In This Tokyo Rock Novel, the Cool Kids Are Not All Right

SET MY HEART ON FIRE, by Izumi Suzuki. Translated by Helen O’Horan.

One thing young people and the despondent have in common is myopia. An existential nearsightedness — as persistent as it is understandable — is comorbid with both conditions. The narrator of Izumi Suzuki’s novel “Set My Heart on Fire,” first published in Japan in 1983, is doubly impaired, being both young and miserable. To see the world through her eyes is to behold a very limited view indeed.

Suzuki, who died in 1986, is better known for her excellent and nervy science fiction, which the publisher Verso recently brought out in two translated story collections, “Terminal Boredom” and “Hit Parade of Tears.” “Set My Heart on Fire” is the author’s first novel to be made available in English.

The narrator of “Set My Heart on Fire” has some things in common with the author. These include her sexual magnetism, her doomed marriage to a free-jazz saxophonist, her vocation and her name. (I’ll refer to the narrator as Izumi, for clarity’s sake.) Izumi is in her early 20s in 1970s Tokyo when the story begins, subsisting on a delicious diet of cigarettes and ice cream. Her hair is cut short and tinted green. She wears an obsidian armor of cynicism and travels wearily — so wearily! — along a winding road of highly conditional relationships. The categories of “friend” and “lover” and “enemy” blend together and break apart for no good reason, and not much fun is had.

Suzuki’s writing is glamorous, knowing and effortless, which is to say: cool. Helen O’Horan deserves praise for the delicate art of transferring coolness from one language to another. But one wishes the underlying material evinced a little more effort. The characters are hazily sketched and the dialogue addled. Suzuki jolts the reader in and out of scenes so abruptly that we never quite know what is happening or how much time has passed between vignettes or why we’re talking to some guy named Sleeve Man.

Drugs play a role, tone-wise. Izumi relies on little boxes of barbiturates that she buys semi-legally from a pharmacy that sells anything to anyone, and she prefers the “cool, impersonal inebriation” of sedative pills to alcohol’s clingy and disinhibiting high. The barbiturates offer not recreation, not even close, but a reprieve from what a therapist might call “negative self-talk”: Izumi’s relentless demeaning of her body, character and mind, often in the form of conflating the three.