“Set My Heart on Fire” by Izumi Suzuki

Set My Heart on Fire, Izumi Suzuki, Helen O’Horan (trans) (Verso, November 2024)

Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese science fiction writer of the 1970s and early 1980s with two collections of short stories currently available in English—Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears. Both are the collaborative work of several translators, and both were widely lauded for their innovation and biting social commentary. When I reviewed Terminal Boredom for the Asian Review of Books, I noted that, “Suzuki’s feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago.”

Set My Heart on Fire, recently translated by Helen O’Horan, is Suzuki’s first novel to appear in English. This novel is something new. Instead of stories about spaceships, witches, or dystopian societies, here Suzuki tells her own tale—the dark, semi-autobiographical narrative of a defiant, prescient voice from the fringes of Japanese society.

The I-novel emerged in early 20th century Japan as a genre of autobiography.

Suzuki’s novel was published in Japan in 1983. Autobiographical fiction in Japan like Set My Heart on Fire almost inevitably draws from Japan’s long-stranding shishosetsu or “I-novel” tradition, one of Japanese culture’s most iconic literary forms. The I-novel emerged in early 20th century Japan as a genre of autobiography. By the late 1910s, it was considered the highest form of literature among the literary elite. It retained that status for decades.

Early I-novel readers assumed they were reading a nonfiction account of the author’s life, a straightforward account of his or her “lived experience”. Today, almost all authors, readers, and critics recognize that I-novels are partially fiction—that the author is making him or herself a character in his or her own story, taking liberties with the tale of his or her own life, as Suzuki does in Set My Heart on Fire. Historically, readers would often, but not always, be familiar with the lives of authors of I-novels. Suzuki certainly had her own sort of niche fame, or perhaps notoriety, in contemporary Japan

Notably, an I-novel author often portrays him or herself in the most unattractive light possible. Readers expect a willingness to lay oneself bare, no matter how ugly or unpleasant one’s true self might be. (O’Horan’s translation of Set My Heart on Fire is fittingly no-holds-barred, presenting Suzuki’s coarse turns of phrase to the English-language reader in all their vulgar glory. In particular, she retains terms many 2024 Anglophone readers are likely to find problematic.) The “true self” Suzuki presents in her novel is, if not ugly, at least painfully raw. “No one would love me anyway,” the semi-autobiographical narrator (“Izumi”) notes early in the book.

 

No person would do me that favor. That’s a given. Who could be honest with a monstrous woman like me? No man on this planet. He can’t exist. That’s a fact. I’d turned this idea into a strange little sort of conviction.

 

Set My Heart on Fire could fall in the same publishing space as other, more recently-written works of gritty and raw realistic fiction by Japanese women that appear in translation this year, particularly Rio Shimamoto’s First Love and Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki (no relation). The difference, of course, is that Set My Heart on Fire is strongly based on Suzuki’s own life, making the realistic fiction even more real.

Set My Heart on Fire is a moving, if bleak, read.

Izumi Suzuki was born in 1949, about six months after seminal Japanese author Haruki Murakami and three years before the end of the American occupation of Japan. Before she began writing, she worked as a keypunch operator, bar hostess, “pink film” actress, and model. Her modeling work with controversial photographer Nouyoushi Araki appears in a posthumous collection, Izumi, This Bad Girl. It now decorates the covers of all three volumes of her work published in English.

Suzuki frames Set My Heart on Fire as the story of directionless young Izumi living the “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll” lifestyle she calls “The Yokohama Blues”—a music that may or may not exist.

 

Court a quiet sadness. Drop those Es and Bs a half-tone. Make me sick with your love. Make full use of your polished operations and techniques. As long as we get there without becoming serious. It doesn’t matter if it’s not how we really feel. Our real feelings are exhausting. Let’s put them off until later.

 

Izumi floats through life through a fog of sedatives and alcohol, moving from rock and jazz concerts to the musicians’ beds, and modeling to support herself. The central plot consists of her rash and unwise marriage after a rejection by a young musician and her failed attempt to recapture her youth after her husband’s death. Because this story is an I-novel, these are also roughly the events of Suzuki’s own life from 1973 to 1978.

In 1973, Suzuki married jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, reimagined as “Jun” in Set My Heart on Fire. Although virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Abe was a relatively well-known figure in Japan’s 1970s jazz scene, playing solo and with some of the Japanese greats of his own day. These greats included  rock musician Kou Machida, who went on to win the 2000 Akutagawa Prize for his novel Rip It Up, translated into English by Daniel Joseph.

Early in Set My Heart on Fire, Izumi predicts she will marry someone “she can conduct psychological warfare with”, a piece of self-knowledge she’s held onto since she read Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in high school. After she meets Jun, she finds herself “drawn in by some strange power that he and no other man [has].” For the reader, it’s difficult to understand what the “strange power” could be. She thinks Jun is physically unattractive and emotionally immature. She even wonders if he’s gay. (For all her flaws, Izumi is not homophobic; she later describes her own sexual encounters with other women. Her concern here is that he isn’t truly attracted to her.) Later, Jun sexually assaults her; she decides not to struggle because she has “the sense a guy like this could kill a girl.”

