emily's Reviews > Terminal Boredom: Stories

‘There is something wrong with our present society, and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that.’ – Izumi Suzuki. AR

Women and Women 4.5/5
You May Dream 5/5
Night Picnic 4.5/5
The Old Seaside Club 4/5
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes 3.5/5
Forgotten 5/5
Terminal Boredom 4/5

A fantastic, surreal collection of stories dipped in dark/dry humour (or am I just misreading it?). Satire. Satire. Satire. Mental health, gender politics, and an exploration of Japanese ‘counterculture’. And existential dread in the air. They are all set in a post-apocalyptic world, some with ‘aliens’, and others without. I really enjoyed the narrative, the characters, and the strange world(s) so brilliantly put together by Izumi Suzuki. It’s a shame she left this one so quickly. Who can blame her though?

“Once you’re above a certain age, if you decide you want kids, you go to the hospital. Even if you’re unmarried, it’s fine as long as you can raise them. They probably inject you with some medicine or something.
‘You’re not going to look for a job?’
‘I’m not cut out for it,’ Rei replied shamelessly. ‘Even if this doesn’t work out, I’ll just find an arranged marriage.’ Rei has a pretty face and pale skin, giving her good reason to be confident of finding someone to support her. Long ago, it was normal for the men to work while the women took care of the household chores, and that arrangement hasn’t really changed – all that’s new is that it’s the more masculine woman who goes to work, while the more feminine partner takes care of the sundry other tasks at home.” – ‘Women and Women’

I found ‘Women and Women’ treading close to the story patterns/themes/feminist writings of Margaret Atwood. It’s basically a dystopian world without men. Men are locked up in special institutions away from women because apparently they’ve caused too much harm and damage their world (in the novel). At the start I found the whole ‘masculine woman’ concept a little unsettling – in terms of how they’re shoved into the family dynamics as a replacement for men (but only because I think that in a queer/lesbian relationship, there is no ‘standard’/’default’ setting/dynamic; like how maddening it is when someone looks at a queer relationship and then say something madly ignorant like ‘so who’s the man/woman in the relationship?’). However, Suzuki cleverly makes a few twists later in the story and totally flip the readers’ expectation – and as a result, making this a very thought-provoking, and obviously fantastic piece of writing. The grandmother of the protagonist (in this particular short story) weeding off thoughts of romantic ideas in the family and calling it all an ‘adolescent fantasy’ is a spectacular way to end the story; beautifully haunting.

“While I fielded her questions, I had to ask myself: What was it about her that was turning me into a man? Got to be all that femininity. She’s acting like such a woman (as society defines the role, anyway) that I have to play the man just to keep the balance. What if I ran into a boy? Could I even play the part of a woman?
Syzygy? Androgyny? I’m no man and I’m no woman. Who needs gender anyway? I just want to get out of this place, to be on my own.
I’ve got no desire to see the collapse of humankind or the end of the world. I just want everyone to enjoy their lives. That’s why I came here — to a different time stream, a different planet, a different universe.” – ‘You May Dream’

‘You May Dream’ and ‘Forgotten’ are stories in this collection that I like best. ‘You May Dream’ opens with a friendship between two young women – and one of them is about to be ‘put to sleep’ (not a euphemism for death, I don’t think) temporarily because the world is too populated to handle so many ‘waking’ humans all at once. However, she wants her consciousness to be linked with her waking friend (the protagonist) so she can appear and live in her friend’s dreams. Their relationship reminds me of the one Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, except this one’s mad surreal, and deals with gender politics and the class system in society with a more surreal but brutal approach, with a slightly bigger serving of existential dread. I thought the ending was a bit sudden and unimpressive; might work much better as a longer piece of writing (novella).

