Set My Heart on Fire is a raw and unrelenting coming-of-age story published in English for the first time, 38 years after the death of its author, Japanese writer and actress Izumi Suzuki. Now perhaps best known for her science fiction short stories, Suzuki blazes new emotional territory in this semi-autobiographical, instant cult classic.
Viscerally translated by Helen O'Horan, Set My Heart on Fire follows its narrator, also named Izumi, through Tokyo's 1970s underground psychedelic-rock scene. As Izumi navigates the fractured landscape of music, drugs, and men, she forms more memorable relationships with her friend Etsuko, as well as with the disarmingly quiet and sincere musician Joel. Yet as Izumi sinks deeper into the hallucinatory intensity of her sexual liaisons, she finds herself drifting away from the people she most loved and toward a life poised more precariously on the edge.
The episodes throughout Izumi's life are rendered as unsparingly as they are tenderly in Suzuki's hands. Izumi's journey proves to be less the corruption of an innocent girl than the assured decision making of a woman eager to learn who she might really be through transgression. But as Izumi learns more about herself with each affair, she also compiles more data on how to read men--their insecurities, their obsessions, the performances they, too, put on.
Yet perhaps it is that very confidence of having it all figured out that proves to be both Izumi's and the people in her orbit's weakness. Even the most jaded in Set My Heart on Fire reverberate with more profound resonance than any of the music that weaves its way into their lives. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor