James Nicoll Reviews

Hiromi Kawakami’s 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a stand-alone science fiction novel. The 2024 translation is by Asa Yoneda.

Mother lives a perfectly conventional life, raising legions of animal-derived children created in the very factory where the latest of her short-lived husbands works. Mother sometimes has questions, but nothing truly upends her placid life. A life sometime in our future.

How did the world get to this state? Consider the first law of history: people are the problem.

Mistakes were made. Inopportune decisions occurred. A few calamities weren’t prevented. Short version: in an immediate future, there are not many humans left on battered Earth. Soon there will be none.

Jakob and Ian are among the few remaining humans. Jakob has a bold plan to guide humans through the crisis, to ensure that there are humans who will not repeat our mistakes. This plan requires time. This plan requires unconventional coping mechanisms.

Across the centuries, Jakob and Ian’s clones are decanted again and again, keeping careful eye on their experiments. Will the gambit work? Will the process be able to produce human variants that are neither self-destructive nor too vulnerable? Or are all the human races doomed?

~oOo~

The title on the book cover is Under the Eye of the Big Bird: a Novel. It is a novel in the sense of being composed of short stories, each set in a different time and place, but connected because they are part of the same history.

Now, some people — bad people, I assume — would question the ​“novel” part of the title. ​“Isn’t that a collection, though? Wouldn’t a novel require an entirely different narrative structure?”

Who are you going to believe: the fourteen short stories in the book or the ​“a novel” on the cover?

Qualms about collection vs novel aside, this is a very elegantly designed narrative, judiciously feeding the reader hints (sometimes seemingly contradictory) as to what is going on, what the goals are of the scheme, and how it will all work out. The author has a very clear idea where she is headed and in the end, the narrative coalesces into a consistent, compelling whole.

Among the advantages of the structure, readers are less likely to give up waiting for the whole to make sense. Each episode stands on its own, with a full narrative and engaging protagonists, while contributing to the grander tale. The work is elegantly delivered.

What the book does not do is lend itself to an 800-word review. Just trust me on this: buy this work and read it the whole way through. I think I’ve found my second Hugo nominee for the 2025 ballot… assuming that this is a novel and 2024 translations of 2016 works are eligible.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).