Mountain Devil

Recommend: Yes

Hit Parade of Tears has a strong allure from well before the first story begins. On the cover a young Japanese woman looks you straight in the eye, challenging, with her eye shadow heavy, a piece of fabric tied around her neck and bruises on her legs. Opening out the front cover, the author stares entranced beyond the camera, beckoning, hands held out in a plea. In both photos a woman is in focus but the domestic emerges quickly alongside. A slovenly bedroom; a dreary apartment building. And then opening the back cover, a small author’s biography: “She worked as a keypunch operator before finding fame as model an actress, but it was her writing that secured her reputation. She took her own life at the age of thirty-six.”

There’s an unfairness permeating fiction writing. A novel can be technically well crafted (Train Dreams) but lack the spark that a 15 page short story can capture seemingly effortlessly (Hit Parade of Tears). These stories are far from perfect. The 1970s pop culture references are dated (but honestly, given they are Japanese, it would probably make little difference if they were present). The narratives can be extremely clunky and hard to follow. Some stories have excessive dialogue. There are certain plot developments that repeat without being fleshed out. Yet Hit Parade of Tears has that spark. I am excited by this collection of stories. I afford them room to make mistakes.

Suzuki’s best writing is when she begins in ‘reality’ and then pulls the rug out from under us. Trial Witch is my favourite in that subset. The narrator, who suffers from being the wife of a pretty shitty man, is visited in a puff of smoke by a stranger who bequeaths her magic powers for her ‘trial’ period.

Suzuki can’t quite get the balance right when the story is fantastical from the start. I think it’s because paradoxically the stakes are lower when the set up begins absurd – it’s harder to shock us, and the entrance of the domestic feels boring and distracting from the sci-fi plot. It doesn’t help that the plots of these stories can be very poorly paced. I was quite enjoying the haphazard crew abord a rouge spaceship looting exotic fauna across the galaxy in Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise, until the end where the plot rushes headfirst, at full speed, into a brick wall and squishes up against itself, deformed.

The longest story in the collection, Hey, it’s a Love Psychedelic!, successfully straddles the middle ground. The main character is flung in and out of different timelines of her life. But she resets each time so while we (readers) are clear this is science fiction, she (main character) is not. Yet. There is something very sad in this story. A woman who is not in control of her past or future is a woman who is displaced from herself. Yet it’s all done with a very light touch. She has been a groupie in one life and then in another timeline an older version is reading a book called Groupie. Who would have thought being unable to fully connect with a past fandom (the pangs of which clearly still haunt) would feel so unmooring? I also love the experimental structure of this story, which I think is so well executed: the interspersing of the time-criminal’s dialogue as timelines shift; the world turning to sushi in one iteration; the main characters name changing spelling as she trips through time.

To recommend a book is to say, “hey, I think you will enjoy this”.

I think you will enjoy this.