For years, I’ve seen Hiromi Kawakami’s short story collections on the shelf at the book store and think “I should really read some of her work.” Well, by coincidence, her book Under the Eye of the Big Bird was shortlisted for this year’s 2025 International Booker Prize and my partner has purchased the shortlisted works for me so that I can judge for myself. So, I’ve finally dived into Kawakami’s writing.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a strange book. I hesitate to call it a short story collection, because each section takes place in the same world, but I hesitate to call it a novel because it’s profoundly episodic. The characters between each chapter change, for the most part, although some characters repeat or we see a throughline between the narratives. Readers are thrown into the book without context and it feels truly alienating. We are the outsiders caught up mid-stream trying to figure out how the world operates.
I’m not sure I have the specifics, really, though towards the end there is some more explicit exposition. Come to think of it, Kawakami might have shown some more restraint and trusted the readers a little more—one character gives the entire history of the world in a conversation with children. In any case, the world feels foreign. The events are taking place hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and humans are just about extinct. They now reside in what we can infer as separate communities without any contact, vaguely united by “mothers” and “watchers” who care for them. Meanwhile, each of the characters seems to be a replica or reincarnation of a previous version of themselves. In one community, this means they have names like 32 of 6 (the 32nd copy of the 6th model or something to that effect). In other communities, it means that you might open the door and find a younger version of yourself, which is your cue to get out of town and be replaced.
That very thing happens in the early chapter “Narcissi.” The chapter’s opening line is “I turned up today. / I opened the front door, and there stood a much younger me, with long hair” (13). The two engage in conversation as the new model moves in. This leads to some of the most interesting grammatical and conceptual content of Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The boundary between self and other-self gets muddled in an interesting way: “As I watched me walk away, I recalled the day the great mother had left” (20). This odd mirroring and duality of selfhood then becomes even more strange as the two swap memories and experiences. The new version of the character arrived in a hovercraft, hid it in the bushes, and approached the home of her predecessor. The predecessor, now having to leave, creeps into the bushes and finds the hovercraft “she” rode in on. It’s an engaging concept, especially because it’s so early on and everything is unfamiliar; Kawakami reels you in as you try to explain the scenes.
On the topic of swapping memories, there are also characters that can essentially connect with other creatures telekinetically. It almost reads like Animorphs except the character seems to be inside a hawk’s brain, witnessing its world, while their physical body remains in place. This psychic connection emerges in several of the stories to explore Kawakami’s themes of love and connection. In one section of the book, split over two parts, Kawakami recounts the tragic story of two lovers. Each has the ability to ‘scan’ the other—that is, dive into the depths of one another’s minds and retrieve any kind of thought or feeling. The woman is both clairvoyant and telepathic and, out of respect, the man refuses to scan her. He comes across as noble and kind until he becomes jealous enough to scan her, finds her complete love of him, and then disappears out of shame. It’s a Blackbeard’s closets kind of situation. In the next section, though, the perspective switches to the young woman’s and we see that she is unfaithful and that her clairvoyance has led her to see how their relationship would operate, how he would behave, and so on and so forth. Him reading love within her mind is chalked up to his lack of practice with scanning—he’s pathetic and she pities him.
Those two chapters stand out as being self-sufficient in their story arcs, while others are components in Kawakami’s narrative mosaic. Eventually the book builds to a section where there is only one great mother left and two girls. Hope for the human race is essentially zero until one of the girls draws on knowledge from the past and starts cloning animals. She has some success over about eighty years, and you might expect it to end there before she’s successfully cloned a human, but then since these beings live for hundreds of years you realize she’s still got some time. If you’d like the spoiler version of the story, I offer it following this sentence. As it turns out, when the human race began to decline, they started experimenting with cloning to help the human race survive; then, they tried to use AI to enhance the defects and whatnot until it became the case that AI embedded itself into human DNA. The mothers are previous iterations of AI that get replaced with the younger versions of themselves; the great mother is the AI that’s miles ahead of the others—but now that seems to be failing and there is likely no hope left.
There’s a lot to like about Under the Eye of the Big Bird—it’s an impressive foray into some creative territory with some cutting-edge concepts that remain the human touch. The downside to the book is that the characters are, by necessity, forgettable and largely underdeveloped. I didn’t feel all that connected to the characters and then before long they would be replaced by another set that drove the world-building forward but felt more like conceptual devices than individuals. It’s a catch-22 with high concept books.
I have to give Kawakami points for offering such a unique project. Now next time when I’m in the bookstore maybe I’ll need to actually pick up her short story collections.
Happy reading!
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