Ian Mond Reviews Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki

Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki (Verso Fiction 978-1-83976-849-1, $19.95, 288pp, tp) April 2023.

Since finishing Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s second collection to be translated into English by Verso Books following Terminal Bore­dom in 2021, I have scoured the internet to learn more about this hard-to-pin-down writer. I have read articles by Andrew Ridker, Genie Harrison, and one of her translators, Daniel Joseph, profiling Suzuki’s brief life (she died of suicide aged 36 in 1985), and I watched Endless Waltz, Kōji Waka­matsu’s 1995 adaptation of Mayumi Inaba’s book of the same name which chronicles Suzuki’s short, abusive marriage to avant-garde jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe. And what have I learnt? That she was born the same year as Haruki Murakami (Andrew Ridker); that her first genre story was published in a special “all women’s issue” of Japan’s SF Magazine alongside pieces from Ursula K. Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley (Daniel Joseph); that Verso’s publication of Terminal Boredom was entirely incidental – “an editor at Verso Books saw her name mentioned in a footnote in an academic thesis” (Genie Harrison); that when she asked to join Japan’s all-male SF Writers Club, she was laughed off by Taku Mayumura (Ridker and Joseph). Suzuki was a bar hostess, a model (that’s her gracing the covers of both Terminal Bore­dom and Hit Parade of Tears), an actor (namely sexploitation films directed by Kōji Wakamatsu) and, of course, a writer of science fiction during the mid-’70s and early ’80s.

So what about the fiction? Having read both English language collections, published initially as a single volume in Japan, I can say with some conviction that no one then or now writes like Suzuki. Her stories depict a complex, frequently disorientating world, her characters (chiefly women) often doubting their sanity or the moti­vations of those around them. Ironically, her first sale to SF Magazine, “The Witch’s Apprentice” (which appears in Hit Parade of Tears under the title “Trial Witch”), is as conventional a story as Suzuki wrote; you could imagine it being adapted for The Twilight Zone. The tale sees an unnamed housewife, stuck in a miserable marriage with an unfaithful, alcoholic husband, given magical powers on a trial period by a man who appears in her apartment with a literal bang. Shenanigans ensue when she realises she can change people (especially her husband) into anything organic. The story is laugh-out-loud-funny with a bril­liantly surreal ending. But while it deals with infidelity – an issue Suzuki returns to – it’s much lighter in tone than her other work. “My Guy”, the collection’s opening piece, is more in keeping with Suzuki’s oeuvre. It’s about a woman who falls in love with an alien who has come to Earth to survey the planet. As the narrative unfurls, we discover that “My Guy’s” mission is to spread his “seed far and wide.” While “My Guy” has several comedic moments, it’s also an edgier story. The piece begins with the female protagonist being chased by a “creep” (“I tried speeding up, or running, or going into a café, but he followed me and showed no sign of discouragement”), which leads her to encounter the “guy” sitting in a phone booth like a “vagrant” (“His complexion was atrocious… his hair was a strange vegetable color, like a moldy log, a little grungy.”). From there, “My Guy” becomes this weird, awkward meditation on love and romance with a side dish of crashed UFOs, telepathy, and alien progeny.

If you’ve read Terminal Boredom, you might find something lacking in those first two pieces. They’re not bad – “Trial Witch” is genuinely hilari­ous – but they pale relative to work like “Women and Women” or “That Old Seaside Club”. That’s not the case with “Hey, It’s A Love Psychedelic!” an astonishing, baffling story that wouldn’t have felt out of place in an issue of New Worlds magazine. As the title suggests, it’s this trippy tale about two music lovers, one of whom, Reico (or Reyco? The spelling changes midway), has her timeline manipulated by two nameless characters (think cheeky teenagers having a laugh). Around midway in the story, reality starts cracking apart, resulting in the appearance of a giant pair of chopsticks pressing large orbs of salmon roe into a building. Freaky imagery aside, what struck me about thestory is Suzuki’s evident passion for all types of music, whether it be pop, rock, or the blues.

“Hey, It’s A Love Psychedelic!” captures Su­zuki’s frank attitude to mental health. Like Philip K. Dick or James Tiptree, Jr. – two writers she’s been compared to – Suzuki employs the tropes of science fiction, time travel, first contact, and simulated realities, to deconstruct her character’s perceptions, their sense of self. There’s Emma from “I’ll Never Forget”, who has been institutionalised after her fraught relationship with the “Meelian” named Sol sends “her over the edge” (a relation­ship chronicled in “Forgotten”, published in Ter­minal Boredom). Or Akiko from “The Covenant”, who believes she’s from another world and, like Emma, is institutionalised after she and a friend methodically plan and murder a man thinking it will alert her people. Or the unnamed narrator of “Memory of Water”, who loses all sense of who she is, her identity gradually replaced by a more strident, demanding alter ego. These stories are confronting because they are so candid from a Western perspective, because Suzuki is unwilling to sugar-coat.

Suzuki’s painfully honest and often cynical view of the world can sometimes be hard going. But as Genie Harrison rightly points out, Suzuki’s fiction “subtly unstuck from specific times and locations,” remains relevant because it speaks to our anxieties and fears about a world, a future, slowly slipping from our grasp.

This review and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.

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