Hit Parade of Tears: Stories

A new collection from the cult author of Terminal Boredom

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.

Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.

A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki’s stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.

Izumi Suzuki (1949–1986) was a countercultural icon and a pioneer of Japanese science fiction. She worked as a keypunch operator before finding fame as a model and actress, but it was her writing that secured her reputation. She took her own life at the age of thirty-six.

Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Freeman's and The New York Times. A winner of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the Unviersity of North Carolina at Charlotte, in the USA.

Helen O'Horan is a linguist based in London. She currently works as a Japanese-English translator, splitting her time between literary projects & TV/Film. She has previously worked with patents & research in linguistics & natural language processing & maintains an interest in how people interact with technology through language & design. She also lieks to draw & cycle.

Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor, and musician who spent his salad days shouting in dank basements before getting a master’s degree in medieval Japanese literature. Recent translation projects include contributions to Terminal Boredom (2021), a collection of stories by science fiction pioneer Izumi Suzuki; and the memoir Try Saying You’re Alive! (Blank Forms, 2021) by outsider folk maniac Kazuki Tomokawa.