‘Set My Coronary heart on Fireplace’: Izumi Suzuki captures the heady cravings of youth

Izumi is a girl on the sting who by no means needs to cease teetering. In “Set My Coronary heart on Fireplace,” set in Seventies Yokohama’s underground music scene, the groupie narrator roams from conquest to conquest, and sometimes finds herself equally conquered.

Initially printed in 1996, Izumi Suzuki’s autobiographical ebook is the primary novel by the writer and actor to seem in English, with fluid translations by Helen O’Horan. The work of the cult author, who died in 1986, has seen new curiosity in English after Verso Books printed her speculative science fiction story assortment “Terminal Boredom” in 2021. Izumi starred in pinku eiga (soft-core grownup movies) and modeled for photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and images of her are sometimes used for her ebook covers, making the writer’s bad-girl picture inseparable from her work.

Set My Coronary heart on Fireplace, by Izumi Suzuki. Translated by Helen O’Horan. 192 pages, VERSO BOOKS, Fiction.