J-Lit Review #4: Under the Eye of the Big Bird

A review of Hiromi Kawakami’s new novel.

Is this a novel? A collection of short stories? I learned about its publication from a review in The Guardian several weeks ago that called it “a novel-in-stories,” which is a fitting description. Under the Eye of the Big Bird is more or less a collection of interlinked stories where names and ideas are repeated but in a confusing way so that you often draw conclusions that are erroneous. However, by the end of the novel (if we are to call it that) you feel that you understand “the big picture” to some degree.

Essentially, this is a book set in the distant future about the extinction of humanity. It is a bleak topic of course and parts of the book are indeed quite grim but it’s not just a depressing vision. Some of the stories feature love and humour. I liked that they were all written in quite different voices, with some of these very childish and engaging.

To begin with, the book is very confusing because Kawakami seems to enjoy feeding the reader tiny bits of information and holding almost everything back. As I mentioned before, she sometimes feeds ideas that are misleading, later making you realise that you misinterpreted something. However, you do not feel it is a cheap trick; you just realise that as you progress through stories that sometimes seem disconnected from one another you are moving towards a fuller understanding of this world.

Each story is somehow linked to the others but they are also standalone works, which is why I asked in the first line of this review whether the book was a collection of short stories or a novel. I suppose to the author maybe there is no difference. The point is that they take place in the same fictional world and gradually build up in the reader an understanding of that world. But the fact that they are self-contained makes them all the more enjoyable. You get to know the narrator, grasp something of their world, follow them through a little adventure or situation, and then move on to someone else.

How do I describe this future world without giving anything away? Well, it is about the distant future of humanity and a number of efforts made to stop our extinction. It includes efforts such as specifically dividing humans into groups to preserve diversity and increase the likelihood of an evolutionary change that will prevent evolution. We see people called “watchers” who help humans and also “the mothers” and a “great mother” who play some role in guiding people. There are people with special abilities (mutations) and many discussions on human nature, such as the interlinked feelings of love and hate.

I was quite interested in how Kawakami handled the idea of identity and naming. These of course are central to the work of my favourite Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. I wrote about them in my book, Murakamian Magical Realism and Psychological Trauma and also in this essay on his unusual naming practices. Kawakami shows lots of different ways of naming people and also discusses the importance of names at various points in her book. Some characters have regular names, others have numbers, some have no names, and some simply get given the same names as others before them. Sometimes the quirks of naming affect grammar through the use of unusual pronouns, such as when there are multiple iterations of a single person.

There is much social criticism buried beneath the surface. I’m sure many will look at the matriarchal societies depicted and come to a feminist reading and indeed there is much to be discussed there. I saw in it certain critiques of modern Japan that I see in many other J-lit books. As in the work of Sayaka Murata and others, Kawakami seems to want us to think about the things that have been normalised and ask, “Should this really be normal?” For example, talking about the sped-up genetically engineered people of the future, she has one of her characters ask:

Don’t you think there’s something strange about the way that we live just to be made and raised, and to marry, and raise children, and then die again?

There is also a passage which resonated with me about the idea of digesting large numbers and perhaps even vast concepts:

Instead of trying to think about it, you had to surrender to the number, like you gave your body to the water when you swam in the lake. Then you’d have an idea of what hundreds of thousands feels like.

To me, in the context of this book, Kawakami is pointing out how difficult it is for humans to live in a world where there aren’t just hundreds of thousands but billions of us and we are supposed to act responsibly and feel like part of that massive community.

At times she can be philosophical and insightful. For example:

Words are convenient. You base your values and affect on words, but the same words are already defined according to your inclinations. Meaning that your value and affect are constructed along the lines of your preferences themselves. While you may believe that you have freely adopted your values out of the entire field of possibilies, that is hardly the case. From the beginning, your limited value systems are built up only in a single, predetermined direction.

The book trots out futurist tropes without ever becoming a dull sci-fi adventure. We see cloning and mutations and certain technologies but it’s not formulaic or genre-bound. It is an original and weird book that is hard to describe and hard to categorise, which are both positives in my mind. It jumps around a lot in time and sometimes hundreds or even thousands of years pass between chapters, which adds to the confusion yet somehow makes sense when it all starts coming together towards the end.

Readers of this blog may know the author, Hiromi Kawakami, from her most famous book, Strange Weather in Tokyo, as well as The Nakano Thrift Shop and People From My Neighbourhood, all of which are available in English. She also has a short story in the latest issue of Monkey magazine.