Angela Carter

Izumi Suzuki was part of what sounds like Japan’s post-60s New Wave of Science Fiction, in which (as in the UK at the same time) the country’s authors made a conscious attempt to move away from the commercial American style. Hers in particular became known as the “SF of manners”, though I’ve a feeling that phrase loses a lot through translation.

Born in 1949 (making her a contemporary of Haruki Murakami, whose world of jazz cafés and disaffected twenty-somethings she shares), she moved to Tokyo after winning recognition for some of her early writing, and there became a stage and film actor, as well as posing for the art-and-bondage photographer Araki. (That’s her, by him, on the cover of Terminal Boredom.) She was apparently introduced to SF in 1970, and began publishing it starting with “Trial Witch” in S-F Magazine in 1975. Her writing career seems to have gone into overdrive after the death of her ex-husband, the experimental jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, with whom she had a daughter. (A 1992 novel and 1995 film, Endless Waltz, depicted a fictionalised version of the couple’s stormy relationship.) Her health declined, though, and she eventually took her own life in 1986.

Terminal Boredom, published this year by Verso Books, is her first English-language collection, with seven stories by almost as many translators (Daniel Joseph, David Boyd, Sam Bett, Helen O’Horan, Aiko Masubuchi, and Polly Barton). There’s no indication of when the Japanese originals first appeared, which is a pity, as I like to at least guess at a writer’s development from knowing which are the earlier stories, but perhaps seven stories is too small a selection for that, anyway.

The opening story, “Women and Women”, is set in a future where “Women have been left carefully husbanding the scant resources of a planet stripped bare by men.” The few remaining males — essential for purposes of reproduction — are housed in an area known as the GETO, the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone. Suzuki gets round the traditional SF exposition problem by having her narrator, a teenager in this mostly-manless world, share the sort of wildly speculative myths about adulthood teenagers in any age do. To her, “Men are an offshoot of humanity… but they’re a deviant strain. They’re freaks…”

“Which is exactly why the males have to be kept in the GETO. If they were allowed to roam free, the radiation or whatever it is they emit would make all the women around them pregnant.”

But when she sees what she just knows to be an actual boy, of her own age, passing her home one night, she’s fascinated, and starts leaving messages for him to find.

Male-female relations — always of a distinctly ambivalent kind, making me think of a less intense version of that from Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains — form the core of the book’s preoccupations, but it soon becomes clear the emotional disconnection that characterises these relationships extends to those between women, too. For instance, in “You May Dream”, the narrator too-casually agrees to the request of a friend, whom she spends most of the time feeling vaguely irritated by, to enter her dreams. This is a future where over-population has resulted in lottery-chosen people being suspended in cryosleep until enough spaceships can be built to take them off-world. Sleepers can bond with one chosen person and take up residence in their dreams. The narrator thinks of her friend as her opposite, even her Jungian shadow, which might make her sound like ideal dream material, but it turns out they’re totally incompatible: “She infused a syrupy wetness into my world.” The narrator soon finds herself reluctant to sleep, because of the burden of her friend’s too-different personality.

Perhaps the best story for capturing Suzuki’s tone is the last one, “Terminal Boredom”, set in a future where mass unemployment has resulted in a habitually bored young populace too unmotivated to remember to even feed themselves regularly. “Everyone,” the narrator says, “lives in a happy-go-lucky depression”, more (but only slightly more) engaged in what they see on TV than in reality:

“Ever since I’ve been old enough to really understand the world (these past two years or so), I’ve never once cried at a scene in real life. Whenever something serious happens, I just convince myself it’s no big deal… I’ve been fooling myself this way for long enough that it’s become a habit, and now nothing affects me.”

When a woman is murdered right next to her and the boyfriend she mostly can’t be bothered to meet, they can’t quite grasp what has happened, until they see it again, on camera. It starts to feel like the sort of world J G Ballard was always predicting — a future of boredom through enforced leisure relieved by explosions of violence — only, it doesn’t have the levels of wealth he assumed would go with it.

