Book of the Week: UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda)
“Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird tells the story of humanity’s evolution on an epic scale that spans as far into the future as the human imagination could possibly allow. In each of its chapters, separated by eons but gracefully unified under the crystalline clarity of Asa Yoneda’s seemingly timeless translation, a variegated cast of posthuman characters each interrogate what it means to be not an individual or a nation but an entire species, that unit of being we currently and urgently struggle so much to grasp, much to the cost to the planet we live on and our own survival.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation.
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small groups across the planet under the observation and care of AI ‘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 species 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.