(Verso, 2021)
I.
Recently, someone sent me an email asking:
Don't you ever get tired of endlessly - and almost exclusively - writing about white European male authors?
The answer is no, I don't.
However, just to demonstrate I am aware that there are writers who can't be characterised in these terms, here's a post in memory of Izumi Suzuki; a woman described not only as a pioneer of Japanese science fiction, but a countercultural icon; a woman who initially found fame as a (nude) model and (pink film) actress; a woman who was a member of Tenjō Sajiki, the avant-garde theatre troupe led by Shūji Terayama; a woman who committed suicide in February 1986, aged thirty-seven.
II.
Although Suzuki had decided to devote herself to writing four years earlier, it wasn't until 1975 that she published her first sci-fi short story and it was in this genre that she became something of a cult figure, developing a quirky feminist style in which she expressed her concerns about technology, gender, and the future.
Unfortunately, being a cult doesn't pay the bills and although Suzuki managed to support herself and her daughter for a brief period with her writing, she ended her days in ill health, poverty, and, tragically, hanging from a rope tied round her neck.
The first English language edition of her work has just been published by Verso: Terminal Boredom (2021) - a collection of seven short stories, including the title story, which was the last she wrote before topping herself.
Although critics describe these tales as singular, punky, irreverent, darkly playful and charmingly deranged, I've so far found them to be disappointing - not least in their despairing humanism; future races and alien beings it seems are pretty much just like us and still struggling with the same issues of loneliness, sorrow, and pain. Unfortunately, this melancholic mix of angst and sentimentality isn't really my cup of tea.
Having said that - and to be fair to the memory of Suzuki - I've only given them a cursory reading, so may yet discover many things to interest and enjoy within the pages of her book when I return to it in due course and subject it to a rather more considered, critically attentive reading.
But, for now, it's back to the white European male writers I'm accused of privileging ...
See: Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom, trans. Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, (Verso, 2021).
