Some simply forget to eat and starve to death. Boredom is the central feature of their lives. (The world of Yoko Tawada’s US National Book Award-winning novella The Emissary bears a strong resemblance.) “Old folks” have so much energy and stamina they can “go to work every day, and somehow still find it in them to have love affairs.” Listless young people can’t find work at all.
The title story is about a future controlled by energetic elderly people. Yet Suzuki’s stories are predicated on a Japan-on a world-in decline. People all over the world were learning the Japanese language. English-language movies like Alien predicted the eventual triumph of Japanese businesses. Hers was the Japan of the Economic Miracle, a Japan with the second-fastest GDP growth in the world. Suzuki was active as a writer in the late 70s and early 80s, long before the “Lost Decade” and years of economic stagnation in Japan. But unlike, say, Mieko Kawakami or Sayaka Murata, author Izumi Suzuki died more than three decades ago. Narrators raise questions about identity and agency.
The characters criticize, challenge, or defy social conventions. The stories collected in Terminal Boredom take up themes that might feel familiar to readers of contemporary Japanese fiction.
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