‘You want to go ask people what’s going on, don’t you?’ a character says to another in Izumi Suzuki’s 1982 story ‘Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!’, as time spins out of joint. ‘There’s no point. You can’t go around telling people the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Nobody’s gonna listen.’ A decade and a half before, that’s exactly what Japanese youth were doing. Japan had one of the biggest ‘1968’ radical movements outside of Italy. A wave of protests, strikes, and university occupations, aimed against Japanese capitalism and its support for American imperialism, convulsed the country during the sixties. The movement collapsed into ultraviolent sectarianism in the mid-seventies, its anti-capitalist ethics swamped by mass affluence and what would eventually be the world’s second most powerful and lucrative pop culture.

One has to obtain any information from elsewhere, as Verso’s three recent volumes of Izumi Suzuki’s fiction feature no introductions, notes, or explanations — they don’t even do the basic courtesy of telling you when the stories were first published — but a little searching will reveal that Suzuki was a leading figure of the Japanese counter-culture in these years.

Suzuki was born in 1949 in Shizuoka, a largely industrial prefecture between Tokyo and Nagoya. She worked as a punch-card operator before moving to the capital, where she worked as an actor (including in the 1971 experimental film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets), modelled (for the coffee-table pornographer Nobuyushi Araki, in his book Izumi: This Bad Girl), and was a ‘muse’ for musicians such as the free jazz alto saxophonist Kaoru Abe, whom she married in 1973. But in her thirties, she established herself as a gifted writer of science fiction and memoir, before taking her own life in 1986. Her later writings narrate what happens when disappointment and depression replace the dream of changing the world.

Her writing spans the two decades between the radical Japan of the sixties and the country of the boom years of the eighties. Since that decade, Japan has been incessantly imagined as the home of ‘the future’, with its advanced technologies and ultramodern cityscapes. If that’s true, then its head start also means its best writers and artists anticipated many of our present problems decades ago: the absence of alternatives to capitalism; an ever more artificial, ever more polluted environment; an ageing, shrinking population; increasing psychological dependence on pharmaceuticals; a world of ubiquitous screens. All these can be found, are anticipated, or are described in Izumi Suzuki’s science fiction stories of the seventies and eighties.

What makes Suzuki interesting to think about is not that she was a great supporter of the radical movements of her time — in fact, her frequent references to the ‘Japanese ’68’ are usually disparaging — and her stories are full of failed utopias. Rather, the interest comes in reading how, through her depressive imagination, she zeroed in on a future of nostalgia, times out of joint, disappointment, and the eternal return of the same.

Quite why Suzuki became big in the 2020s in English is easy to ascertain on reading the title story of the first of Verso’s Suzuki books, the anthology Terminal Boredom: Stories — it is set in an authoritarian, hyper-mediated future, in which people are so alienated, agoraphobic, and anomic that they spend their days watching footage of atrocities; and, if possible, they interact with each other only through screens. ‘I’m not used to scenes that aren’t in a frame,’ says its narrator. ‘Looking at a picture inside a border always calms me down.’ I first read this story during lockdown in the winter of 2020–1: it felt like a simple description of reality. One character records their entire mundane life on camera. ‘And you watch it later?’ asks the incredulous narrator. ‘Wow, must be riveting.’ As a woman writing science fiction, Suzuki has been lazily compared to Ursula Le Guin, but her pessimism and dark humour are miles away from the American writer’s optimistic anarchism. In ‘Women and Women’, included in Terminal Boredom, a matriarchal future society oppresses men in much the same manner as women are oppressed in a patriarchal one. The stories in the second anthology, Hit Parade of Tears, reveal much more of a rooting in pop culture — Suzuki was more glam than hippy. The longer tales often have an enjoyably giggly, gossip-magazine tone (in the sixties, Suzuki wrote an advice column for a women’s magazine), like ‘Trial Witch’, with its spectacular acts of revenge on awful husbands, or ‘My Guy’, in which a man from a more advanced cosmic civilisation where emotions are rather more controlled impregnates women across Tokyo.

Two stories centre on time gone haywire. In the kaleidoscopic, haunting ‘Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!’, a hipster resembling Suzuki — with obsessive knowledge of Group Sounds, the noisy garage rock bands of mid-sixties Japan — is thrown into different historical periods, where the sequence of pop music and technology is scrambled into chaos. At first seeing the appearance of things in the wrong time periods as just a consequence of retro culture, she finally becomes aware of what is happening when somebody in the sixties plays a record by the eighties neo-fifties band Stray Cats.

The title story is set in a faintly North Korea–like Stalinist dictatorship — though one as permeated by pop culture nostalgia, fashion, and celebrity as Suzuki’s contemporary Japan — and tells the tale of an eternally youthful 180-year-old survivor of the sixties, who is helping his vastly younger girlfriend with her project on that decade, entitled ‘Fictions and Realities of Capitalist Society’. He is imprisoned after trying to create an autonomous republic in Tokyo Bay, which would ‘encapsulate Japan from 1960 to 1970 . . . violent and reckless and cruel’.

Set My Heart on Fire, a novel originally published in 1983, and newly published in English, is strikingly unlike these opiated, woozy, depressive, dryly humorous stories. Rather, it’s a visceral, alcohol-soaked memoir, very thinly disguised (The Golden Cups, a Group Sounds band, of which the young Suzuki was a self-described groupie, appear here as ‘Green Glass’). Much of it is set in Yokohama, a port city which in the sixties was multicultural by Japanese standards, with a proper Chinatown and scores of American soldiers (from whom records could be obtained), and hence an alternative to the homogenous, predictable culture of Japan’s ‘economic miracle’.

What mostly happens here, though, is grim, like a much more violent version of Jenny Fabian’s ‘swinging’ London memoir, Groupie (a Suzuki favourite, referenced in ‘Hey, it’s a Love Psychedelic!’). It is also populated by appalling men who play guitars for a living, dwells on constant but generally unenjoyable sex, and features a great deal of detail on records and clothes. You then realise that this, here, is the distant, halcyon sixties and seventies of sex and drugs and rock and roll, which the drifting sci-fi heroines of her later stories are so often longing for. In Set My Heart on Fire, the era is radically demythologised and revealed as a suffocating world of solipsism and misogyny. It seems to ask: how far gone would a society have to be for it to feel nostalgia for this?