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A review by marthmuffins
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki
3.0
Set My Heart on Fire - 3.5/5
Whilst I do prefer Izumi Suzuki's sci-fi short stories in Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears I did still like this a fair bit, being a light fictionalisation of Suzuki's life from her early 20s to a few years before her suicide in 1986 when she was 36 (). I don't actually know how this was originally released: it feels like a number of vignettes written over years and then stitched together as "A Novel" not long before Suzuki's death to make a sort of fictionalised autobiography of her life (especially as one chapter specifically references a previous one as published years earlier in a magazine) but I don't know for sure.
I do get the complaint that it largely treads water: Izumi listens to music, talks with someone, gets into a shitty relationship with a man, sex scene, talks with someone, listens to music, repeat, multiple times throughout the book but that repetitiveness worked for me (maybe because I read it over a longer period of time than a lot of folk) in reinforcing what was happening. The focus on the ennui and apathy Izumi is experiencing, the intense self-loathing, the constant repetition of Izumi thinking she's a bad woman morally, sexually, and emotionally, and the awfulness of all the men she meets, feels raw whilst remaining detached as if Suzuki is writing about someone else. Whilst it's something so many people write about, I do think the book captures it in a unique way and with a unique voice.
Gender comes up a lot here, like in Suzuki's sci-fi, and like many 1960s-80s works (and even into the 90s-now) there's both a very prescriptive and binary view of gender whilst simultaneously the characters obviously feel very uncomfortable existing inside that binary. Izumi feels out of place, but she can't entirely imagine a world outside of the rigid confines of WOMAN and MAN and instead just glimpses at vague possibilities beyond it, articulating her discomfort in ways that push a little at those walls without being able to entirely chip through them to see the possibility of something else.
I rated it lower that Suzuki's other work because I do miss the campiness and silliness that comes with her sci-fi stories (plus I just generally have a better time with spec-fic) and the repetitiveness is a genuine issue reading this quickly, but I still really enjoyed this and am definitely gonna look out for whatever work of Suzuki's gets translated next!
Whilst I do prefer Izumi Suzuki's sci-fi short stories in Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears I did still like this a fair bit, being a light fictionalisation of Suzuki's life from her early 20s to a few years before her suicide in 1986 when she was 36 (
Spoiler
with a small probable sci-fi element in the final chapter/epilogueI do get the complaint that it largely treads water: Izumi listens to music, talks with someone, gets into a shitty relationship with a man, sex scene, talks with someone, listens to music, repeat, multiple times throughout the book but that repetitiveness worked for me (maybe because I read it over a longer period of time than a lot of folk) in reinforcing what was happening. The focus on the ennui and apathy Izumi is experiencing, the intense self-loathing, the constant repetition of Izumi thinking she's a bad woman morally, sexually, and emotionally, and the awfulness of all the men she meets, feels raw whilst remaining detached as if Suzuki is writing about someone else. Whilst it's something so many people write about, I do think the book captures it in a unique way and with a unique voice.
Gender comes up a lot here, like in Suzuki's sci-fi, and like many 1960s-80s works (and even into the 90s-now) there's both a very prescriptive and binary view of gender whilst simultaneously the characters obviously feel very uncomfortable existing inside that binary. Izumi feels out of place, but she can't entirely imagine a world outside of the rigid confines of WOMAN and MAN and instead just glimpses at vague possibilities beyond it, articulating her discomfort in ways that push a little at those walls without being able to entirely chip through them to see the possibility of something else.
I rated it lower that Suzuki's other work because I do miss the campiness and silliness that comes with her sci-fi stories (plus I just generally have a better time with spec-fic) and the repetitiveness is a genuine issue reading this quickly, but I still really enjoyed this and am definitely gonna look out for whatever work of Suzuki's gets translated next!