Hit Parade of Tears

January 2, 2023
With this impressive collection, translators Bett, David Boyd, Helen O’Horan, and Daniel Joseph bring 11 strange, transfixing, and compassionate short stories from Suzuki (1949–1986) to English-speaking audiences. Suzuki has a real sympathy for the alien and the marginalized—especially young girls and women confused or constrained by societal expectations of female sexuality—and tends to end each story with a bizarre yet fascinating twist. Standouts include “Trial Witch,” wherein a housewife uses her newly granted magical powers to teach her abusive husband a lesson, and “Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!” a metafictional forerunner of the cyberpunk genre about a former music groupie discovering a warp in her timeline after Tokyo’s Triangle Building gets filled with salmon roe and eaten like sushi. Readers should be aware of a running thread of fatphobia that does not age well, but the quirky sci-fi concepts and some delightful turns of phrase (a self-centered man is described as “an ad for himself on an infinite loop”) mean these tales largely hold up quite well. SFF fans are sure to be pleased with these slangy, accessible new translations of a master.

March 15, 2023
Suzuki (1949-1986), a pioneer of Japanese science fiction known for her dark and punky stories and essays, is back for English readers with a translated collection of short stories steeped in 1970s-era counterculture. Suzuki's characters are often outsiders, believing themselves alien in some way. Whether these beliefs are delusions or based in reality isn't always the concern. In this book there are characters who suspect they are from a different planet or have lived far longer than other humans. There are characters who are placed and misplaced in other timelines and can't remember their pasts and others who see visions of the dead or right through to other worlds. Many of the stories have a strong dreamlike quality, in particular "My Guy" and "After Everything," in which bizarre incidents eclipse any narrative and all that remains is a fleeting sense of something beautiful and troubling. One of the standouts, and most reminiscent of Suzuki's previous work, is "Memory of Water," a haunting tale about a woman's psychological state and the exhausting toll of misogyny. The story follows the protagonist as she reluctantly, and with much energy expended to "overcome this oppressive inertia," leaves her house. The title story captures the pain and confusion of being alive through the communications--and miscommunications--of a seemingly nonaging protagonist living through repressive regimes. The book is time-stamped with cultural references, like the 1968 SF film Barbarella and bands Jefferson Airplane and The Zombies. Music is woven through the book, as if Suzuki had created an accompanying playlist and is urging readers to listen along. This collection reaches out from the past not as a warning so much as the musings of a writer grasping for hope in a dark world. Though the stories mostly end too abruptly, the tone is set and the mood will linger. These 11 stories surprise with wry humor and stun with the loneliness of living.

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Starred review from April 1, 2023
This follow-up to 2021's Terminal Boredom presents more of writer, actress, and essayist Suzuki's short work. The stories range in tone and structure, from short pieces of only a few, elliptical pages to longer, sustained works that indulge in alienation, campy humor, or both. This collection feels slightly more scattered than the previous volume, perhaps a reflection of Suzuki's wide and varying range. Some of the standout entries reflect Suzuki's work as a cultural critic, such as ""Hey, It's a Love Psychedelic,"" a narrative that plunges into a delirium of music and pop culture as one woman's past and present are repeatedly altered by unseen forces. Other stories explore similar territory to Boredom's stories of existential and psychic alienation, such as ""The Covenant,"" where a young girl may or may not be a refugee alien consciousness projected to Earth, or ""Memory of Water,"" in which the boundaries between the narrators She and Alter-She begin to dissolve after experiencing a new form of immersive psychic film. The continuing translation of Suzuki's work is extremely exciting, as it helps to provide a more thorough picture of a dynamic and experimental artist whose work parallels some of the most important work of the 1970s new wave, cyberpunk, and beyond.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.