Under the Eye of the Big Bird

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Under the Eye of the Big Bird

by
Kawakami Hiromi

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Author:	Kawakami Hiromi
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2016 (Eng. 2024)
Length:	278 pages
Original in:	Japanese
Availability:	Under the Eye of the Big Bird - US
	Under the Eye of the Big Bird - UK
	Under the Eye of the Big Bird - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Japanese title: 大きな鳥にさらわれないよう
Translated by Asa Yoneda

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Our Assessment:

B+ : neat (and timely) turn on the science fiction novel

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Japan Times	.	3/9/2024	Thu-Huong Ha
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	3/9/2024	Hilary Leichter
Publishers Weekly	.	29/7/2024	.

From the Reviews:

"The book skirts along the edges of a wide range of themes, with reproduction being one of the most dominant. (...) The world is not exactly a dystopia, nor does it seem to be an improvement on reality. (...) In this somewhat passionless world, it’s the rare characters bucking society with their random moods, tireless questions and obsessive behavior who give readers something worth turning the page for." - Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times

"(A) novel of connected vignettes all set in a terrible far future. But I started to think of it more as an assemblage of narrative Punnett squares, the details and characters of each section receding or recurring, vying for the dominant plot. It’s less experimental fiction and more fiction on the human experiment (.....) Translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, Kawakami’s prose is often clinically deadpan, but she also finds humor and warmth in the puzzles of existence and extinction." - Hilary Leichter, The New York Times Book Review

"Kawakami falters at times with heavy chunks of exposition devoted to outlining the technology and other worldbuilding details. She enchants, however, with depictions of the future from her characters’ perspective" - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is set thousands of years in the future, the human race decimated and the old order long abandoned; instead of large nation-states, there seem to be now only small and largely isolated communities, between which there is little contact. The chapters are narrated by a variety of individuals in this future time, describing their lives and giving some sense of some of the conditions. The beings are generally human-like, but differences have also evolved; some of the characters are endowed with remarkable powers, such as being able to 'scan' (read: read) the minds of others -- and there are also some physical differences in some:

     "They just look so different from us."
     "They look a little different, but 30 and 2 and their twins -- they're all human."
     Kyla nodded.
     "They're human, even though they have three eyes and no nose ?"
     "Those are pretty minor differences, actually."

       Procreation is a major issue, in a variety of cases, with natural procreation -- sexual intercourse resulting in pregnancy -- rare among most of those mentioned here. Various forms of cloning and other kinds of artificial life-creation are much more common.
       The environments described by the different narrators vary considerably; some are very small communities while others resemble more familiar kinds of social, political, and economic arrangements. One character describes still taking the: "fossil-fuel school bus" to school -- but even that institution has fundamentally changed, the children encouraged to be 'free' -- "The more we come up with ideas that aren't beholden to common sense, the more teachers like it" -- and with bringing guns and drugs to school not an issue (but: "guns are practically nonexistent in this town anyway [...] and no one bothers with drugs after the first couple of times, because the brief trip isn't worth getting found out and being forced to take the antitoxin").
       Several characters are travelers and 'watchers', who seek out and visit various communities; as one of them notes:

Each of the places I had encountered was simply itself. They were all different, and always changing. Any attempt to fix and integrate them into "Earth" only yielded a terrible confusion.

The state of the world (and the human-like beings living in it) is presented in these individual chapters, offering different vantage points and perspectives over, as also becomes clear, a longer period of time. Characters do reäppear in some accounts, but for much of the novel there is only very limited overlap. (Near the end, two characters who eventually form a couple, Noah and Kyla, each tell their story in successive chapters, revealing just how different characters see and experience things.) Only in the final two chapters -- the longest in the novel -- is a more detailed explanation of the worlds we have encountered in the previous chapters presented. Where most of the chapters function more or less as separate stories in a future-world, the final two present a more cohesive picture of the whole.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird posits a world where:

As a result of multiple impacts and other catastrophic events, the human population was in free fall. We were on the brink of population collapse. the question we faced was how to preserve even a slim chance that we might someday thrive on this planet again. Across the world, we brought together the foremost intellects, unearthed every old technology that might have some application, ran lengthy calculations on our computers, and found not a single way through.
"No moves left. This might be our cue to bow out."

       Kawakami doesn't focus too much on the science of her fiction -- there are a variety of great technological advances, but there's little ... machinery and the like here; mostly she just presents it as a given (and that largely in the background), more interested in her individuals and their consciousnesses. This long leaves the reader uncertain just what kind of a world Earth has become, at least in parts -- both because of a general vagueness Kawakami employs, as well as the nature of time here, with some living entities here that exist for thousands of years as well as so much time having passed since any discernible 'history'.
       In its depiction of population collapse as well as then the role of Artificial Intelligence, Under the Eye of the Big Bird feels remarkably au courant in late 2024 (and Kawakami's take on AI is impressively prescient for a novel first published in 2016 -- an eternity ago in terms of advances in the field). Readers might at first feel somewhat frustratedly at sea from chapter to chapter, with the different slices of life being presented and the exact nature of aspects of this world long left unclear, but it is all well and quite fully tied together by the end.
       Some of the characters are able to 'scan' others' minds, and the chapters of Under the Eye of the Big Bird give a similar deep-dive into the many different narrators. With its emphasis, determinedly, on the human, personal, and intimate, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is an impressive variation on the science-fiction-novel -- complete with bigger-vision/concept to the whole. The novel tackles big issues -- not least: what does it mean to be human ? -- but without forcing the issue(s), over-elaborately, as so many writers tend to.

- M.A.Orthofer, 1 September 2024

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Links:

Under the Eye of the Big Bird:

Soft Skull publicity page
Kodansha publicity page

Reviews:

Other books by Kawakami Hiromi under review:

The Briefcase (UK title: Strange Weather in Tokyo)
Dragon Palace
Manazuru
The Nakano Thrift Shop
Parade
People from My Neighborhood
Record of a Night too Brief
The Ten Loves of Nishino

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Japanese literature
See Index of Science Fiction and Fantasy books

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About the Author:

Japanese author Kawakami Hiromi (川上弘美) was born in 1958.

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