On a distant planet, memory permeates the air and the characters seem to be battling with the weight of something unsaid, each carrying some sort of ‘illness’ that is just out of their capacity to acknowledge. ‘That Old Seaside Club’ evokes Black Mirror’s nostalgic, queer “ San Junipero” episode with an uncanny similarity and tenderness - particularly as it was written around 40 years prior. Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki. That is, until the protagonist sees one – a man – in real life and soon learns why her mother is held by the state as a criminal.

Yet, as this dominance extends over the environment through factories pumping out pollution, the male birthright declines so sharply they become anomalies, leaving the mostly queer young girls to form their ideals about the opposite sex from manga. War found its way even into everyday life, and so were born ‘traffic wars’ and ‘admission wars’’. She drolly recounts the long societal domination of men, ‘They seemed to find their raison d’être in conflicts both great and small. In the opening story, ‘Women and Women’, the unamused teenage narrator begins to question the seeming utopia of queer matriarchal society, in which men are contained in state-sanctioned ghettos – the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy zone – and can be visited on school field trips. Combining fantastical elements of space travel, cryosleep, and mindmerging with well-drawn characters and their everyday annoyances, the reader travels alongside Suzuki’s characters’ unpredictable trajectories that unfold with a looming air of inescapable conclusion. Using the existing boundaries of her particular zeitgeist as a springboard for departure, Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom (translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan) is both prescient and tragic, as the possible is ensared by the probable.Īcross these seven cinematic stories, her wry voice captures the fraught limitations of gendered relations, the hedonism sought by disaffected youth, and the generational fear of another nuclear fallout and environmental concerns. Science fiction asks us to suspend disbelief, to accompany the author on a voyage to an imagined world that hinges on possibility.

The first English-language publication of Izumi Suzuki’s darkly humorous dystopias packs a punky, prescient punch.

Terminal boredom suzuki