In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings - but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.
Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.
Reviews
No other book of hers convinces me more that Kawakami used to be a teacher of chemistry. A sad but beautiful depiction of a perishing world -- Banana Yoshimoto There's real satisfaction in figuring out how the chapters connect, and all are richly imagined * Telegraph * Haunting... it offers a powerful corrective to the assumption of human primacy * Guardian * I'm still haunted by this dystopian Japanese novel about the appalling transformative potential of AI on human life months after having read it. Written in disarmingly dreamy prose, it's a horribly persuasive depiction of our future extinction * Daily Mail *
More info
An inventive and immersive novel about a future in which humans are nearing extinction - from the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo.
HIROMI KAWAKAMI was born in Tokyo in 1958. In 2001 she won the Tanizaki Prize for Strange Weather in Tokyo, which became an international bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 International Foreign Fiction Prize. Her other fiction in translation includes The Nakano Thrift Shop, The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino, People from My Neighbourhood, and The Third Love. Kawakami has contributed to editions of Granta in both the UK and Japan and is one of Japan's most popular contemporary novelists.
ASA YONEDA is the translator of books including Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya, The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, and Idol, Burning by Rin Usami, as well as stories by Natsuko Kuroda, Atsushi Nakajima, and (with David Boyd) Midori Osaki.
