Izumi Suzuki (1949–1986)

Jagged. That is the word that comes foremost to mind. Jagged, painful stories within lives not worth living. Caustic, and eerily beautiful too. Drugs might be able to mask this hurt, but they would not be able to heal it. Nothing could but death itself. All unique stories. All scraping the edges of their containers - finger nail screeches on chalk boards.

So, 35 years after her suicide at the age of 36, Verso Books - together with various translators - bring us the first work to appear in English of this remarkable woman. This collection of 7 short stories would be interesting enough but, given the distance in time, the science fiction and dystopian worlds that Izumi Suzuki depicts become even more intriguing.

The opening story of the collection ('Women and Women') portrays a society where men are imprisoned in underground ghettos, women are show more in relationships with each other, and the planet has been devastated by human exploitation. In another story, teenagers video call each other, struggle with eating disorders and watch real-life video clips of violent street attacks filmed by strangers. Other stories feature drug use, a small group of human survivors struggling to survive, and a couple of friends having a 'holiday' on a resort planet.

Not all of the stories grabbed my attention, but on the whole this is a remarkable collection, well worth a read. And, as someone who normally doesn't read speculative SF, that is a big recommendation! I hope that more of Suzuki's writings will get future publications now, on the back of what is (hopefully) a successful and well-received outing for this book. The final title story, where the state offers an implant to take away stress and boredom, is a chilling and timely one indeed. To escape real life, to see the world as if it were just a reality TV show, becomes the dream:

'Even in this day and age, we still revere truth. But at the same time, we devote ourselves to the task of erasing the distinction between truth and fiction.'

Astonishing for its vision - and indeed for the author herself - this is a must-read collection that deserves to be out there. show less

This is an acerbic and astounding collection of short stories originally published in on the late 70s and 80s. They are varied in their tone, subject and quality, but all share Suzuki's isolated alien outsider perspective explored through science fiction.

It's genuinely difficult to not believe these are contemporary srories initially published when the translations came out a few years ago. There is a prescient and modern sensibility throughout, with the exception of the handling of gender show more non-comformity/ transphobia and sexual assault in the first story.

I need to revisit these stories and this review when I have actually managed to get a night's sleep. But suffice to say this is a phenomenal collection in Suzuki's distinct dark voice that evokes Philip K Dick, Jordan Peel, Charlie Brooker, with some making me imagine is Jeanne Thornton wrote an episode of Black Mirror.

These bleak, outcast stories really spoke to my sad girl soul, and the only reason I can't give this full marks is because of problematic elements that actually made me put this book down for quite some time, before devouring it. show less

I found the narrative disjointed, not so much in the moments shown (even when Izumi is high or starving or otherwise mentally affected) as the jumps between; scenes often slip without warning or context from one to another, which may be immediately following or three years later, and a reader has to keep up by figuring out as it goes where, when, and with whom Izumi is, what's going on, anything at all.

People come and go and the reader has to figure out who they are from context as rarely show more does Izumi offer too much more; meeting a friend to catch up, we find out who the person is only then.

The narrator does an absolutely phenomenal job - her tones mesh wonderfully with Izumi's moods and she speaks in a quiet, not really withdrawn but somewhat confiding, conspiratorial manner that perfectly suits Izumi's story and her way of telling it. Izumi who is 'careless' not so much in the sense of not taking care (although that too) but in being somehow uncaring of or distant from what goes on or happens to her even when she's emotionally involved.

I wasn't expecting a lot of the content I found . . . and especially not Izumi's way of handling much of it when it came to sexual violence, abuse, etc. Which was . . . to carry on and basically ignore it, I suppose. When a man she'd known only briefly (a week?), and who had terrified her and raped her on their first meeting, asked her to marry him she . . . said yes and wound up in a terrible situation in even more ways than expected.

Izumi's baby was mentioned in . . . one scene, perhaps? Which in a number of latter ones over the following weeks, months, years, felt . . . unsettling; shouldn't there have been some mention? What happened to the child?

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the book. I didn't love it, and it's not something I'd revisit, and there were certainly things I vehemently disliked (some on the order of fits the narrative but I wish it wasn't happening and some that felt strange even in situ), but it was interesting. The knowledge that it was influenced by/a mirror of the author's own life gave it an additional layer of unease. show less