Japanese Literature discussion
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Under the Eye of the Big Bird
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2025/04 Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami
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Excited to see how the discussion of this one goes! And if she will make the shortlist of the Bookerprize, I loved it and saw a lot of SF influences reflected in this book.
O, very nice ! I’ve recently read “Manazuru” and “Kamisama”, 1998 & 2011. I like her writing style!
I loved it and it is currently my favourite of the International Booker Prize long listed books. My review can be found here, it is structured per story in the novel, but I would recommend going in blank might be the best approach for the book to yield its secrets. Review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Henk, I look forward to reading your review after finishing the book. -Jack
I’m reasonably happy with the way my review for the ARB turned out: https://asianreviewofbooks.com/under-.... I’m excited to finally have folks to discuss the book with!
Excellent review Alison!
Thanks! I just realized it’s quoted on the Booker Prize website. ☺️
I'm a bit unclear on the meaning of the Japanese title (大きな鳥にさらわれないよう)"Doing our best not to be abducted by the big bird"?
"Doing our best to not be monopolized by the big bird"? (jisho.org tells me the kana-only version of sarau means monopolize)
On another note, the title page says this is a novel. It doesn't read like a novel. I'm on chapter/story three, and so far the chapters/stories don't seem to have anything to do with one another. The "I" in chapter two says she has no name, but the "I" in chapter three starts by mentioning hers!
That quibble aside, I am greatly enjoying these 'stories'.
The penultimate story binds the book and the stories together in my opinion, but it is definitely not a traditional novel, fully agreed!
The stories do start tying together. I'm a third of the way in now where we get an overview of what's going on in the world.I enjoy linked stories and settings that reveal themselves late. This is both. I expect to be disappointed when it's over.
I finished it while the internet was out at work (can't do anything productive without internet). I look forward to discussing it later in the month when I'm allowed to spoil the ending.Some questions to discuss:
1) Is the penultimate chapter too exhaustive? Could it have left any of that out? And what did it leave out?
2) Are all the chapters in chronological order? Which ones are obviously not, and which ones might not be?
3) What SF books would people compare this to?
A future history, interesting and thoughtful, and, I feel, a possible outcome of us all.
Just now shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, very happy with that!
Bill wrote: "I finished it while the internet was out at work (can't do anything productive without internet). I look forward to discussing it later in the month when I'm allowed to spoil the ending.Some ques..."
1) I found that the penultimate story bound a lot of the novel together, but have read a lot of thoughts as well that it is too much explaining. I found it nice to get some more definite bearings and to get some assumptions explicitly confirmed.
2) What I think about this will probably be a spoiler so let's just say that I liked the take on time as not just being linear.
3) Under the Eye of the Big Bird reminds me a bit of How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu or Dune in the ultra long take on humanity. Or Ilium by Dan Simmons, which has humanity post apocalypse being herded. Or the last part of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. International Booker Prize judge Anton Hur own work Toward Eternity and Foundation by Isaac Asimov and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon come to mind as well, as does long listed Booker novel Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward.
I will come back to make a proper post when I've finished reading, but I started the book yesterday and am only 40 pages in and already blown away by it.
Folks have been really careful about anything that might be a spoiler for those that have not finished the novel. So maybe we can end the spoiler free zone here————————————————
If you have NOT finished the book yet STOP HERE!
————————————————
Ok, below feel free to discuss anything about the novel….
We're on to the next month, so I don't think spoilers are necessary anymore. Plus I'm saying this after Jack's big STOP HERE ^_^The book is about the great experiment performed on humanity over many thousands of years by the Mothers and the Watchers to save humanity from extinction through a kind of cultural/genetic exhaustion. It starts with the end (though it doesn't tell us so), then goes back to the middle, and eventually gives us the beginning. The penultimate chapter that flashes back to the beginning tries to be too complete and 'exhausts' at least this reader. Yet it still leaves some things unsaid.