“There was no way anyone could live in a world like this with a fully functioning mind. You only found yourself feeling angry from morning until night. If she ended up joining some kind of political movement as a result, her mother and father would be upset. Using drugs, she told herself, was her way of being a good daughter.” – ‘Forgotten’

“I’m not particularly eclectic in my tastes, and I’m not interested in anything that feels too much like hard work. The Kamiroi aesthetic doesn’t really do it for me, although I hear that you Terrans really go for it. And Balians are way too irrational.” – ‘Forgotten’

While I’d complained about how in ‘You May Dream’, Suzuki ends the story with a weak fizzle, I almost didn’t have time to catch my breath in the last few pages of ‘Forgotten’. On the surface, it’s an interplanetary/intergalactic, interracial love story – green alien men and all. But what lies underneath it all is a hot and political mess – internal/mental and external/physical abuse. The translation in this one didn’t feel very ‘Japanese’ to me in terms of language and esp. tone; I don’t know if Suzuki wrote it this way, or if it was totally washed away in translation. But it didn’t bother me too much because the characters, narrative, and the story/plot were absolutely stunning; I was rendered speechless at the end of it – like a fish out of the sea, gasping for dear life.

“I will avoid a casual approach to life at any cost.’ But Dad immediately qualified himself, to smooth things over. ‘I simply don’t want us to wind up the butt of the joke. When people behave shamefully, their children follow suit. Children only notice when their parents make mistakes. One false move, and pretty soon they’re … You know, whatever you call it.” – ‘The Night Picnic’

“She must be thirty-six years old, in this world. Naoshi must be out of the facility too, then. He took off from that planet three days earlier. No need to look in a mirror. I already know the score: I’m a dejected housewife, in my thirties – impatient and frustrated, yet too limp and lethargic to do anything about it. And I live in one of those hideous, uniform, low-rent apartments I can see out the window.” – ‘The Old Seaside Club’

I’ll finish up the rest by comparing them to popular films. ‘The Night Picnic’ is basically ‘The Others’ (film) by Alejandro Amenábar – except for the jarringly different settings/worlds, and a much quicker pace. And instead of ghosts, you have ‘aliens’. I love the post-apocalyptic, stagnant, urban backdrop of this one; and of how Nature slowly reclaims the land. This one makes me think of ‘anime’ (dark, psychological thrillers) – in particular, 新世界より Shinsekai Yori based on a manga with the same name by Yusuke Kishi. Again, the characterisation in this one is fucking spectacular – exploring gender and gender roles in strange, extra-terrestrial ways. ‘The Old Seaside Club’ is a bit like ‘The Matrix’ by the Wachowskis, but with a semi-romantic twist. No guns/pills, but for me, the commonplace/ordinary ‘human’ issues in the story makes it even more unsettling – especially with the concepts of age and time (and of how – humans can’t escape our mortalities even if we can manipulate/mess with time and space).

“After getting back from the arcade, I didn’t feel like going anywhere. I watched the 3-D television with the sound off. My favourite thing is to be by myself. I can’t take drugs, I don’t smoke, and I can barely drink, but I still know how to pass the time. These days, I only work one day a week, if that. Right now, I do illustrations for a living, but I’ve had around twenty different jobs. Physical labour is better. I don’t have to think about things. When I begin thinking, I start to dislike myself.” – ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’

‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ treads on very similar themes, but without the concept of separating/transferring one’s ‘consciousness’ into a different ‘space’. It also explores how the world/society views/deals with people with mental health issues – and of how it’s all a massive heap of a bad joke since being completely ‘sane’ is just an illusion/Utopian ideology. This concept is further satirised in the last story of the collection – which is basically a less American, and much more condensed sci-fi version of ‘The American Psycho’ (more of the film, than the actual novel it was based on) by Mary Harron.

“Older folks are amazing. They’ve got so much energy, so much stamina. They go to work every day, and somehow they still find it in them to have love affairs. My mum had a steady stream of them until recently.” – Terminal Boredom

“Things like respect and awe are long since gone. Everyone lives in a happy-go-lucky depression – they only take life half-seriously, you might say.” – Terminal Boredom

Overall, I enjoyed the book tremendously. I could’ve finished it all in one go without a problem, but I intentionally took my time with it because I wanted to savour every page of it. Izumi Suzuki, what a legend. In the strangest way possible, I miss her even though I’ve never met her. This must be the transcending power of great writing/literature. Oh, dear.

“'Do you have any idea how hopelessly in love with him I was?’ What the hell am I supposed to say to that? ” – ‘Terminal Boredom’