as the Anpo Protests in the ‘60s, the Women’s Liberation Movement in the ‘70s, and the radical switch to consumerism in the ‘80s. Contextualising Suzuki’s work is vital to understanding it, as this intense consciousness reveals a human experience chock full of social ambivalence and reluctant attachment in a world of aliens. Hit Parade of Tears is more obviously rooted in the time it was written, epitomised by music and a strong 60s and 70s counterculture. Short story Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic! translated by Boyd is a unique multi-dimensional unravelling of reality against a backdrop of 70’s Japanese pop subcultures. Suzuki writes, “It was like she was seeing everything around her for the first time… But not like seeing the world in a new light.”
Unsurprisingly, Suzuki’s male counterparts are more readily available in the English translation, most likely due to the fact that Suzuki has been portrayed as a side character in the lives of her male contemporaries, disappearing under the weight of male ambition. While writers like Murakami and Kōbō Abe flourished into the mainstream canon, Suzuki remained in obscurity.
Though Suzuki was excluded from the canon, the genre of science fiction allowed her to deconstruct traditional roles, and explore mainstream notions of gender, politics and pop culture. One of her translators, Daniel Joseph, claims that science fiction “liberated her writing, providing a playground where she could deconstruct male-dominated Japanese society and her relation to it.” Her stories and essays, while rooted in the relevant culture of the time of their initial release, resonate with the emotional exhaustion and nuanced societal perspectives of today.
Suzuki’s stories speak on our quasi-burnt out earthling sensitivities and the complex state of emotionality in an ever evolving technological world. While she encompasses social issues in regards to gender and capitalism, the genre of science fiction is a vehicle for the human experience of alienation and a yearning for both escape and familiarity – spurned by Suzuki’s feminine rage and apathy. Suzuki offers us, decades later, a paradoxically intimate yet estranged look at how society has affected us and how it continues to do so.
Words: Maya Mathur