Today I’m joined again by Rachel S. Cordasco, the creator of the indispensable website and resource Speculative Fiction in Translation, for the sixth installment of our series exploring non-English language SF worlds. Last time we covered Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s ruminative “Wanderers and Travellers” in International Science Fiction, ed. Frederik Pohl (November 1967).

Please note that Rachel and I are interested in learning about a large range of authors and works vs. only tracking down the best. That means we’ll encounter some stinkers. Thankfully, not this time! We got a powerful one.

Unfortunately, Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021) does not exist online. A large range of her SF stories were translated and published in two volumes by Verso books with various translators. You can acquire Terminal Boredom (2021) and Hit Parade of Tears (2023) at relatively inexpensive prices online. Despite my substantial qualms with the editions (see my review below), I recommend acquiring them.

“Terminal Boredom” (1984) does double duty as the 35th installment of my review series on media landscapes of the future.

Previously:  George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966).

Up Next: TBD

Enjoy!

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Rachel S. Cordasco’s Review

In an article on the “iconoclast” Japanese sf writer Izumi Suzuki, Andrew Ridker distills her stories down to three words: “Ambivalence, disappointment, resignation: Suzuki’s stories speak so eloquently to our burnt-out moment that it’s easy to forget the importance of her cultural context” (LitHub, 5/7/21). We are indeed burnt out, more burnt out even than when Ridker was writing just four years ago. It’s now 2025 and time to face the fact that Facebook and YouTube have been around for over twenty years. The iPhone has been around for nearly that long, and for an entire year, the world was turned upside down during a pandemic, during which time we were even more closely connected to our devices. We’re burnt out by phones, by the rapidly-developing world of AI, by the streaming services that offer us so many choices that it’s nearly impossible to pick something to watch.

It’s almost as if Suzuki foresaw this moment, for her story “Terminal Boredom” is about this addiction to technology, though since her piece was written in the 1980s, it’s television—not the smartphone—that has snared everyone. The protagonist/narrator, a nameless young woman (everyone is nameless in this story) leads a dreary life, with very few job prospects and only television to keep her company. In fact, everyone is very connected to their tvs—so connected, that they’ve started having devices wired into their brains to make the watching experience more immersive. As the narrator’s mother explains, “When the monitor is turned on, it begins to stimulate the brain. The subject no longer has to flip the switch each time; instead, a weak electrical current is transmitted automatically at appropriate intervals” (204).

Despite the ubiquity of tv, real conversations do happen. Three of these conversations make up the bulk of “Terminal Boredom”–two are with the narrator’s sometime “boyfriend,” while the other is the aforementioned talk with her mother. Only referred to as “HE” and “HIM,” the boyfriend talks to the narrator about another girlfriend he has who actually wants to have a baby the “old fashioned way.” The narrator marvels at this and both think about how the people of their parents’ generation seem to have so much energy and drive, while their generation has none of that—the tv has taken over everything. Now, with these devices connected to their brains, people can feel as if they are participating in the story they’re watching, which is more interesting than their boring, real lives.

During this conversation, the two witness a man beat a woman to death on the street. Capturing it on film, the boyfriend later tells the narrator that he finds it thrilling and plays it over and over again in his room. As he explains “I end up putting a frame around everything I see…It makes it seem fresh, helps me relax as a viewer” (200). This eruption of violence into a tv-addicted, tightly-constrained society, where one isn’t allowed to linger in a public place for more than twenty minutes, is what makes this story so unnerving. The narrator finds herself thinking about her parents’ divorce and her father’s remarriage, only to then find out from that second wife that her father committed suicide. At the end of the story, her boyfriend asks her to help him kill his pregnant girlfriend because he doesn’t want the responsibility—he just wants to “slip quietly into oblivion, all by myself.” He tries to convince the narrator with “[t]hink of it as a TV show. Pretend you’re an actor” (216). Only violence ultimately gets a reaction out of the narrator, since she winds up crying for the first time in her life.