The biggest is that we never get to see the point of view of the Mothers. They can't be totally alien and incomprehensible, since they raise the Watchers from childhood and are partly human themselves. What do they think of the whole experiment? Why did they give it up in the end? Surely they didn't just throw in the towel when the messiah figure caused people to start moving around and break down the isolation of communities? If the Mothers & Watchers caused this isolation before, they could have limited its breakdown during the time of the messiah and treated larger groups of interconnected communities as another variation in the experiment.
The concept of humanity going slowly extinct has traction in SF, and even a few Japanese examples come to mind. As a group we read Tawada Yoko's The Emissary (aka The Last Children in Tokyo). There's Ashinano Hitoshi's manga Yokohama Shopping Log, where human numbers are shrinking and the world is slowly going to ruin. There's Kishi Yusuke's novels From the New World (Not translated, but the anime and manga are. Don't read the manga; watch the anime) where a remnant of humanity exists among a large population of non-humans. Non Japanese examples of this decline exist in old SF like Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time and M John Harrison's The Pastel City. But of these only Yokohama takes a long view of the situation, and even then only over a few generations.
Someone is bound to mention Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (or perhaps more obscurely H Beam Piper's First Cycle) as an example of the long view. But neither really has characters in it. Under the Eye of the Big Bird gives us chapters focusing on characters before the story skips ahead to other characters somewhere in the long expanse of time.
One advantage of Under the Eye of the Big Bird is how it can be seen as a set of social experiments in how to organize human society. Another is how for most of the book it's left to the reader to puzzle out how all the pieces fit together. Yet it's disappointing that the resolution is both too long winded and incomplete to give closure. I'm left enjoying the pieces but not the whole.
The Booker Prizes put out a readers guide for Under the Eye of the Big Bird in April 2025.https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke...
It has some Q&A and discussion points that may be interesting to consider after reading the novel.
For example:
In an interview with the Booker Prizes website, Hiromi Kawakami said the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in 2011 inspired her to write Under the Eye of the Big Bird, marking a moment when humanity was ‘no longer able to control the technologies we have created’. Discuss how this concern is reflected within the narrative.
Thanks for posting! I am very happy this got short-listed for the International Booker. I would say in a sense the mothers, which I only slowly while reading found out where non-human, rather than a religious cult like the Bene Gesserit, are a good example where the things invented to guide us take a different route (and definitely hold more knowledge than the average resident of the world Kawakami sketches). But also systems like the village isolation and factories operate on a scale that is hard to comprehend for any inhabitants of the world or even a reader, which indeed is interesting and almost a foreshadowing of how AI could surpass us, even though the book is pre-ChatGPT 10 years old.
I would like to explore her other books that have a fantasy, speculative fiction or SF bent. Some that were suggested to me:
People From My Neighbourhood (2016jpn/2023eng),
Dragon Palace (2002jpn/2023eng)
The Third Love (2020jpn/2024eng) - a timeslip romance (I don't understand the release dates for this. It is available from Granta Books in HB but the official US release may be 10/11/2025 from Catapult)
also Parade: A Folk Tale (2002?jpn/2019eng from Soft Skull)
Oh the Third Love sounds good! I will nominate that somewhere for the monthly reads!
Can't wait to read this one. The third love was a great book, even though my personal favourites of Kawakami will always be Strange weather in Tokyo and Record of a night too brief.
After Bill’s comments above, I think I am not finished with this group read. I want to read again and also Third Love (at least). I have much more of Kawakami to explore.
Japanese Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
Under the Eye of the Big Bird (other topics)How High We Go in the Dark (other topics)
Dune (other topics)
Ilium (other topics)
Seveneves (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Sequoia Nagamatsu (other topics)Dan Simmons (other topics)
Neal Stephenson (other topics)
Anton Hur (other topics)
Isaac Asimov (other topics)
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Hiromi Kawakami (川上 弘美, Kawakami Hiromi, born 1958) is a Japanese writer known for her off-beat fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature. Her work has been adapted for film, and has been translated into more than 15 languages. (Credit Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirom... )
Under the Eye of the Big Bird was published in English in 2024. Its original Japanese publication was 2016.