Nevertheless, Izumi agrees to marry Jun after the couple dates for just four days, significantly contracting the actual two-year period Suzuki knew the real-life Abe.

Ultimately, Izumi’s high school prediction of marriage as psychological warfare turns out to be as accurate in Izumi’s life as it was in Suzuki’s. Soon after they wed, Izumi loses the ability to eat and drops to 38 kilos (just under 84 pounds) with a 50 cm waist (just under 20 inches; too small for the smallest off-the-rack pants sold in Japan in 2024). The real-life Suzuki also cut off her own toe while Abe looked on. (The event doesn’t appear directly in Set My Heart on Fire, but Izumi later blames Jun for the amputation.)

The real-life Suzuki also cut off her own toe.

Those English-language readers who pick up Set My Heart on Fire because they are already familiar with her science fiction short stories might be surprised or disappointed to discover that the book makes only the briefest reference to Suzuki’s writing career. The real-life Izumi Suzuki published “Trial Witch” (translated in Hit Parade of Tears) in Japan’s SF magazine in 1975, while pregnant with her only child. The story went on to become her breakout hit. Like many of Suzuki’s stories, it’s a supernatural story about a flawed woman dealing with her oafish male romantic partner.

Set My Heart on Fire stands on its own as a work of autobiographical fiction, but Suzuki fans of longer standing may also find echoes of the themes Suzuki takes up in her science fiction. For example, in a conversation with a gay friend in Set My Heart on Fire, Izumi ultimately concludes she is a female drag queen—“the bad parts of a woman distilled”. Izumi positions herself as both a female and a female impersonator at the same time, calling to mind the unstable gender boundaries of Suzuki stories like “Night Picnic” (in Terminal Boredom), in which one character goes from being the family’s younger son to younger daughter almost without comment

Izumi also relays her own experiences with problematic encounters between men and women. Most notably, Set My Heart on Fire includes several episodes of Jun sexually assaulting or outright raping Izumi, both before and after they marry. Such encounters litter stories like “Women and Women” (in Terminal Boredom), which includes both a man raping a woman and a society of women that keeps men only as breeding stock.

Finally, Izumi moves through the semi-autobiographical narrative with the kind of passivity Suzuki ascribes to many of her fictional characters, like the young people from the title story of “Terminal Boredom” who eventually become so disenchanted with life that they lay down and die. “It’s always the same day, over and over,” Set My Heart on Fire’s Izumi says about her manic, “Yokohama Blues” lifestyle. “There’s nothing else to do. I’ve got to have fun, I no longer have a choice. It’s an obsessive compulsion.” When Jun asks Izumi to marry him, she agrees “without thinking about it”, even though she immediately recognizes that she has made a life-changing mistake.

Suzuki herself only outlived the Japanese-language publication of Set My Heart on Fire by three years.

Izumi Suzuki and Kaoru Abe divorced in 1977. (Set My Heart on Fire never mentions a divorce.) They continued to live together until Abe’s death of an accidental sedative overdose in 1978, another event not directly depicted in Set My Heart on Fire. (In the novel, Jun’s death is abrupt, and the reader only learns about it after the fact.)

The last 30 or so pages of the 180 page novel take place after Jun’s overdose. The long denouement is a kind of calm after the storm that gives Izumi a chance to pick through the wreckage of her life. She would like to be able to return to her relatively carefree, concert-hopping life of the early 1970s, so she reconnects with the musician who rejected her, setting off the chain of events that resulted in her ill-fated marriage. Even that encounter doesn’t bring the solace she was looking for. “The Yokohama Blues”—the life of Izumi’s youth, in which feelings can be put off until later because they are exhausting—cannot be recaptured, if it ever truly existed.

Suzuki herself only outlived the Japanese-language publication of Set My Heart on Fire by three years. She was able to support herself and her daughter through her writing for several years after Abe’s death in 1978. Eventually, her physical and mental health declined and she was forced to accept public assistance. In 1986, Suzuki hanged herself in her home. She was 36 years old.

Set My Heart on Fire is a moving, if bleak, read in its own right, particularly as a later example of a Japanese I-novel. It’s likely to appeal to anyone who reads gritty stories of people who make questionable choices, particularly because this story is more-or-less true. It’s also a fascinating example of autobiographical fiction from the 1970s, an era sadly underrepresented in Japanese fiction translated into English, particularly fiction by women. It is perhaps most likely to appeal to the reader already familiar with Suzuki’s work—to someone who can appreciate it as the fictionalized autobiography of a writer whose powerful stories still ring true almost four decades after she took her own life.


Alison Fincher (@readjapaneselit.bsky.social) is the founder and host of the Read Japanese Literature podcast and co-editor at the Asian Review of Books for Japanese fiction.