Review of Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki

A great, sleazy Japanese novel in the tradition of Ryu Murakami and Shuichi Yoshida. 

I would love to read all of her books. I read and loved her two previous short story collections. So far, her most interesting book in English is Terminal Boredom. She broke from traditional Japanese realism here, depicting a gritty auto-fiction which makes typical I-novels of the time feel tame and polite.

The perspective is very close, and the style is very casual. It is highly readable and eschews elegant descriptions or elaborate interior monologues. We hear the protagonist’s thoughts. She could be a stand-in for the author and bears her name. Plenty of drugs are consumed. The atmosphere is sultry. She is no longer as young as she wants to be. The older she gets, the more depressed she becomes, the more embroiled in her twisted passions. She feels nothing most of the time. There is a hint of the ennui and the disgust present in such splendor in the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Though this is not quite as brutal, there is an abundance of hideous violence and gross behavior. It is the polar opposite of what your parents are reading now.

I definitely appreciate the boldness of the author’s artistic integrity. The references to obscure Japanese music groups were sometimes difficult to follow, suffering from localization. The translation is wonderful. All 3 books by this author presently in English offer something different. None of them are predictable rehashes of genre tropes. Each one is a unique scream into readers’ echo chambers. Meaning to shake our sensibilities she holds nothing back, and the product is a breathless read with memorable, execrable characters acting abominably in the way you will often find Bret Easton Ellis and his ilk casting their characters into self-manufactured hells of greasy uneasiness. Emerge bleary-eyed from this novel and salivate over the prospect of future translations.