Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2024) by Hiromi Kawakami

Book Review

Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2024)

by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Asa Yoneda

   I checked the latest book by Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami after reading the New York Times review a couple weeks ago.  The review ticked most of my boxes:  It's translated from a foreign language and combines literary fiction techniques with a science fiction story.  Under the Eye takes the form of a connected series of short-stories about a horrifying far-future scenario where the human population of the Earth has collapsed, leaving the remnants grasping for a means of survival.  For the first fifty pages or so, the reader has no perspective on the situation, and it makes for a strange reading experience.  For example, the first story is about a girl who lives near a clone factory where humans are made from the remnants of animals, leaving each human with a small bone embedded inside of them which resembles the animal from which they are constructed.

   About a third of the way through the book Kawakami fills us in: Earth is populated by clones, sentient AI and different groups of humans, watched over by two formerly human, now cloned scientists who have designed this plan to ensure human survival by promoting isolation in an attempt to press fast-forward on evolution and come up with a kind of human that can survive and repopulate the Earth.   It is weird, wild stuff, with a time-scale of thousands, even tens of thousands of years.  I really enjoyed Under the Eye and recommend it heartily to the literary fiction/science fiction cross-over crowd.