Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami: Review by Niall Harrison

Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Hiromi Kawakami (Soft Skull 978-1-59376-611-5, $27.00, 278pp, hc) September 2024.

Hiromi Kawakami is one of those authors whose long and decorated career has, thanks to the vagaries of translation and market dynamics, appeared in English in a slightly scrambled form. Almost certainly her best-known novel in English is Sensei no kaban (2001), first released as The Briefcase in 2012, and then re-edited for the UK edition, Strange Weather in Tokyo, in 2017. A delicate, contemporary-set and entirely non-fantastic story of the connection between a younger woman and an older man, its success led to the subsequent translation of similarly-vibed The Nakano Thrift Shop (2005/2016) and The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino (2003/2019). In that context the appearance of the fantastical Record of a Night Too Brief (title story 1996, English collection 2017), seemed like a brief digression, but a flurry of books in the last few years has made clear that the fantastic has always been an important strand of Kawakami’s career: 2002’s Parade: A Folktale appeared in 2019; then in 2021 we got her eerie linked collection People From My Neighbourhood (2016/2023), which was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award; last year brought another collection of earlier fantasy stories, Dragon Palace (2002/2023); and this year we’ve already had the timeslip romance The Third Love (2020/2024). My point here is that if you are one of those readers, as I was until recently, who held a particular mental image of Kawakami based on Sensei no kaban, it’s time to update your priors. Even then, however, her latest book in English, Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2016/2024) is striking. An accomplished mosaic novel spanning thousands of years, it investigates change on the grandest scale: the evolutionary fate of humanity.

What this means in Kawakami’s hands is that each of the 14 chapters sets out a different cross-wiring of issues arising from the evolutionary fundamentals of reproduction, mutation, and sur­vival. Across this series of thought-experiments, differences in biology and ecology play out as differences in family and social structures. She begins with a scene that unfolds its strangeness in stages, and in language that (at least in Asa Yoneda’s translation) has an unadorned directness that reminded me of some of Carol Emshwiller’s late work. Early in the story, the narrator tells us about her relationship with her husband: they have been married five years, and he works in a factory at the edge of the city. “Several times a week, I think about how much I love my husband,” the narrator states. “When I notice these feelings I have for him, it makes me feel relieved, and also a little uneasy.” After a conversation with some of the other women in their community, the reasons for these contradictory feelings start to become clear: they have all been married multiple times. In fact, the narrator reports, while she is in her second marriage, for her husband this is the fourth go-around; and all of their previous spouses are dead. Strangeness accumulates quickly now. The narrator can remember raising 15 children and thinks she has probably had at least 50, and this is partly possible because they grow so fast, ready for early education in months, not years, which in turn explains the high death rate: life is short overall, for most. It’s also only possible because the children are not being borne by women: they are made in the factory. And they are not human per se, they are human-like beings derived from animal stem cells, but you can’t tell which animal until after death.

It’s a wonderful, wrong-footing opening. The characters are not entirely oblivious. They know that in the past there were things called countries, including Japan; they know that they exist as a way of preserving biological diversity. But they don’t exactly know why, or what it all means, and neither do we. Over the next few chapters, ele­ments of the larger history become clear. In an enjoyably unsettling first-person chapter, we meet a watcher, due to be replaced by a younger clone-brother. The pair live together for a short while, comparing themselves (“This long-haired me was more sentimental, I thought”), reflecting on the contributions of environment and genet­ics to their personalities, and so on. In another chapter we meet the mothers – the word becomes a group label – whose duty is to raise the watchers “a few at a time, from a handful of lineages”, and whose placid lives are disrupted by a child who insists that “I’d rather be the one being watched than watch”.

Gradually we understand that we are touring an islanded world. Some agency has splintered humanity into different arrangements in an at­tempt to accelerate the development of variant or post-human species and created the mothers to raise watchers to keep things on track. Thousands of years slip by between chapters, although some names – some lineages – recur, and soon we start to see the strategy bear fruit. Here the resonances are with novels like John Wyndham’s The Chrysa­lids, or Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, because although a suite of physiological changes emerge, such as additional eyes or changed olfac­tory organs or photosynthetic skin, the more prominent mutations are psychic abilities. We meet telekinetics, empaths, and clairvoyants, and humanity’s intolerance of difference moves to the fore. The fundamental tension, as the novel moves into its closing stages, is whether humanity is capable of change, or whether “corrective forces” will invariably emerge, rooted in fear.

Don’t get the wrong idea: this is not a novel of action and high drama. The jeopardy is moral and intellectual. Was this radical reorganisation of humanity necessary; was it right, will it even work? Under the Eye of the Big Bird is on one level a novel about change, but on a more funda­mental level it is a novel about death, and whether it should end for humanity – one character reflects that “Our history was full of enough contradic­tions to destroy any sense of self-belief” – and if it should, can we at least provide the seed for some­thing better, a people less damaging to each other and to the planet. For the most part, Kawakami’s answers to these questions are unsentimental, in the manner of evolutionary science fiction back to Stapledon. We are not as special as we might like to believe. But her novel is leavened with flashes of dry humour – I loved the chapter structured as an interview with a member of a tribe whose mem­bers stay awake their entire lives and eat chunks of each others’ bodies; “You’re really concerned about what’s normal,” they tell their interlocutor – and by its insistence on seeing past an abstract “humanity” to individuals.

Confronted by the designers of the system, one character reflects that humanity is “too abstract, too vast”, perhaps suitable for “some thought experiment”, but not something that can be use­fully treated as a single reality. It’s not an accident, I think, that almost every chapter in Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a first-person narrative of some kind. The power and the pain of the novel lies in its ability to bridge between humanity as an abstract and humanity as a characteristic, to pick out moments from a vast sweep of time and show their insignificance and their simultaneous, ultimate importance. The novel ends with a plea from a speaker who doesn’t know if they will ever be heard: I wanted to reach back into the page and say, you are.

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In Niall Harrison‘s spare time, he writes reviews and essays about sf. He is a former editor of Vector (2006-2010) and Strange Horizons (2010-2017), as well as a former Arthur C. Clarke Award judge and various other things.

This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.

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