The crown jewel of the book is ‘You May Dream’, translated by David Boyd.

Over and over again, I was mind-bogglingly thrilled by the fact that these stories featuring video calls and robot vacuum cleaners, reality TV, live streams and screen-addicted people, in which Suzuki treats gender as a progressive 21st-century writer would, must have been written in the mid-80s at the latest. The reason I was so curious about this is that ‘prescient’ is too weak a word to describe the stories in Terminal Boredom: ‘prophetic’ would be more like it. Information about her in English is frustratingly scarce, and most of it seems to stem from a press release about this collection I eventually found this short bio, which gives publication years for some of her work. The original dates for the stories aren’t given. The review copy doesn’t include any biographical details about Izumi Suzuki I don’t usually read introductions (at least not until I’ve finished the book), but this is a case in which I would have appreciated one. The publisher’s website says she was a model and actress in the 1970s, became a prolific writer after the death of her partner, and died by suicide in 1986. I wasn’t able to keep this review short, so here’s the one-sentence version: this is one of the best short story collections I have ever read. And with a kitchen sink in the corner of even her wildest stories, Suzuki reminds us that while society may be limitless, relationships remain impossible

Concerns about society, gender and imperialism dovetail irresistibly with flights of speculative wonder. Suzuki's singular slant on science fiction remains fresh and essential. The fissures in a queer matriarchal utopia are exposed when a boy - a creature usually contained in ghettoised isolation - appears beneath young Yūko's window an extreme government initiative curbing overpopulation prompts a woman to re-evaluate her friendships the last family in a desolate city learns to be human through the awkward appropriation of popular culture passive-aggressive furniture provides unwelcome romantic advice tense interplanetary politics distort Emma's love life Jane's ex-girlfriend reppears, radically altered and insistent on a catch-up Tokyo's teenagers, disaffected and numb from excessive screentime, find distraction in violence. Seven punky and pitch-black stories offer English-language readers an overdue introduction to Izumi Suzuki, a cult figure in Japanese literature.

Terminal boredom suzuki