Reading Hiromi Kawakami’s Under The Eye of the Big Bird, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda, is an immersive experience. The novel takes us through the various aspect of its speculative world—“a gamble on evolution” (p. 235)—via various first-person vignettes in the lives of different characters, spread across geological eons, and connected often tangentially.
Kawakami’s world is in a distant future, long after the beginning of the decline of humankind, in which “the knowledge of how to enter space has been lost. Even the ability to fly the stratosphere is now only a matter of historical record” (p. 109). Here, the people live in isolated sectors designed by a couple of men, Jakob and Ian. These sectors are managed by mothers and watchers. “The communities [as observed by a traveller] were varied, and there was no overt communication between them at all. Each one already had its own history, a past, a culture” (p. 108). They are dramatically different from each other. “It’s commonplace for what is correct in one community to have precisely the opposite significance in another” (p. 108).
Each of the fourteen chapters is a piece of something hopefully resembling a puzzle, as one turns the page and overlooks the ambiguities. These chapters are narrated by different characters in various places over a period of time. Each introduce an element of the imagined world that gives rise to curiosity and intrigue, a desire to move on to the next chapter; but each also remains tethered to ideas of love, longing to fit in, and freedom. The book’s strength lies in its depictions of often sensitive and raw experiences of different people—be they children or adults, humans or mutants or clones. Kawakami spends no time in describing the world; she jumps right into the weird that instantly catches the reader’s attention.
Under The Eye is a study in contradiction. Here technological advancement coexists with the rudimentary biological roles of male and female bodies. In one sector, children are made in factories and their origins randomized. “Some are derived from cows; others from whales or rabbits” (p. 7). In another sector, men are invited to impregnate women who neither consent nor have the agency to say anything about the process.
In the far past, there were times that women decided, and times that women and men decided together by talking, and times when it didn’t need thinking about at all … at that time, there was an equal number of women and men, not like we have now, when there are fewer than twenty for all so many of us. (p. 31)
In yet another sector, it is conveyed that women need not necessarily bear children but that this would simply imply a waste of abilities of their bodies’ design.
Gender roles play a huge part in the story, then. It showcases a fairly heteronormative world, and instances of gender and sexual fluidity exist only in the periphery. If the world is designed by two men, then it is raised and sustained by “mothers.” When an unnamed character grows attached to a mother, she expresses her desire to be called Pater—because she is told “it forms a pair with Mother.” She doesn’t know what the name or the word means, she just wants to be close to the mother. Such instances happen across the communities to individuals: They are told things; they know them but they don’t necessarily understand them. They do not share the intellectual prowess of their ancestors, but they are trying to build their sense of self by only suspecting the ways of their world.
The experiences of all the characters are disorienting at first, but Kawakami’s writing is always brilliant and subtle. For example, when three clones narrate their story, in “Narcissi,” the reader is easily able to distinguish them after the initial shock of being introduced to clones subsides. Likewise, it takes a while to understand that each chapter is set in a different community, but it becomes evident through the sectors’ different processes of procreation as well as their different ways of naming. Some individuals are given names, such as Rien, others, number like “5 of 22,” and yet others are known by their physical traits such as White or Big. Elsewhere, humans are accompanied by mutants who can photosynthesise or have a third eye for a nose, who can scan people’s brain or transfer their consciousness into another; some are clairvoyant, others have telekinesis. The writing flows like a fever dream through it all. The staggering feat in this novel is that the future seems a lot like the past when humans were surviving on their primal instincts rather than thriving in their many social, political, religious and technological institutions. But then, what will a species on the verge of extinction do, if not survive? This simplified form of human civilisation, although it challenges the reader in her views of a progressive future, seems very intentional.
In this way, Kawakami meditates on what it is to be human. In “Testimony,” one of the most riveting chapters, we read a photosynthesising mutant’s responses to its interlocutor, each of which makes the initiating questions evident (although we do not read them). These responses are filled with dry humour. He firmly believes that the life-forms on the planet are merely specks in the dust, and hence doesn’t understand the need to understand or be understood. He makes a great statement on humans’ need for self-identification, as a way of forming meaning of their existence:
To the planet, us life-forms aren’t even specks of dust. But sometimes we irritate it a little. If we irritate it? That’s a good thing. It’s a lot better than being nothing. But either way, we’re only talking about my unconscious’s projection of Earth, so you could say it’s all made up anyway, in a way. (p. 129)
As humans create AI, and give it a form, Under the Eye asks what would the world look like if it was sustained by AI, in the interest of giving humans a chance to change from their natures. What if they could cease choosing conflict over peace and move forward, have a purpose to live for? In “The Miracle Worker,” the secluded communities begin to intermingle, creating life as humanity once knew it. A watcher says, “Yes, politics and religion. The center and the periphery. Traffic and hybridization. The same stages that the old humanity went through are being reproduced, albeit on a far more rudimentary, simplified scale” (p. 167). Yet Kawakami also looks at humanity’s need to cast out people who are different from them, or who deviate from what a community has established as the norm. Even when a person is curious to find a different life-form, he can still cause a genocide out of sheer unease: In “The Drift,” the character says, “My unease was not because they differed from us in appearance. Rather, some kind of preverbal, instinctive rejection dawned in me the more I observed them.”
Under the Eye of the Big Bird is ouroboric in its telling. It begins where it ends. It ends where it begins. This creates a cyclical structure akin to the survival of humankind, which, quite like a snake, swallows its own tail. One can read this book as a dystopic tale wherein humans don’t change, irrespective of their origins and lived experiences. One can read it as a story of hope that focuses on the resilience of humanity to survive in the face of overwhelming odds, courtesy of a few humans who are curious enough to obsess and transgress to create a different world. Many things remain ambiguous, or are rather left to the imagination of the reader, and it all works in favour of the absorbing, fascinating narrative Kawakami creates. A narrative that promises to be more fulfilling with multiple reads.
[Editor’s Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Arkady Martine during our annual Kickstarter.]