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abbie_'s review
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
3.5
My second pick for #WomenInTranslation month was Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, which is a short story collection translated by a team of translators: Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O’Horan. I’m assuming that these stories were published in various places before being gathered in this collection, and that different translators worked on different stories. I will say that the tone (or style??) of the stories fluctuated quite a lot, some of them read a little clunkier than others, while some were super smooth and more pleasurable to read.
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I often just pick up books based on vibes, without paying much attention to the blurb. Based on the cover of this one (which I adore) I was expecting these sci fi stories to be gritty and super grounded in our reality. So I was surprised that a lot them are actually set in outer space, dealing with futuristic technology, aliens, intergalactic politics - a fun surprise honestly! It’s very cool that Suzuki was writing this sort of thing in the 70s as a Japanese woman, when the sci-fi scene back then was even more of a sausage fest than it is today.
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A few of the stories admittedly did nothing for me, I read them and then could barely tell you what happened after. There were also a few casual homophobic and fatphobic comments thrown in (at one point a woman character says women aren’t scary ‘except for the lesbians’ lol). But there were a few that were great, very unsettling, questioning traditional gender roles in Japanese society (I swear almost all of these stories had a general undertone of ~men are trash~). Some of my faves were Trial Witch, The Covenant and Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise. I think you can really tell that Suzuki has a big influence over contemporary Japanese writer Sayaka Murata, as she often explores the theme of being an outsider, feeling like you don’t belong in this world.
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Overall a solid collection, a few misses, but I’d definitely pick up Terminal Boredom!
.
I often just pick up books based on vibes, without paying much attention to the blurb. Based on the cover of this one (which I adore) I was expecting these sci fi stories to be gritty and super grounded in our reality. So I was surprised that a lot them are actually set in outer space, dealing with futuristic technology, aliens, intergalactic politics - a fun surprise honestly! It’s very cool that Suzuki was writing this sort of thing in the 70s as a Japanese woman, when the sci-fi scene back then was even more of a sausage fest than it is today.
.
A few of the stories admittedly did nothing for me, I read them and then could barely tell you what happened after. There were also a few casual homophobic and fatphobic comments thrown in (at one point a woman character says women aren’t scary ‘except for the lesbians’ lol). But there were a few that were great, very unsettling, questioning traditional gender roles in Japanese society (I swear almost all of these stories had a general undertone of ~men are trash~). Some of my faves were Trial Witch, The Covenant and Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise. I think you can really tell that Suzuki has a big influence over contemporary Japanese writer Sayaka Murata, as she often explores the theme of being an outsider, feeling like you don’t belong in this world.
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Overall a solid collection, a few misses, but I’d definitely pick up Terminal Boredom!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Blood, and Murder
Minor: Fatphobia and Lesbophobia
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