Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki

In review and discussion.

This past month, I’ve had the honor of reviewing cult author Izumi Suzuki’s Set My Heart on Fire, a shrewd and passionate account of life in 1970s Japan, and interviewing the translator, Helen O’Horan, for the Asymptote Book Club. Read both below.

Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Helen O’Horan, Verso, November 2024

Strung-out bass, clunky keys, psychedelic vocals. Abundant patterns, colors, and substances. Dancing, libating, popping, fucking. The groovy, knocked-out backdrop to 1960s Japan. In Honmoku, a district in Yokohama known for its American military base, Japanese youth had reveled in the abundance of American-influenced music, rock and roll, and rebellion, fueled by the financial prosperity of the “Golden Sixties” and its reigning youthful, nonconformist spirit. Izumi Suzuki, a prolific science fiction writer in the late 1970s, moved to Tokyo in 1969 with a year remaining to soak in that rhythm, as in the following decade, Japan would face the first hint of its coming economic breakdown as GDP growth slowed significantly during the global oil crisis. The former revelers, strung out and blissed out, were suddenly thrust into a decade of fading glory and no direction.

Izumi Suzuki’s latest work in English, translated by British linguist Helen O’Horan, is a novel titled Set My Heart on Fire—a notable deviation from the original title’s reference to The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Song-inspired titles are a near-constant in Suzuki’s oeuvre, and her first novel in translation is no exception, with each chapter taking its name from a track from the sixties. While the references are upheld throughout much of the translation, O’Horan’s choice to alter the title better reflects the broader, underlying sense of desperation—for a dying age, a lost youth—and self-destruction that runs through the novel.

The It Girl in Her Own Words: Helen O’Horan on Translating Izumi Suzuki

Bella Creel (BC): How did you initially discover Izumi Suzuki’s work, and what drew you to her writing?

Helen O’Horan (HOH): I first worked on a short story for Suzuki’s collection, Terminal Boredom, just before the pandemic. I joined the project relatively late; by then, the reports had been written and the research done, so I want to credit the other translators and the publisher. That’s how I first learned about her work.

After that story, I really got into her writing—the timing was significant too. During the pandemic, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected from my mind and body. My work as a translator wasn’t disrupted much since most of my clients are outside the United Kingdom, and it’s all online, but I started feeling like my mind and body were splitting apart.

That sense of disconnect reminded me of Suzuki’s writing—she often describes her body as something separate from her mind. Her work resonated with me at that moment, though of course, that’s just my interpretation.

BC: That’s really interesting. I love your comment about the disconnect between the body and mind—I felt that too reading Hit Parade of Tears and parts of Terminal Boredom. Her stories have such an uncanny quality that makes you feel detached from everyday life. I think the translations capture that beautifully.

Your previous translations of Suzuki’s work were short science fiction stories—full of weirdness and that sense of separation. But Set My Heart on Fire is a novel and more autobiographical. It still has those elements of disconnect and surrealism, but how was translating the novel different from her short stories?

HOH: The first big difference was the length. With short stories, you can spend a few focused weeks on them, but a novel is different—you have to work on it alongside other projects, so it seeps into your daily life. That felt fitting since this novel is more realist and closer to everyday life. It sort of ate away at me gradually rather than consuming me all at once.

As for the distinction between her science fiction and realist work, I think it’s more of a marketing divide. Even in this novel, she describes people’s skin as green, for example. There’s more overlap than the genres suggest.

That said, Set My Heart on Fire feels unique because it’s her last piece of work and much more autobiographical. Honestly, I don’t think it’s her most natural mode. Suzuki is at her best when she writes with the mantle of fiction, where readers expect something fantastical. She enjoyed artificiality—like musicians who performed in deliberately fake, exaggerated ways or bands that only did covers. Translating this novel, I could sense her struggling a little. She wrote it shortly before her death, and it feels like an attempt to put everything down, to give an account of herself. That’s very different from how she approached writing during the rest of her life. Overall, it was a very particular experience, both to translate and to read.

Three of Suzuki’s works are available from Verso: Terminal Boredom (in translation by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O'Horan), Hit Parade of Tears (in translation by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O'Horan), and now Set My Heart on Fire (in translation by Helen O’Horan). We can look forward to more bold and uncanny stories by Izumi Suzuki to come. ☆