Hiromi Kawakami

From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings—but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.

A Novel

Under the Eye of the Big Bird

messy storytelling style that i couldnt get used to. stagnant pace, poor world-building narrative as it's all over the place. interesting dystopian concept but executed poorly, so it seems like there's nothing new that hasn't been written.

aemouh

I cannot say I’ve ever had strong opinions about dystopian novels when the speculative aspect of the dystopia is ‘hard.’ I’m much more of a fan of softer dystopias (say, something like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) or, at the very least, when the dystopia does contain a very convoluted world and system, I’m a fan of when the presentation of the dystopia is shown from the eyes of an ordinary individual caught in the system (in the vein of 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale—we won’t talk about The Testaments). In short, I highly prefer when any sort of speculative fiction focusses on the human rather than any overarching political allegory or system, and when it does go into the human, I like it to drill deep, to really examine the psychological and existential dread of the horrible situation they find themselves in. Dystopia’s assumed main purpose in literature is allegory (hence the often-belaboured post-facto discussion of many classic dystopias being ‘wow, this was really prophetic’) but I’ve never personally cared for the allegorical element of novels. What I want from dystopia is something new and interesting and experimental that presents something novel about the human experience. Thankfully, this book provides this in spades.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a dystopian sci-fi novel told in very distinct chapters spanning, seemingly, tens of thousands of years between them. A bit of a puzzle box in how the dystopia is revealed to the reader, each chapter contains different protagonists in indeterminate times in indeterminate locations with, at most points, completely different social systems. Information explaining earlier dystopias turns up in later chapters, and it’s probably a book that one would get real value out of doing a full re-read to fully understand how everything links together. But on an initial read-through it is just amazing the plethora of sci-fi/dystopia boxes that have been checked. Not only is there a strange system of animal-based cloning, there is also a sophisticated network of AI-empowered surveillance; children who grow up with mutant powers, including consciousness melding, mind reading, predicting the future, starting fires, telekinesis, and performing miracles; later on one finds artificial intelligence takeovers, and alien life evolving on earth,  

The thing that made society this way was some sort of human extinction event, but the novel is vague on how this extinction occurred. Human extinction is not a new concept in sci-fi and dystopia, and not only was it a hot topic in the mid 2010s when this was written, with climate protests and large scale environmental demonstrations taking a media forefront—it is also relevant now, when largely ill-willed oligarchs and billionaires push eugenics-lite concern about birth rates, and tech entrepreneurs invest in biohacking life extension therapies. Human extinction and population maintenance is something constantly in the mind’s of the elite. Big Bird takes a much more neutral, fatalistic (perhaps nihilistic view?) of the situation—that all attempts to extend humanity’s lifespan are ultimately just delaying the inevitable, and is it so bad that humanity will go extinct in the first place? Are we not just a single item in the chain of evolution, fated to be replaced, to return to the dust from which we came?

Humanity is doomed to fail, this novel says, and it gives us every single dystopia at once in order to drive home that point. But what is interesting is that every society that springs from the overarching dystopia fails in unique ways. A society that evolved too well to its surroundings goes extinct due to a lack of competition and drive for reproduction; another is erased due to the actions of a genocidal psychopath; throughout Earth systems are failing, safeguards and monitoring fall out of use, bugs and diseases tear through populations both robotic and biological. Conflict, competition, inequality, the things that initial societies were built in the new world to remove, evolve independently—and these evolutions bring about society’s destruction in a cycle of destruction.

The protagonists are, for the most part, regular individuals caught within these different societies in this speculative, constructed earth, and I was very glad to not have any overarching story where a chosen one overthrows the system. Instead, what you get is a human acquiescence into the society the individuals are born into. What I did love is Kawakami’s effortless ability to shift between different narrative styles and perspectives with each chapter, some of which are downright experimental. One of the early chapters in a novel concerns cloning, and Kawakami plays around with pronouns with dizzying effect as the protagonist meets their clone (“‘It’s good to see you,’ I’d said to me that day, and welcomed me in’). Other chapters play around with naming conventions, non-human emotions and the narrator’s perception of time, and it is a miracle that these chapters were so fluidly written and translated that I could read them without any special effort at all, oftentimes smiling at how inventive and playful the prose was. Beyond its serious themes about extinction and human failure, playfulness and experimentation is what I think I’ll take the most from this novel.

