Several women walk children down a flagstone path to a hot spring in the cozy opening scene of Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The children play while the women enjoy the warm water. The narrator has been married for five years to a factory worker. He works while she takes care of the children.
But conversation between the women gives lie to any sense of normalcy. “Sometimes I try to remember all the children I’ve raised so far,” the narrator says. “If I include the ones I’ve forgotten, the number must easily be over fifty.”
Nothing in the world of Hiromi Kawakami’s novel is quite as the reader expects.
Akutagawa-Prize winning author Hiromi Kawakami is one of the most widely-recognized contemporary writers from Japan, probably best known in English for her literary fiction. Still, she studied science at university, writing a thesis on the reproductive cycle of sea urchins. She edited a Japanese science fiction magazine and then taught middle and high school science. Under the Eye of the Big Bird, recently translated into English by Asa Yoneda, shows off her science expertise, especially in biology. Although science fiction elements like time travel or gravity anomalies appear in her other work, this novel is certainly the “hardest” sci-fi by Kawakami to appear in English to date.
Epic in scale if not in size, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a far-reaching, far-ranging story of the end of the human race. It takes place over many thousands or even millions of years as shrinking numbers of human beings stubbornly cling to existence on the planet Earth. Tiny, unconnected communities have found their own ways to survive. One community genetically-engineers children in a factory using material from whales and rabbits. Another carefully censors the ideas in the community, rejecting anyone who develops unique abilities or “transformative potential” as also potentially dangerous. A third, suffering from a shortage of men, sends the same man to father children with women all over the sparsely-populated community.
Like many of Kawakami’s other works in translation, there are also feminist themes in play here. In particular, the novel is an extended consideration of the role of mother—sometimes played out to its metaphorical extremes. A woman has raised at least fifty children, many of whom are now forgotten. An “F” allows her children to “eat” her in a bizarre reimagining of breast feeding. (Translator Asa Yoneda does a laudable and noteworthy job rendering the different ways Kawakami plays with sex and gender in the novel, such as identifying those who can bear children as “F”s and those who cannot as “M”s.) Most importantly, mysterious “mothers” observe, teach, and supervise human development without actually being a part of it—“mothers are only mothers, after all, and there is no need to speak of them as if they were people.”
Motherhood is ambiguous in a great deal of contemporary Japanese fiction, and it’s ambiguous here, too. Many of the women in Kawakami’s novel are ambivalent about motherhood at best. “Even the thought of children [doesn’t] appeal to me,” the narrator of one story complains. “All they make is mess and trouble.”
“Don’t be silly!” a friend responds.
“We have to make the children and raise them, because that’s how we maintain the biological diversity of the genetic information we need to preserve. That’s the only way the world keeps going.”
The circular logic overlaps with themes in the work of other contemporary women writers from Japan—notably Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman and Life Ceremony—who are increasingly frustrated by the government’s attempts to promote pregnancy and childbirth to halt Japan’s plummeting birth rates. Many contemporary Japanese women might have a character respond, as Kawakami’s does, “Don’t you think there’s something strange about the way we live just to be made and raised, and to marry, and raise children, and then die again?”
Kawakami’s novel is a meaty and intellectually-satisfying work of speculative fiction, both structurally and thematically. Each chapter seems to begin with a new narrator—often, but not always, a new “I” the reader must work to identify. Characters appear in the interconnected stories, sometimes under other names, sometimes as myths. Time skips and jumps at unpredictable intervals. A narrative arc might finally reach its end with a few lines many chapters after it began. The titular “big bird” reveals itself only slowly, its role in the human communities opaque. A “solution” to the puzzles the novel presents suggests itself, only to fizzle out. The reader only glimpses the overall situation governing Under the Eye of the Big Bird after reading all of the novel’s fourteen loosely-connected chapters—and even then only if she squints.
But Under the Eye of the Big Bird is more than an excellent work of speculative fiction. Like all great literature, it takes up some of life’s biggest questions about what it means to be alive, to love, and to be human. (“You’re a very human human,” a mother tells one character. “You create things, and you destroy more than you create.”) And to this catalogue of great questions, Kawakami adds, “How will the human species face the end?”