Blair's Reviews > Terminal Boredom: Stories

I was stunned by this book. I wasn’t able to keep this review short, so here’s the one-sentence version: this is one of the best short story collections I have ever read.

The review copy doesn’t include any biographical details about Izumi Suzuki; I don’t usually read introductions (at least not until I’ve finished the book), but this is a case in which I would have appreciated one. The publisher’s website says she was a model and actress in the 1970s, became a prolific writer after the death of her partner, and died by suicide in 1986. The original dates for the stories aren’t given. Information about her in English is frustratingly scarce, and most of it seems to stem from a press release about this collection; I eventually found this short bio, which gives publication years for some of her work.

The reason I was so curious about this is that ‘prescient’ is too weak a word to describe the stories in Terminal Boredom: ‘prophetic’ would be more like it. Over and over again, I was mind-bogglingly thrilled by the fact that these stories featuring video calls and robot vacuum cleaners, reality TV, live streams and screen-addicted people, in which Suzuki treats gender as a progressive 21st-century writer would, must have been written in the mid-80s at the latest.

The crown jewel of the book is ‘You May Dream’, translated by David Boyd. In it, a dispassionate young woman meets her more emotional friend, whom she regards with disgust. The two have differing opinions of the government’s latest population-reducing scheme, in which citizens are selected at random to enter cryosleep, after which they’ll only be able to live on by transferring their consciousness to another person’s dreams. It’s a story about grappling with loneliness and nihilism and detachment, with being the sort of person who will say I’m a hardcore people-pleaser, even in my dreams on one page and I’ve always enjoyed making fun of other people, cornering them on the next.

Reading this story, I began to understand Suzuki’s grasp on her characters’ voices – the voices being the other remarkable thing about these stories. Suzuki has this ability to pin down a person’s worldview in just a few lines. The things they say feel so accurate somehow, as well as so modern, that it’s often unnerving.

Like most people these days, I don’t overthink things. I’ll go along with whatever. No firm beliefs, no hang-ups. Just a lack of self-confidence tangled up in fatalistic resignation. Whatever the situation, nothing ever reaches me on an emotional level. Nothing’s important. Because I won’t let it be. I operate on mood alone. No regrets, no looking back.

I know exactly who the narrator of ‘You May Dream’ is. If she was young now she’d describe herself as blackpilled in her Twitter bio and make memes that seem vaguely fascist, and she’d be delighted that nobody could figure out whether or not she was kidding, due to her horror of sincerity, which she’d believe to be the highest form of cringe. I mean, how 2021 is a line like I devote myself to the acme of emptiness... the sadistic act of self-creation? I’m obsessed with this story. It’s incredible. It’s going straight on my list of favourite short stories of all time.

The other standout is ‘Terminal Boredom’, translated by Daniel Joseph. Set in a world of mass unemployment and screen addiction, it finds a young man and woman wearily going through the motions of some kind of relationship, the real world seeming less real to them than what they see on TV. They’re indifferent to violence, hide their emotions beneath a cool veneer of disinterest, and find human interaction exhausting. Again, they feel like they could have been written yesterday.

I couldn’t tell whether I was genuinely pissed off or not. The performance had just become a part of my personality. If nothing else, I can be pretty sure I’m not happy, I thought vacantly.

Without a doubt, this is the most uncannily clairvoyant of all the stories in Terminal Boredom, with its celebrities as politicians, reality TV shows, a character who routinely films his daily life, live recordings of suicides and killings... It also gives us the clearest articulation of the mood of Suzuki’s fiction, when the narrator states that everyone lives in a happy-go-lucky-depression – they only take life half-seriously. That attitude is typical of the people we meet throughout the book. That serious half is one of profound sadness and exhausted apathy, but the detachment it fosters allows Suzuki’s characters a kind of deadened joy.

‘Women and Women’, also translated by Daniel Joseph, is a barnstorming opener which I loved: a tongue-in-cheek story about a female-dominated society in which men are relegated to the ‘Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone’. But one girl, 18-year-old Yūko, is beginning to question the order of things, especially after she actually sees a boy. It’s so funny and irreverent, but spiked with thought-provoking details, and the characters have startling depth.

Several stories take place in alien worlds. In ‘Night Picnic’, translated by Sam Bett, a family on a far-off planet try their hardest to act normal, attempting to play out traditional roles: Mom and Dad, Junior and Sis. They’re the last remaining humans... or are they? ‘Forgotten’, translated by Polly Barton, is a haunting love story about the relationship between Emma, a human, and Sol, an alien. It is the most plot-driven story in the book, culminating in interplanetary war, yet its key strength is how it shows us the inherent incompatibility of these two people, and the pain that causes.

Addiction is a recurring theme: in ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, translated by Aiko Masubuchi, a woman is hooked on drugs that make her age rapidly. ‘That Old Seaside Club’, translated by Helen O’Horan, presents a more offbeat take, following two young women who appear to be having the time of their lives in a beautiful seaside resort... though their memories of the past are oddly blurry. Emma in ‘Forgotten’ also sustains herself through drugs and drink, and of course, the characters in ‘Terminal Boredom’ are numbed by their screen addiction. Always, it is not necessarily the stories that matter, but the way Suzuki tells them. She will make you laugh out loud, then punch you in the gut with an observation so acute, so seemingly personal, that it hurts.

I don’t think I’ve read a collection like this before: stories originally written by the same author, but translated by a variety of translators. I was worried the latter would dilute the authorial voice, would be distracting – but as I discovered, there’s little chance of that. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it’s Anna Kavan’s short stories spliced with Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, but really, Suzuki’s vision stands alone. ‘You May Dream’ is an instant classic, ‘Terminal Boredom’ and ‘Women and Women’ are also outstanding, and the entire collection represents a striking body of work I’m thrilled to have been able to discover.

I received an advance review copy of Terminal Boredom from the publisher through Edelweiss.

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