I highly enjoyed Under the Eye of the Big Bird and it is a highly unique read, which gives it extra points in my book. A dystopia told non-chronologically, with experimental chapter designs and a complicated, philosophical undertow? Sign me up for more.

shain

I cannot say I’ve ever had strong opinions about dystopian novels when the speculative aspect of the dystopia is ‘hard.’ I’m much more of a fan of softer dystopias (say, something like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) or, at the very least, when the dystopia does contain a very convoluted world and system, I’m a fan of when the presentation of the dystopia is shown from the eyes of an ordinary individual caught in the system (in the vein of 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale—we won’t talk about The Testaments). In short, I highly prefer when any sort of speculative fiction focusses on the human rather than any overarching political allegory or system, and when it does go into the human, I like it to drill deep, to really examine the psychological and existential dread of the horrible situation they find themselves in. Dystopia’s assumed main purpose in literature is allegory (hence the often-belaboured post-facto discussion of many classic dystopias being ‘wow, this was really prophetic’) but I’ve never personally cared for the allegorical element of novels. What I want from dystopia is something new and interesting and experimental that presents something novel about the human experience. Thankfully, this book provides this in spades.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a dystopian sci-fi novel told in very distinct chapters spanning, seemingly, tens of thousands of years between them. A bit of a puzzle box in how the dystopia is revealed to the reader, each chapter contains different protagonists in indeterminate times in indeterminate locations with, at most points, completely different social systems. Information explaining earlier dystopias turns up in later chapters, and it’s probably a book that one would get real value out of doing a full re-read to fully understand how everything links together. But on an initial read-through it is just amazing the plethora of sci-fi/dystopia boxes that have been checked. Not only is there a strange system of animal-based cloning, there is also a sophisticated network of AI-empowered surveillance; children who grow up with mutant powers, including consciousness melding, mind reading, predicting the future, starting fires, telekinesis, and performing miracles; later on one finds artificial intelligence takeovers, and alien life evolving on earth,  

The thing that made society this way was some sort of human extinction event, but the novel is vague on how this extinction occurred. Human extinction is not a new concept in sci-fi and dystopia, and not only was it a hot topic in the mid 2010s when this was written, with climate protests and large scale environmental demonstrations taking a media forefront—it is also relevant now, when largely ill-willed oligarchs and billionaires push eugenics-lite concern about birth rates, and tech entrepreneurs invest in biohacking life extension therapies. Human extinction and population maintenance is something constantly in the mind’s of the elite. Big Bird takes a much more neutral, fatalistic (perhaps nihilistic view?) of the situation—that all attempts to extend humanity’s lifespan are ultimately just delaying the inevitable, and is it so bad that humanity will go extinct in the first place? Are we not just a single item in the chain of evolution, fated to be replaced, to return to the dust from which we came?

Humanity is doomed to fail, this novel says, and it gives us every single dystopia at once in order to drive home that point. But what is interesting is that every society that springs from the overarching dystopia fails in unique ways. A society that evolved too well to its surroundings goes extinct due to a lack of competition and drive for reproduction; another is erased due to the actions of a genocidal psychopath; throughout Earth systems are failing, safeguards and monitoring fall out of use, bugs and diseases tear through populations both robotic and biological. Conflict, competition, inequality, the things that initial societies were built in the new world to remove, evolve independently—and these evolutions bring about society’s destruction in a cycle of destruction.

The protagonists are, for the most part, regular individuals caught within these different societies in this speculative, constructed earth, and I was very glad to not have any overarching story where a chosen one overthrows the system. Instead, what you get is a human acquiescence into the society the individuals are born into. What I did love is Kawakami’s effortless ability to shift between different narrative styles and perspectives with each chapter, some of which are downright experimental. One of the early chapters in a novel concerns cloning, and Kawakami plays around with pronouns with dizzying effect as the protagonist meets their clone (“‘It’s good to see you,’ I’d said to me that day, and welcomed me in’). Other chapters play around with naming conventions, non-human emotions and the narrator’s perception of time, and it is a miracle that these chapters were so fluidly written and translated that I could read them without any special effort at all, oftentimes smiling at how inventive and playful the prose was. Beyond its serious themes about extinction and human failure, playfulness and experimentation is what I think I’ll take the most from this novel.

I highly enjoyed Under the Eye of the Big Bird and it is a highly unique read, which gives it extra points in my book. A dystopia told non-chronologically, with experimental chapter designs and a complicated, philosophical undertow? Sign me up for more.

One of my favourite books this year so far. (I know I say that way too often 😅).

Under the Eye of the Big Bird A Novel

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