These feel like precarious times. Looking at world geopolitics and climate change, the security of humanity suddenly feels fragile. This has drawn a number of novelists to write about possible futures beyond simple dystopian narratives, including Under the Eye of the Big Bird, the new book by Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda.
This expansive and inventive novel feels like a departure for the writer, whose previous bestselling work includes the more straightforward Strange Weather in Tokyo. The novel is told in fragments and set mostly in the far future, when humanity is on the brink of extinction.
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The book jumps around in place and time, but mostly concerns isolated small groups of people who are observed by ‘watchers’, genetically engineered humanoids, who report back to ‘mothers’, who began as a kind of AI but gradually became human-AI hybrids. All of this is in service of the idea of preserving genetic diversity, an attempt to keep humanity going through the survival bottleneck of existence that has occurred.
The voices and narrators across these disparate tales are diverse and intriguing, from mothers and watchers to genetically mutated humans. This is when the book is at its best, exploring the mindsets of, for example, humans who have developed the ability to photosynthesise, or the ability to read other people’s minds.
Through a simple, direct prose style, Kawakami does a great job of getting under the skin of all her characters – be they human, AI or something else entirely – and the end result is a book that is unsettling, thought-provoking and utterly unique. While this subject matter might’ve seemed depressing in a lesser writer’s hands, Kawakami’s style is playful and light among the poignancy and depth. Wonderful writing.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda, is out now (Granta, £14.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
