In “Under the Eye of the Big Bird,” Hiromi Kawakami creates a new speculative future for humanity. Translated into English by Asa Yoneda, the book is a series of interconnected vignettes that take place in a world in which sexual reproduction, family ties and societal roles have been reimagined.
Kawakami has been publishing works of speculative fiction since the 1990s and is perhaps best known among English-speaking readers for her novel “Strange Weather in Tokyo.” She often depicts societies in which transfiguration is par for the course and invents creatures who blur the lines between human, animal and plant.
The chapters in “Under the Eye of the Big Bird” are brief, and we rarely hear about the same characters twice, leaving us to focus, instead, on the dynamics of Kawakami’s invented world more than any individual narrative.
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