James Nicoll Reviews

Izumi Suzuki’s 1983¹ Set My Heart on Fire is a mainstream semiautobiographical novel. First published as Hato ni hi wo tsukete! Dare ga kesuin [Ignite (one’s) heart! Who will extinguish (it)?], the 2024 English translation is by Helen O’Horan.

Twenty-three-year-old model Izumi fills her days and nights with music, sex, and drugs. What better way to spend the early 1970s?

Three days of modeling per month funds Izumi’s debauched life. With her music reporter friend Etusko, Izumi hangs out in Japan’s underground music scene. It’s the perfect hunting ground for bed partners. Musicians are, after all, immoral, decadent, self-centered, and self-destructive. Perfect boyfriend² material for apathetic Izumi.

A reasonable person might expect Izumi to follow convention and die of an overdose at age twenty-seven. Izumi herself is aware her drug habit could very well end badly for her. But that’s not what happens.

Izumi is irresistibly attractive to men (and some women). Her habit is to select some suitably pretty person — Joel, the vapid but extremely attractive mixed-race singer from Green Glass is an excellent example — fall into bed with them, pursue a half-hearted relationship until bored, then move on. Rinse, cycle, repeat.

Saxophone-player Jun proves Izumi’s Kryptonite. Previous lovers eventually went away. Not obsessive, possessive, questionably sane Jun. Jun proposes. Passive Izumi acquiesces.

Maybe marriage can cure self-destructive behavior. Or perhaps it cannot.

~oOo~

Sex and drugs and rock and roll should be more fun than this. 

Sprinkle ​“domestic abuse” warnings to taste.

Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears and Terminal Boredom: Stories were speculative fiction. Set My Heart on Fire is resolutely mainstream, generally outside my remit. Nevertheless, it’s not as if so much Suzuki gets translated that I can be fussy about which of her works I review.

As one might guess from the fact that writer and protagonist share names, this book appears to be based at least in part on Izumi’s own life, including her marriage to jazz musician Kaoru Abe. However, fictional Izumi seems to lack the real Izumi’s creative drive, having neither the acting nor writing careers that the real Izumi had.

In fact, fictional Izumi seems to embody all of Izumi Suzuki’s negative traits, without many of her positive traits. As self-portraits go, it’s even more negative than Shigeru Mizuki’s in Showa. Given that Mizuki presented himself as an uncurious knucklehead whose inability to manage boredom landed him in a front-line combat zone, that’s saying a lot. Mizuki at least admits to having one or two things he’s good at, whereas Izumi’s fictional Izumi seems to lack that.

Fictional Izumi does have some disadvantages, starting with the status of Japanese women in the 1970s and going on to her terrible ideas about how relationships should work. Fictional Izumi seems to have confused romance with oppositional defiant disorder.

Suzuki engages in a narrative tactic I appreciate, which is to assert that things are one way while presenting facts that make it clear that things are in fact some other way entirely. Izuki seems to think her marriage to Jun was nothing remarkable, while her offhanded descriptions of his behavior make it clear that he was a monster.

So! Not the most cheerful book I’ve read in 2025. Actually, pretty depressing, especially if you know how Suzuki’s life played out. On the plus side, it’s a bleak tale skillfully told and it might make other books I read this year more upbeat by comparison.

Set My Heart on Fire is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books). I did not find Heart at Apple Books. Why do I bother with Apple, exactly?

1: The copyright page says 1996, but that appears to be incorrect.

2: And occasionally girlfriend material, although glancingly mentioned, not fully described.