Suzuki’s is a world that seems particularly post-counter-cultural. The book flap describes her stories as “punky and pitch-black”, but the punkiness is most definitely of the “pretty vacant” rather than pogo-dancing variety. Characters don’t have friends so much as people they habitually hang out with, and get vaguely irritated by, though not enough to make them seek out other people:

“What are your relationships usually like?”
“Totally throwaway. I anticipate the break-up and hint towards it to prepare for a smooth exit.”

Some of Suzuki’s characters (if not all of them, at some level) are just as dissociated from themselves. In “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, one of the narrators is a woman prematurely aged by a drug she overused, who approaches the still-young man she once had a relationship with, only to find he doesn’t recognise her, or at most thinks she might be his ex-girlfriend’s mother. In “That Old Seaside Club”, the narrator says she’s 19, but is haunted by a failed adult life she surely has not yet lived. “Night Picnic” is about a family who think of themselves as the last surviving human beings on a distant, non-Earth planet, desperately trying to cling to supposedly authentic human ways my mimicking what they see in old movies and read in old books. (As all the cultural references in this story were American, I wondered if this might have been a satire on US culture taking over Japan’s.) In “Forgotten”, the key difference the narrator’s alien boyfriend notes between humans and his own kind is that humans forget while Meelians don’t, which is why “we haven’t had a war on my planet for two millennia”. “Whose life is this? It’s completely empty,” says one narrator, of her own life, and it’s a quote that could fit any of her stories.

I’d like to read some more stories by Suzuki, though perhaps I wouldn’t read them back-to-back, as that malaise of disaffection can be hard to read too much of. A biographical introduction would be nice, too.

(Another story, “The Walker”, translated by Daniel Joseph, is available at Granta, though it’s quite different in feel from all the stories in Terminal Boredom.)

A few Mewsings ago, I reviewed H M Hoover’s Morrow books, in the first of which a pair of children living in a semi-barbarous, post-apocalyptic society escape to the more technologically advanced society of Morrow. In Angela Carter’s (not YA) Heroes and Villains (1969), the opposite happens. Carter’s heroine Marianne (a young woman rather than a child) leaves her home community, a fenced-in remnant of the pre-“blast” civilisation dwelling in the buildings that survived this particular future’s apocalypse — mostly farmers and soldiers with the added “intellectual luxury of a few Professors who corresponded by the trading convoys” — for the wastelands, in the company of a barbarian man, Jewel. Whereas Hoover’s Tia and Rabbit leave because of their telepathic abilities and outsider status, Marianne goes because she’s bored with the possibilities offered to her by her society. She’s always been drawn to the barbarians — by their freedom, their vivacity, their bright colours. In Carter’s post-apocalyptic future, it’s the technological society that’s the most repressive (the soldiers are “developing an autonomous power of their own”, and look set to take over once the last few Professors die out). The barbarians can afford to be more free — in part because they live by raiding the farmers every so often — but are nevertheless beset by disease, physical ailments, and, crucially for Marianne, superstition. Hoover’s Tia left “the Base” because they thought she was a witch; arriving at Jewel’s people’s latest home, Marianne finds herself believed to be a witch, too, and doesn’t even have Tia’s witchy telepathic abilities to make up for it.

Carter, though, is less interested in the differences between the two types of communities, as to the dichotomy Marianne is caught by throughout the book, two poles she can’t escape because she carries them within herself, and often finds difficult to tell apart: desire and need.

