‘Set My Heart on Fire’: Izumi Suzuki captures the heady cravings of youth

Izumi is a woman on the edge who never wants to stop teetering. In “Set My Heart on Fire,” set in 1970s Yokohama’s underground music scene, the groupie narrator roams from conquest to conquest, and often finds herself equally conquered.

Originally published in 1996, Izumi Suzuki’s autobiographical book is the first novel by the author and actor to appear in English, with fluid translations by Helen O’Horan. The work of the cult writer, who died in 1986, has seen new interest in English after Verso Books published her speculative science fiction story collection “Terminal Boredom” in 2021. Izumi starred in pinku eiga (soft-core adult films) and modeled for photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and photos of her are often used for her book covers, making the author’s bad-girl image inseparable from her work.

Set My Heart on Fire, by Izumi Suzuki. Translated by Helen O’Horan. 192 pages, VERSO BOOKS, Fiction.

While Suzuki’s two previous books published in English are fantastical and lean into sci-fi, “Set My Heart on Fire” is firmly grounded in a grim reality. At the beginning, Izumi is 23 and obsessed with her own youth. She roams aimlessly, doesn’t work much if at all and lives in semi squalor. Most of the action centers on her sexcapades with musicians, including one she steals from her closest female friend, a Chinese rocker expecting his second child and a half-Japanese blues It Boy.

Izumi is hedonistic and unapologetic, excusing any behavior so long as the perpetrator is beautiful (“Beautiful people have beautiful hearts”). She herself is a bombshell Venus whose attributes — big breasts, round hips, a tight waist — are underscored repeatedly through the gaze and beseechings of the men she sleeps with.

To a contemporary reader, Izumi has an old-fashioned femme fatale charm: She’s desperate to be loved, but she loathes almost everyone she ensnares; her prowess lies entirely in being an object of lust; she refers to the “whore inside” herself and swears by “vanity before love.”

And she’s a consummate performer: “For me there’s little distance between loving and hating someone. You’d think I had extensive acting experience,” she says. “My true self and my performed self, when I get them well mixed up, are indistinguishable from each other.”

The plot skips across the years, quick and compulsive, like jump cuts from a multi-year bender. The bulk of the middle follows her relationship with Jun, a stand-in for Suzuki’s real-life husband, avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe, who died of an overdose at age 29. Jun is abusive, controlling and philandering, but the two can’t break free of one another.

“You have so much energy. It’s concentrated and focused, too. Like drilling through a wall of concrete,” he tells Izumi. “And why? Because you’re insane.”

The world of moody, sleazy punks and rockers and reductive pronouncements about the nature of men and women could be tiresome to readers today, but “Set My Heart on Fire” is an electric time capsule. Izumi’s encounters are sexual but almost never actually sexy, and reading the story as told by the woman who really lived it, the experience is one of simmering, insatiable longing. The novel itself seems to be an attempt at freezing time right in the moments of wanting.

In the final chapters of the book, the narrator, now in her 30s, romanticizes her remorseless youth (“A burning desire for tomorrow, all that”) and the golden era of Yokohama as she looks on the sanitized neighborhood. She’s jealous of the 21-year-old woman beside her, thinking, “Seeing people age is the hardest thing.” Readers no longer in the “young” phase of life may wonder if the fictional Izumi ever found a way to age peacefully. Perhaps not; for the real-life Suzuki, who died by suicide at the age of 36, the question is asked and answered.