Tokyo’s depraved underbelly, as seen by a tormented genius

The writer Izumi Suzuki, as photographed by Nobuyoshi Araki
The writer Izumi Suzuki, as photographed by Nobuyoshi Araki - Verso

Today, Izumi Suzuki is more image than writer. Immortalised in the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki, and the “pink films” – an indie genre known for nudity – of Koja Wakamatsu, the myth of her life has come to overshadow her literary contributions. Born in Japan in 1949, Suzuki worked as a bar hostess, key-punch operator, model and actress, before dedicating herself to writing full-time. She became a fixture on the underground music scene in Tokyo in the 1970s; she married the jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe and had a daughter with him, before he died of a drug overdose in 1978. She went on writing furiously, and published short stories, novels and essays, until she committed suicide in 1986. She was just 36.

Since Verso published her short stories in translation, first in the collection Terminal Boredom (2021), then another, Hit Parade of Tears (2023), Anglophone readers have had a chance to discover that Suzuki’s tabloid biography is far from the most interesting thing about her. Underneath the troubled “It girl” is an even more troubled and thrillingly ambivalent writer, who played with every trope she ever encountered, from sci-fi conventions to her own cultish reputation as “Izumi This Bad Girl” – the title of an Araki monograph of her portraits.

The idea of genius and fandom looms large in Suzuki’s fiction. While she entered the genre of science fiction by chance – with her 1975 breakout story, The Trial Witch, she won a competition aged 20 – she embraced it as another form of performance, in which gender and genre intersect. Her short stories, often set in familiar domestic or urban settings, probe the uneven relationship between men and women through extraterrestrial interventions, dystopian scenarios and lurid fantasies of domination.

Set My Heart on Fire, the first of Suzuki’s novels to appear in English, in Helen O’Horan’s sharp translation, is a book that might register as autofiction to a contemporary reader, but still contains the seeds of that sci-fi sensibility. Written towards the end of her short life and published in Japanese in 1983, it charts the twenties and thirties of a narrator called Izumi, from her brief and intense affairs with different musicians to her wilful submission to the tenacious desire of one maniacal man, modelled on Abe, who becomes her husband. Echoing some of the mood and trajectory of her 1982 short story Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!, which evokes the rock-music scene in 1970s Tokyo from the point of view of a groupie and an older version of the same woman reflecting on the past, Set My Heart on Fire begins as a bildungsroman that transforms into a kind of elegy – or as close to elegy as a fast-hearted, unsentimental writer as Suzuki would ever get.

“For me there’s little distance between loving and hating someone,” Izumi declares early on. “You’d think I had extensive acting experience. My true self and my performed self, when I get them well mixed up, are indistinguishable from each other.” The novel opens at a gig, with her best friend Etsuko, dressed in “a mesh vest dyed red, green and black” like “an enraged bird-of-paradise”, where the pair fixate on musicians who they’ll later pursue. In the second chapter, Izumi has already seduced Etsuko’s lover. When Etsuko later forgives her, Izumi judges it both a weakness and a symptom of the world’s futility. “For me, anything goes. No matter how outrageous. I’ve always been like this, even as a kid. It’s a severe form of resignation.”

Suzuki's novel takes us through the nocturnal alleyways of Tokyo
Suzuki’s novel takes us through the nocturnal alleyways of Tokyo - Moment RM

The alienation at the centre of Izumi’s voice carries traces of the alien presence in Suzuki’s stories. In this novel, though, it’s men who loom as unknowable presences. Joel, another musician who remains Izumi’s most enduring fixation and love, is “so blank and expressionless, it was frightening. Like an android.” She finds herself impossibly drawn to him, even as her bewilderment at his incoherence grows. (Being with him is “like being held by a plastic doll with glass eyes”.) In another scene quickly after, she’s with another bandmate, Landi, who has a “straight gaze” and a “penetrating, metallic voice”. His effects work strongly enough: “Just being held by him wiped my mind… A sweet numbness spread in waves from the rear of my head.” The way Suzuki writes sex could be straight out of Henry Miller, if Miller were a woman, or told the truth.

When Jun, the man who’ll become her husband, appears, she judges him “psychologically uncircumcised”, but is taken by his brashness and her own curiosity. The following chapters trace the “terrifying thing” their marriage becomes, as he turns violent and progressively unstable. It’s both a reckoning and an accounting, as if Izumi were trying to explain to her younger self why she chose the man who so brutally holds onto her. After he dies, there are scenes of recollection and consideration, with strange and painful returns to earlier characters, to old loves and chances missed. Set My Heart on Fire closes without any notable progress or change; just the numbness with which you’re left when heartbreak begins to lift. Suzuki isn’t one to offer catharsis. And yet the very existence of her pioneering work, and its steady appearance in English, lights the match of a cold fire whose blaze is finally beginning to spread.


Set My Heart on Fire, tr Helen O’Horan, is published by Verso at £11.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books