Barrelhouse Reviews: Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki

Reviewed by Brittany Micka-Foos

Translated by Allison Markin Powell / Transit Books / October 2024 / 108 pp

Gifted, Suzumi Suzuki’s first book translated into English, is a slim novel of sharp contrasts. Delicate, almost mundane physical details are juxtaposed against flatly rendered emotional bombshells. The result is a dreamy, brutal mix, a detached but still-live wire. Best to keep your distance: come too close and you’ll be burned.

The book’s protagonist, a sex worker in Tokyo’s entertainment district, knows this danger all too well. The novel, composed mostly of the protagonist’s ruminations on beauty and death as she drifts through her routine, follows her through the final days of her mother’s life. The narrator hops back and forth between palliative care and drug-fueled city nightlife as casually as changing clothes. The effect is one of whiplash: she is just as likely to recount the doctor suctioning phlegm from her dying mother’s throat as to describe the shade and texture of that evening’s designer handbag. Suzuki establishes a listless sense of remove, grounded in details of the everyday but lacking strong emotion:

No matter where I am, I feel no sense of reality. Not at the host club or in my mother’s hospital room—there is an inconsistency between me and whatever scene I find myself in. Not even the rooms where I live seem real to me, but so long as the sounds of the door and the key ring out, I can feel a small measure of security.

This “small measure of security” rooted in sensory detail—for instance, the particular tone of her key latching in the door—is a recurrent motif throughout the novel. It is also, tellingly, one of the few things Suzuki introduces without a price tag attached.

Gifted portrays an economy where everything comes at a cost, and everything exists for the sake of being possessed. Even—or perhaps especially—women’s bodies. The protagonist herself knowingly inhabits this liminal space of body as object, both a liability and an asset:

Among the things my mother had bestowed upon me were a perfectly healthy body, the scars that had slashed the value of that body by half, and, in the dwindling bloom of my twenties, time to waste walking in the languid morning.

This cruel act of abuse inflicted by the mother is revealed in the first few pages—offhandedly, of course. The blithe transactionality of the assault skims across a brutal truth: property crimes are never as serious as crimes against people, yet in a world of ubiquitous materiality, the body becomes yet another object in a revolving display case, another product to be bought and sold.

Suzuki explores this consumerist theme through the mother/daughter relationship—in Gifted, the original site of possession. The umbilical cord of ownership winds through the novel, and proves far-ranging, though characteristically recalled at arm’s length:

… Mother. The word, connoting the parent who had once held dominion over my body, carries too much meaning.

The narrator defines the maternal relationship by its blurred boundaries and attendant confusions; “too much meaning” never expounded upon, just a baldly stated fact. But enmeshment does not require intimacy. In fact, in Gifted, it seems to preclude it.  Though the protagonist describes feeling “like an outsider” with her mother, there is physical and psychic closeness born from, if nothing else, proximity. Mother is, de facto, a site of resource-sharing, of endless negotiation, of the excess of commerce.  Like capitalism, Mother is a necessary evil.

But Mother is also more: a part of her exists beyond the daily machinations of industry. Mother is the catalyst, the original creator, the beginning of all things. Mother’s cancer diagnosis is our entrance into the novel, and her descent into death and decay ignites the story. In the protagonist’s view, death is yet another property crime; aging, a diminishment in value. Yet, rendered in Suzuki’s matter-of-fact voice, the reader detects a slight shift under the surface, simmering:

My mother, born in the early months of the year, would likely die before she turned fifty-four. I will have to cremate my fifty-three-year-old mother, whose skin and hair show the tragic ravages of an old woman. Her skin and blood and flesh will surely vanish in the flames, but her bones will remain—along with her teeth, I imagine.

Fire, the original mother, the great creator and reducer of value. Something endures: the hot-white center, the teeth and bones of it all. This is what Gifted speaks obliquely around, comfortably nestled in the concrete, mundane details of the everyday. Underlying pain and suffering are still palpable, all the more so because of the distance they require. The novel’s aloofness speaks to the strength of the blaze at its core—so powerful one cannot approach it head-on. Readers will find Gifted brings them plenty close enough; anything more would threaten to consume the reader completely.

Brittany Micka-Foos is a writer living in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and the short story collection It's No Fun Anymore (Apprentice House Press, 2025). Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, NonBinary Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Read more at www.brittanymickafoos.com.