Japanese sci-fi that's more fiction than science

 I bought Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki because I am endlessly fascinated by Japanese fiction and because I watched a video chat about the book and the author.

Suzuki was born in 1949 (the same year as Haruki Murakami) in Shizuoka. She killed herself  at age 36 in 1986. After graduating from high school she worked briefly as a keypunch operator. In 1969 she was a runner-up for the literary magazine Shosetsu Gendai and move to Tokyo where she worked as a bar hostess, nude model, and actor in “pink films”—sort of low-budge soft-core porn. She wrote plays and from 1971 devoted herself to writing. In 1975 she published her first science-fiction short story.

She married Kaoru Abe in 1973 and they had a daughter in 1976. A year later she divorced Abe although they continued to live together. He died in 1978 from an accidental overdose of Bromisoval, a sedative/hypnotic drug. According to Wikipedia, “For a time she managed to support her daughter by publishing stories in sci-fi magazines, but eventually her health deteriorated and she began receiving public assistance. In 1986, she committed suicide by hanging herself at home.”

Given Suzuki’s tumultuous marriage and avant-garde instincts (writes the reviewer who has no idea what he is talking about), it is no surprise that the seven stories in Terminal Boredom tend to be bleak. They are selected from earlier collections and translated by six translators: Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Akio Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan.

In the first, “Women and Women,” men, responsible for war and the world’s other evils—have begun to die off, the survivors exiled to the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupation zone. The narrator is fine with this until a boy—someone who has escaped the zone—passes by her house. They become unlikely and secret friends until one day:

“Suddenly he hugged me, then flipped me over and pinned me down like we were wrestling. At first, I thought he was just messing around. But he wasn’t. Not in the slightest. Hiro wasn’t messing around at all. I spent the rest of that day learning the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life. Learning it with my body.” What she’s learned, however, is an adolescent fantasy.

The stories all have sci-fi aspects, but they tend to be subordinate to the conversations between characters. Two friends seem to be in an ordinary coffee shop when “she took a slow look around the room and pushed the button at the edge of the table. A see-through capsule popped up to cover us. No one could hear us now.” In “Night Picnic” the family picnics on the moon. In “That Old Seaside Club” CHAIR in small caps “sits in the middle of my apartment and talks to me—and only ever to say mean things!”

I am afraid that my patience with talking chairs and human/alien individuals and faster-than-light travel is limited. Nevertheless, I think Terminal Boredom is worth reading if only to be exposed to the attitudes and ideas of a prolific and interesting writer. I also do not regret the two hours I’ve spent (because I’ve watched it twice) with the translators talking about translation in general and Suzuki in particular. You can find it here.