"The writer Izumi Suzuki, an icon and pioneer of Japanese science fiction, came of age in the 1960s and was part of Japan’s artistic avant garde; she worked with the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki as well experimental film directors Shūji Terayama and Kōji Wakamatsu, and was married to the free jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe. Suzuki died at 37, in the middle of the 1980s, completing her best work in the last ten years of her life. Despite being an outsider in the science fiction world during much of her career, she is compared to Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Anna Kavan, and others, having paved the way for many contemporary Japanese authors including the brilliant Yōko Tawada and Haruki Murakami. Suzuki’s work, now released in English for the first time, marks an exciting moment. Its themes feel of-the-moment despite being written over thirty years ago, and yet they are also surreal—the imagined artificialities of the 1980s written as futuristic now mirror our mundane, modern technology.

In “That Old Seaside Club,” a story from Suzuki’s newly released collection Terminal Boredom (Verso)…"