The stories collected in Terminal Boredom are fundamentally science fiction, and a few may make more comfortable reading for long-standing sci-fi fans. Terminal Boredom: Stories, Izumi Suzuki, Polly Barton (trans), Sam Bett (trans), David Boyd (trans), Daniel Joseph (trans) (Verso, April 2021) Suzuki’s feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago. Another reflects, “I am no man and I’m no woman. One once-male character has become a girl based on her parents’ expectations. People change gender in each other’s dreams.
Gender is never comfortable or stable in Suzuki’s stories. Men once ruled society “through violence and cunning,” but are now relegated to an exclusion zone where their only purpose is to help women conceive. “Women and Women” is the most extreme example. Daniel Joseph, who translated the stories “Terminal Boredom” and “Women on Women”, recently described her writing as a sci-fi version of “kitchen-sink realism, told from the perspective of the one stuck doing the dishes.” Men loom large in many of Suzuki’s stories as a potential threat.
Suzuki was also remarkably forward-thinking on feminism and gender. Japan has one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and it faces a looming demographic crisis. In 1980, the median age in Japan was 32 today, it is 48. Like much of Suzuki’s fiction, “Terminal Boredom” is even more striking and believable in 2020 than it was in 1980. They don’t want to have children, preferring to “slip quietly into oblivion” all by themselves. Some simply forget to eat and starve to death. Boredom is the central feature of their lives. (The world of Yoko Tawada’s US National Book Award-winning novella The Emissary bears a strong resemblance.) “Old folks” have so much energy and stamina they can “go to work every day, and somehow still find it in them to have love affairs.” Listless young people can’t find work at all. The title story is about a future controlled by energetic elderly people. Yet Suzuki’s stories are predicated on a Japan-on a world-in decline. People all over the world were learning the Japanese language. English-language movies like Alien predicted the eventual triumph of Japanese businesses. Hers was the Japan of the Economic Miracle, a Japan with the second-fastest GDP growth in the world. Suzuki was active as a writer in the late 70s and early 80s, long before the “Lost Decade” and years of economic stagnation in Japan.
But unlike, say, Mieko Kawakami or Sayaka Murata, author Izumi Suzuki died more than three decades ago. Narrators raise questions about identity and agency. The characters criticize, challenge, or defy social conventions. The stories collected in Terminal Boredom take up themes that might feel familiar to readers of contemporary Japanese fiction.
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