Jewel takes Marianne to his people, currently living in a large, semi-ruined house beyond the swamps and forests that surround her former home. There, she meets Mrs Green, the tribe’s matriarch, herself an escapee from the world of the Professors. Mrs Green is motherly, and treats everyone as though they were just big children, which, in a sense, they are. But these barbarians also have a dark father-figure in the shape of Doctor Donnelly, a former Professor who, “bored” and “ambitious”, went out into the world and, Kurtz-like, turned himself into a shaman and holy man for this tribe, frightening, guiding, and controlling them with his fits, his visions, and his stuffed snake. He feels like a character that’s appeared in the other Carter novels I’ve read (though quite some time ago), the puppeteer/shop-owner of The Magic Toyshop and the titular doctor from The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann. Unpredictable, entirely self-serving, helping Marianne one moment, plotting to poison her the next, Donnelly is undoubtedly the book’s liveliest character, also its most dangerous. He instructs and warns Marianne through a series of slogans daubed above his door, most of which are nonsense, but one of which is:

“OUR NEEDS BEAR NO RELATION TO OUR DESIRES”

Marianne is obviously drawn to Jewel, but not quite enough to want to stay with him. When she attempts to escape (after Jewel’s brothers threaten to rape her) Jewel tracks her down and rapes her himself. She’s then brought back to the house and told she’s going to marry Jewel, even though his people are all convinced Marianne is a witch and ought to be burned. (Motherly Mrs Green’s sympathies are all with her boy, Jewel, who she felt had no choice but to do what he did.) Marianne and Jewel spend the rest of the novel alternately hating and needing one another, hurting and healing one another, breaking up and coming together, giving in to each other one moment, struggling and fighting the next. For most of its second half, Heroes and Villains is like being forced to witness the often verging-on-violence tussles of a quarrelsome couple who can’t live together but can’t live apart either. Morrowian telepathy might help, but I can’t help feeling, in Carter’s world, it would only make things worse, as the real battle is within each character, with their own human nature. Carter’s post-blast future is not, like The Death of Grass or Day of the Triffids, an exploration of how easily civilisation might give way to barbarism; it’s more about how the world changes when you grow up and leave the (here) boring world of childhood for the dangerous and never-satisfying world of adulthood, and meet with only frustration, pain, and more boredom:

“Boredom and exhaustion conspired to erode her formerly complacent idea of herself. She could find no logic to account for her presence nor for that of the people around her nor any familiar, sequential logic at all in this shifting world; for that consciousness of reason in which her own had ripened was now withering away and she might soon be prepared to accept, since it was coherent, whatever malign structure of the world with which the shaman who rode the donkey should one day choose to present her.”

And at the heart of it, that constant inner struggle between desire and need:

“Night came; that confusion between need and desire against which she had been warned consumed her. If it was only that she desired him, then it became a simple situation which she could perfectly resolve while continuing to despise him. But if he was necessary to her, that constituted a wholly other situation which raised a constellation of miserable possibilities each one indicating that, willy nilly, she would be changed.”

It’s evident Marianne will never decide one way or the other. She and Jewel sometimes fit each other’s desires, sometimes fit each other’s needs, but rarely for long or at the same time. It’s all rather despairing (“There’s nowhere to go, dear,” said the Doctor. “If there was, I would have found it.”) — and not because this is a post-apocalyptic, ruined version of our world, but because it’s an emotional picture of the world as it can be now, if you’re caught between incompatible desires and needs, and perhaps trapped in a marriage you sometimes want and sometimes hate. The post-apocalyptic wasteland just exists to add that note of hardly-necessary hopelessness to an already hopeless domestic situation. As Mrs Green says:

“It’d be hell with your Dr Donnelly running everything, real hell, no respect for the old or nothing. Only tortures, mutilations and displays of magic.”

I can’t help feeling, though, that Dr Donnelly is running the world in Heroes and Villains, or at least his approach is the only one that works. He’s given up all attempt at being rational and consistent, and has embraced a sort of wilful madness. As a child, Marianne lived in a world of carefully-protected reason; bored with that (and after the death of her father) she left it, to find that nothing would ever be the same again:

“When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don’t know which is which any more… Because nobody can teach me which is which or who is who because my father is dead.”

So, the comparison with H M Hoover’s Children of Morrow is less about the two authors’ ideas on technological as opposed to barbaric societies, and more about differing complexities in their characters’ inner worlds, the simplicity (or not) of their needs and desires, the difference, perhaps, between childhood’s easy answers and adulthood’s impossible questions.