Humanity unhinged
A newly translated short-story collection by Japanese sci-fi writer Izumi Suzuki is alarmingly prescient.
Four decades have passed since the surreal and dark short stories in Izumi Suzuki’s collection Terminal Boredom were written. Yet, despite their age, the themes capture our present zeitgeist with astonishing prescience. Preoccupied with gender, empathy, disconnection, technology and the future of our species, these seven stories hum with a gritty tension.
Japanese writers such as Kenzaburō Ōe and Haruki Murakami have long blurred the lines between science fiction and mainstream literature, but Suzuki isn’t as well known – although this may change. Terminal Boredom is the first of Suzuki’s works to be translated into English; another collection, Love The writing of Suzuki, who died in 1986 after leading a short, productive but increasingly troubled life as an author and actor, explores possible futures through a feminist lens – a fresh perspective in a largely male-dominated genre. This is rendered sharply in “Women and Women”, which depicts a post-apocalyptic matriarchal society in which men are confined to concentration camps. When a curious young girl discovers a boy hiding near her home, she learns an “unexpected, dreadful truth”. Other stories explore the burdens of time and sentience. In “You May Dream”, the Population Department employs cryosleep to control overpopulation, and the sleepers can have their consciousness transferred to the dreams of a relative or friend. In “That Old Seaside Club”, patients in an unnamed facility seek a cure in a dream world of youth and music. There’s a touch of the absurd, too, when a chair offers unsolicited relationship advice. “Women and Women” depicts a postapocalyptic matriarchal society in which men are confined to concentration camps. Both stories have an eerily contemporary feel to them and could easily be read as plots from an episode of Black Mirror. Anxious characters yearn for serenity; others desperately wish for a connection that will salve their fears. Most suffer from a “fatalistic resignation” and don’t feel things in the way they expect. “Nothing’s important,” they decide, so they turn to drugs and other distractions to endure their lives. In “Forgotten”, humans have colonised other planets and Emma’s relationship with the alien Sol is under extreme tension. Emma can’t understand how anyone would survive without drugs, certain that “there was no way anyone could live in a world like this with a fully functioning mind”. In the title story, a society drenched in screen time is left unable to handle, emotionally and physically, the rigours of daily life. There’s an uncanny clairvoyance to these dilemmas, with our present-day internet-addicted culture. Suzuki’s prose has an air of adolescent insouciance, almost casual in tone and plotting. She carefully leads us into worlds that feel oddly familiar yet bristle with the fantastical. The nihilistic tendencies of her characters brush up against their hopes for love and comfort. Untethered from norms and customs, some turn to violence, others to despondent regret. The speculative twists take us on journeys outside our solar system, although what we discover in going so far from Earth is merely a deeper look at our own insecurities and doubts about gender, sex and how to live a good life in a world full of cruelty and despair. l TERMINAL BOREDOM, by Izumi Suzuki (Verso, $24.99)