The constant stimulation from the TV has wound up dulling the narrator’s mind (as it has everyone else’s), such that the tendency toward a sedentary lifestyle has made them all weak and tired. And yet, the fact that the narrator has extended conversations with the two main people in her life (despite her brief, dull answers), offers a spark of hope—that she, as someone who hasn’t yet adopted the brain device, might still be able to think for herself and do something—anything—that might make life have meaning again. One gets the sense that what has happened to the larger society wasn’t an accident—the brief glimpses of an oppressive police state suggest that a passive society is an easily-patrolled one. Breaking out of her boredom would require the narrator to rebel against more than just her tendency to sit and watch tv.

Suzuki’s story is part of a larger collection that offers us a window into unusual worlds. Her work fits into the larger, complex, and wonderfully varied universe of Japanese science fiction, which blossomed after World War II, energized by the American sf that flooded it during the US occupation. Some of the best translated science/speculative fiction to come to American readers over the past 60 years, in my opinion, has been Japanese, including that by Yoshiki Tanaka, Yoko Ogawa, Mariko Ohara, Hoshi Shinichi, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Kobo Abe, Koji Suzuki, Taiyo Fujii, and so many more. Here one can find everything from space opera and body horror to har science fiction and surrealism. For Anglophone readers, Izumi Suzuki can take her place alongside these writers, with two collections now out in English.

A work of simmering horror and technological dystopia, “Terminal Boredom” will make you want to read more Izumi Suzuki and explore her grim, dark worlds.

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Joachim Boaz’s Review

4.5/5 (Very Good)

A Preliminary Note about the Verso edition that I wish I didn’t have to make: It’s a shame that the editors of Terminal Boredom (2021) did not commission an introduction about Izumi Suzuki and her place in the larger Japanese literary/SF world or even include the original Japanese publication dates for the seven stories included. I identified the date for “Terminal Boredom” (1984) and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (1979) from a Japanese-language website and “Women and Women” (1977, rev. 1978) and “Night Picnic” (1981) from SF Encyclopedia. It’s embarrassing/lazy that this information isn’t included in the edition. If you know of the rest of the publication dates for “You May Dream,” “That Old Seaside Club,” and “Forgotten” in the collection let me know. As the organization appears to be chronological, I assume they were published between 1977-1984.

I imagine you’ve heard of the Japanese hikikomori, reclusive individuals withdrawn from social life, seeking “extreme degrees of isolation and confinement” often due to the pressures of modern Japanese society. Izumi Suzuki, more than a decade before psychiatrist Tamaki Saitō researched and popularized the term, imagines a similar phenomenon facilitated by new patterns of media consumption on an epic, and destructive, scale. There are a lot of angles to approach “Terminal Boredom” (1984), and its place within Suzuki’s work (both fiction and film). I imagine someone far more immersed in Japanese society and culture could tackle her take on gender and society in a more adept manner than myself! With that in mind, I will, as always, engage with an element that particular spoke to me: Sukuzi’s rendering of the media landscape of the future.

First a few words about the basic plot. A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions with “HE,” her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room (“or something”) in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him (193). She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the “aboveground” (191). Both youth find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

One of the recurrent patterns illustrating societal change Suzuki deploys is the TV frame (“ultravision”) as the new way of engagement with the world. Elections, if you can call them that, seem to be conducted via TV celebrities–people vote for a celebrity who then somehow chooses from a slate of candidates (195). Restaurants brag about their TV programs instead of their food. She confesses “it’s hard to relax without something to look at” (193). HE mixes up the real and the unreal. In one instance he watches a woman being beaten: he poses, in front of the bloody woman, as if an actor in a scene from a TV show (199). He purchases an illegal copy of the beating, recorded by an observer, to relive the experience. And, as the horrifying finality of the tale sets in the appearance of a futuristic tech to connect with a program, ultravision becomes the only way of seeing and feeling.

It’s punchy yet quiet. And like a Michael Haneke film, I found it possessed an unnerving ability to get under the skin.¹ Suzuki adeptly renders the conversation, mentalities, and actions of the disaffected and deeply depressed: “Come on, how often do you think I can do something like that? It’s exhausting” (192) (a conversation about sex).

Highly recommended.

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Notes

1. I’m thinking Haneke’s The Lost Continent (1989) and Benny’s Video (1992). Both rank amongst my most disquieting filmic experiences. The latter of the two has some thematic relevancy to Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984).. ↩︎

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