The second English-language publication of Izumi Suzuki’s short stories delves deeper into the politics of feeling and the future’s dark underbelly.
In my last year at primary school, I remember our teacher reading us a short story called ‘Narapoia’ by Alan Nelson. The wry sci-fi tale sees a protagonist unburdening himself to his doctor: he believes he is following someone. The opposite of paranoia, he finds that when walking along the street he’s trying to catch up with someone. But when he arrives, they aren’t there. I recount this story because until writing this review, I couldn’t find any existence of it. All I had was a vague memory of the plot and the feeling it left me with – both the dissatisfaction at my inability to recall it, but also the longing to hear the story again.
The latest cache of Izumi Suzuki’s newly translated stories, Hit Parade of Tears (Verso, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan), evoked a similar feeling. Suzuki died aged 36 in 1986 and reading her stories almost 40 years later places the reader in a liminal space of nostalgia. She made the sci-fi genre refreshingly unique, where the future is infused with 1960s music, illegal space jaunts to capture strange creatures, magic, and forbidden time travel. Her visions were of the future – a now? – which are firmly cemented in her own zeitgeist, yet they excite and retain an ephemeralness.
Having read Terminal Boredom, the first English-translated work of the late Japanese author, the overriding ennui and dystopian/utopian pendulum continue to swing into this second volume. Yet, these stories feel darker. There is less world-building and more of an interrogation of the politics of emotion – from primordial rage to modern apathy. The chosen works, which range from novelistic character-driven scenes and short, perplexing sketches, result in a harder-hitting collection that is both humorous and devastating.
In Suzuki’s futures, characters oscillate between excessive emotions and passivity. Whether this is anger, longing for love, or total disconnection, these people are often surveilled and subjected to intervention by shady organisations. Yet the government and other various magical or intergalactic bureaucracies are seldom the focus of the story. Rather, they are omnipresent but impenetrable, which doesn’t stop them from regulating, pathologising, and experimenting on the general populace.
In ‘Full of Malice’, the nameless protagonist and her mother visit a facility for mentally ill and disabled people where her brother is interned, “forced to smile at all times”. Entering the building, she crosses “an invisible threshold and stepped into another dimension” from which she cannot escape. Orderlies and patients are indistinguishable and obscenely happy. The Director of the facility creates artificial family structures between patients and small families spring up within the walls.
The protagonist soon becomes ensnared in the medical system’s grasp, where they take it upon themselves to remove, what they deem, her malice. This procedure is enacted on each patient, which is why “they’re all so happy, and why they can handle true freedom.” In this short tale, free will is quashed for the sake of the facility’s view of freedom and regulation of otherwise “undesirable” members of society. Any emotion outside of “happiness” is forcefully removed to create the illusion of a happy life and the outcome is terrifying.
‘Memory of Water’ is one of the collection’s most riveting stories, and could easily be a full-length novel or movie. Straying from the sci-fi genre into gothic horror, we read of a chronically ill woman who has been quarantined for five years in a lonely apartment receiving an invite to an immersive theatre show. Her interactions are limited to her doctor, who leads rather than listens, and she has no real sense of self.
After seeing a play “based on the psychological profile of a woman with multiple personalities,” she is transported hundreds and thousands of years to the start of the galaxy. As the sky flames and artificial landscapes unfurl, the woman isn’t alone. She remembers a ‘we’ watching the universe evolve. While we think the story has a foregone conclusion, this prophetic vision makes the reveal even more uncanny.
Where ‘Memory of Water’ sees a self splitting under a cosmic weight, ‘Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic’ is an Everything Everywhere All At Once-esque story of Reico, a character who is manipulated into experiencing multiple timelines. Here Suzuki’s excellent 60s score comes into play, as Reico, then Reyco, then Reiko, moves through life motivated by music, being a groupie, and hanging out with her girlfriends.
A script between two unseen speakers interrupts the otherwise everyday scenes of her disaffected youth. “Warps in the timeline are common enough,” they assure one another as they try to keep one step ahead of the overwhelming threat of the Timekeepers, and their subject Reico, who notices anachronistic glitches in the worlds they create for her. It’s an enjoyable cat-and-mouse read, with each strand contributing to the psychedelic reading experience, though the motivations of the interlopers orchestrating the timelines are never interrogated.
The penultimate story, ‘I’ll Never Forget’, looks at the emotional complexities between Meelians (aliens) and Terrans (humans). While the two groups seem to be in the late stages of a war, their cultures infiltrate one another. Meelian protagonist Mari, affected by the death of her brother, Sol, and long-ago heartbreak at the hands of a Terran boy, is tasked with a new job on Earth as a fashion model.
We learn that “Meelians die when their hearts reach full capacity. That’s because [they] never forget things that are important.” Since her childhood heartbreak and loss of her family to the Meelian emotional condition, Mari sees herself as empty. Perhaps this is a self-preservation technique, yet “Vacant folks like her had to keep living, to fill that void.” While on earth, Mari resolves to see Emma, Sol’s former lover, confined to a mental institution.
Before they meet, Emma sends Mari a vivid dream, projecting her memories and emotions towards Sol. This contradictory experience sparks jealousy, confusion, and sympathy for Emma, who is plagued by these visions that cease her from functioning entirely. This transference of emotion is a physical experience: “Mari sank into a deep fatigue. She knew now what it meant to come into contact with another’s madness.” Where Mari previously lived ‘labouring under the weight of her own solitude’, Emma is still living despite her grief and poor quality of life.
The relationship between these two characters, where Mari longs to feel despite the consequences and Emma’s psychic ability leads to overwhelming emotional memories, acts as the nexus of Hit Parade of Tears. Each of the distinct elements of Suzuki’s sci-fi come together, from institutions, aliens, the desire for love, and the disastrous consequences of apathy and overwhelm meeting.
These 11 stories are a slippery reading experience. The interlinking of themes, particularly the shorter scenes of primordial soup at the beginning (or end?) of the world in ‘After Everything’ and ‘The Walker’, illustrate the dexterity of Suzuki’s handling of otherwise “out there” concepts. By grounding her sci-fi stories in the interpersonal, the reader is ready to take a greater leap with her – beyond Earth and its confining interpersonal structures.
While Hit Parade of Tears can be confounding and, at times, absurdist, Suzuki’s view of the future is mercurial – both dystopian and utopian – as characters long to experience the complexity of the entire emotional spectrum. As one of the protagonists muses, “She was tormented by visions of something she had already lost.” Reading Hit Parade of Tears is like this; upon finishing several of these stories I immediately re-read them to see what I had missed. Both nostalgia for the experience they gave me on first reading and being totally absorbed in the liminal space Suzuki evokes. Her signature sci-fi style is as moving as it is unpredictable and a must-read by anyone interested in the emotional politics of our potential future(s).
Hit Parade of Tears is published by Verso as part of their fiction series and is available to purchase online. To read the little we know about the late Suzuki and her work, read her Wikipedia page.
