music of Set My Heart on Fire

daylist: underground Japanese psychedelic-rock

I recently reread Izumi Suzuki’s I-novel (私小説), Set My Heart on Fire, for a review for Mad Women Book Club. This work is necessarily steeped in the cultural context: Tokyo’s 1970s underground club scene. Everything is a reference. For example: the title of the book itself, which is taken from “Light My Fire” by The Doors, was instead translated literally to capture the essence of the story. More such gems abound! With pages of notes, I thought it would be helpful to compile my findings for other curious readers & audiophiles. Here’s a soundtrack of the book:

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Chapter titles, which all reference a song:

1. This Bad Girl — The Golden Cups

2. I’m Your Puppet — James & Bobby Purify

3. She’s Got Us Talking — The Tempters

4. Honmoku Blues — The Golden Cups

5. Three in the Morning — The Golden Cups (cover)

6. Nights in White Satin — The Moody Blues

7. Gimme Little Sign — Brenton Wood

8. Time of the Season — The Zombies

9. Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes — Ten Years After

10. Loveless World

11. I’ve Got a Mind to Give Up Living — Paul Butterfield Blues Band

12. Keep Me Hangin’ On — Vanilla Fudge

13. Please, Time Machine

Songs*

• In The Year 2525 — Zager & Evans

• Mamy Blue — Pop-Tops

• Shotgun — Vanilla Fudge

• Walking Blues — The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

• Lucille — Everly Brothers

• Can’t Buy Me Love — The Beatles

• Diana — Paul Anka

• Chain of Fools — Aretha Franklin

• St. James Infirmary — Louis Armstrong

• California Dreamin’ — The Mamas & the Papas

• Transistor Radio — RC Succession

• Sneaker Blues — Kyohei Tsutsumi

Bands/artists

• Roxy Music

• The Tigers

• The Dynamites

• The Jaguars

• Mike Bloomfield

• Kenji Sawada

• Miyoko Asada

• Agnes Chan

• The Monkees

• The Doors

• T. Rex

• Masahiko Kondo

• Seiko Matsuda

*disclaimer: some of these versions are my best guess based on the time period/region as they’re not referenced in their entirety in the book