The first novel from the late Izumi Suzuki to be published in English. A young woman named Izumi details her turbulent twenties in thirteen disarmingly candid vignettes set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo.
Set My Heart On Fire is what would happen if Joan Didion wrote a tell-all memoir about her alternative, fictional life as a groupie. But not just any groupie — the Pattie Boyd of Japanese rock in the early 70s. The new English translation of the late Izumi Suzuki recalls Didion’s best reportage. Set My Heart On Fire reminded me of Play It As It Lays, Didion’s beautifully bleak portrayal of a young woman’s futile struggle for meaning and agency in the rarified world of 1960’s Hollywood ... It felt like a guilty pleasure to read Izumi’s encounters with her celebrity boyfriends. Who hasn’t wondered what it would be like to bed a rock star? But Suzuki’s sentences are so direct, her hook-ups so frankly recounted, that I often felt I had glimpsed the pages of a diary. These sex scenes are sensual and electric, charged with the boldness of erotic fiction and the terrible awkwardness of lived experience ... Rather than writing a facile romance or even a more interesting rock odyssey, Suzuki chose to write a deeply disturbing, powerfully erotic, nihilistic confessional that unflinchingly challenges the predominant, traditional norms of post-WWII Japanese society.
Suzuki’s writing is glamorous, knowing and effortless, which is to say: cool. Helen O’Horan deserves praise for the delicate art of transferring coolness from one language to another. But one wishes the underlying material evinced a little more effort. The characters are hazily sketched and the dialogue addled. Suzuki jolts the reader in and out of scenes so abruptly that we never quite know what is happening or how much time has passed between vignettes ... It’s not a compliment to say that the illogic of a barbiturate daze permeates the prose, with regard to both pacing (syrupy slow, interrupted by jump cuts) and character ... Music is one thing Suzuki writes reliably well about, or rather, through. Izumi’s is a life felt and understood through organized sound ... Suzuki is also a keen observer of an era-specific flavor of misogyny ... Still, compared with her bizarre and inventive short stories, this is an underachieving work ... Suzuki sticks closely to the narrator’s weary and watery impressions, which are thin enough to evaporate off the page. Autofiction (if we must) is not her format.
While this novel is more rooted in reality than her previous works of sci-fi, it continues Suzuki’s concern with patriarchy-inflicted turmoil, told in her signature elliptic, sometimes abrasive style, which tends to leave much unsaid. And though Izumi’s narrative is ultimately mournful, her tragic but tender love story is lifted by Suzuki’s wry, rebellious spirit.
