Under the eye of the big bird by Hiromi Kawakami

Japanese fiction

Original title – 大きな鳥にさらわれないよう
Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō

Translator – Asa Yoneda

Source – Personal copy

I will hold my hand up now when the long list for the Booker International comes out, and I have read through the list of books that have made the cut. This is the one that appealed least to me. I have read two other books by the writer over the years; I really liked her book The Briefcase, as it was called when I read it for the Man Asian prize many years ago. Now, I am in the mood for sci-fi. I am not a huge sci-fi fan, and speculative fiction has to appeal. The problem with this book is that I may have read it in the middle of all the books, but it is very different from the other books. Plus, I was dreading it in a way, so maybe I hadn’t given it a good enough chance anyway. Fair to say I scored it lowest for the Shadow Booker International. Anyway, here is my take on it for what it is worth lol(I rarely am so unexcited by a book I have read )

Are things going well at the factory? I ask my husband.

He shrugs his shoulders in a way that can be taken as

either uh-huh or nuh-uh.

They say the factory in this region was built around a hundred years ago. The other regions’ factories are around the same age. The very first one was built several hundred years ago, but that one no longer exists. Also, at that time, there was a unit that contained multiple regions, called a country, and that country was named Japan. And as well as Japan, there were countless other countries, each of which had a name. I learned all this from my husband, who enjoys reading old documents.

What was life like back then? I ask him.

The factory and the past what was it like?

 

The book is fourteen stories that roughly link together to make it a novel set in a distant future when men’s DNA has started to unravel, and thus science has begun to splice human DNA with animal DNA. So the species has evolved into various types of men, which is all overseen as the stories unfold by some AI  and watchers. However, they are trying to turn back the tide of man’s decline in a way. This is a story of what happened at the end of man’s time. I struggled to find the thread and saw this done in several other similar books. I’m thinking of The Last Children of Tokyo, which is about just Japanese dying out, but has a similar theme. Sorry, this is so short, there are other fans of this book to read their reviews !

“Things that live are things that die. In time.”

Die. I didn’t understand the meaning of the word until the cat I kept brought in a mouse. The mouse, which had always moved, stopped moving at all, and grew cold before

my eyes.

There were many animals at that house. Cats. Dogs.

Mice. Rabbits. Cows. Horses. Chickens. Bantams. Ducks.

Geese. Peafowl. Dozens of waterbirds bobbed on the big lake in the garden. The one who liked to sit very still and watch the grebes dive was me, the shortest of us three.

“You like that? Just watching those birds go into the wa-

ter?” I asked, and the shortest me nodded.

“Sometimes they dive for a long time, and sometimes

they don’t.”

The mothers always told us how important it was to no-tice things. When the shortest me gave an account of the grebes over dinner, they were full of praise.

“Observe carefully. Never rush to conclusions. But com-mit everything to memory, without neglecting the smallestdetail,” they said.

That first bit here did make me think back to some scenes in Blade runner (the orginal film )

As you can see, this book just didn’t get me.I rarely have this effect with a book, but I can’t say that I loved a book I had to push myself to read through. But that said, I may go back and reread it later and see if a different time makes a difference. I do have a couple of her other books to read as well. For me, this had two ideas that could make it a significant part of the Matrix and also part of Studio Ghibli’s nightmare. I think it would make a tremendous Japanese sci-fi film. But I rarely am hard on a book. But this just isn’t my type of book. I will read sci-fi if it appeals, but this wasn’t a book for me. I would love to know if you liked the book and why? Are you a sci fi or speculative fiction fan?