Set My Heart on Fire

Hope I'm in for a good time, I thought. Even if it's just for tonight.Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties. Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun.Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance. Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist's love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.

Report

This Tokyo rock novel, first published in Japan in 1983 and here translated by Helen O'Horan, follows a young woman through a world of drugs, music and highly conditional relationships in which the cool kids are emphatically not all right. Suzuki (who died in 1986) is better known as a science fiction writer, for good reason, but Set My Heart on Fire shows her to be a keen observer of the rock 'n' roll milieu. New York Times

Product details

• Authors: Izumi Suzuki
• Assisted by: Helen O'Horan (Translation)
• Publisher: Verso
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 12.11.2024
• EAN: 9781804293300
• ISBN: 978-1-80429-330-0
• No. of pages: 192
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 200 mm x 10 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies; Japan, FICTION / Coming of Age, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Autobiography: general, Fiction in translation, FICTION / World Literature / Japan, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary, FICTION / Biographical & Autofiction, Drugs; Mieko Kawakami; Murakami; Music; Punk; Sex; Tokyo