Across their individual stylistic approaches to Suzuki’s prose, bedrock features come through: crispness edging toward a cruel gloss in the dialogue, emotional saturation (or desaturation) as both literal experience and speculative metaphor, references to American films and Jazz music.
Instead of one translator handling the entire collection, the stories are split between six: Daniel Joseph, David Boyd, Sam Bett, Helen O’Horan, Aiko Masubuchi, and Polly Barton.
Passing decades certainly haven’t dulled the the razor’s cut of her punk sensibilities. the themes of fiction still thrum with a resistant, brightly grim tension. Terminal Boredom provides a solid foundation to introduce her work, and the stories extend the canon of twentieth century science fiction. Suzuki is confronting issues still very much in the cultural zeitgeist. Although she has been dead for a quarter century, the stories retain a contemporary quality and relevance. The science fiction serves as set dressing for their humanity. Suzuki focuses on the character’s relationships with each other, the friendship between Emi and the narrator, the narrator and Noashi, a famous celebrity, rather than on the surrounding setting.
This vagueness projects a sense of purposeful exclusion, allowing space for the reader to fill in many missing points while preventing the narrative pace from dragging. like Dick, Suzuki often leaves out concrete details in favor of ambiguity, a sense of disconnection, and a grayness between black and white truths. In this collection, Suzuki’s stories are reminiscent of the unhinged science fiction dystopias of the master of the craft, Philip K. Even though sometimes they are 'out of this world' aliens or living in reimagined societies of the future, these are people struggling in the same ways we struggle today. an intimate exploration of anxiety, pain, and sadness.
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