People are produced in factories. Communities exist in isolation, spread out from one another by design. Children are raised by groups of mothers, a network of caretakers who may not be altogether human. One narrator seems closer to vegetable than animal. A man can project his mind onto the brain of a bird, but the technology for space travel is long lost. Earth is a place of dread, and humanity might be done for. The problem, summarized by one character: “how to preserve even a slim chance that we might someday thrive on this planet again.”
This is the world of Hiromi Kawakami’s haunting latest, “Under the Eye of the Big Bird,” a novel of connected vignettes all set in a terrible far future. But I started to think of it more as an assemblage of narrative Punnett squares, the details and characters of each section receding or recurring, vying for the dominant plot. It’s less experimental fiction and more fiction on the human experiment — what kinds of new approaches to mating, community and family will allow people to survive? It’s not quite correct to call all the characters “people,” and that’s part of the point. To continue living, this book suggests, people might need to become something else.
In the first chapter, “Keepsakes,” the world’s only remaining humans are manufactured from animals, but “none of us is allowed to know what our animal of origin is.” When someone dies, the surviving spouse can collect an “analogous bone,” shaped like the miniature skull of their loved one’s animal ancestor. (The narrator’s own dead husband was derived from a dolphin.) In “Changes,” certain people have evolved to possess new and extraordinary abilities. The young narrator, Kyla, is a “scanner,” someone who can read minds. When she scans Noah, the boy with whom she will eventually start a family, she finds that his “despair” is “the color of an amethyst.” Kyla and Noah are human, but nevertheless have something mineral about them, even if only metaphorically.
Translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, Kawakami’s prose is often clinically deadpan, but she also finds humor and warmth in the puzzles of existence and extinction. A scene between two clones leads to the wonderfully daffy sentence, “I asked me, but I shook my head.” One narrator describes a dwindling population in terms of “head count,” and another accuses humankind of “racking up more and more history.” It’s the kind of playful language that makes the end of the world sound like a field trip gone awry. Analogous bones manage to be a bit terrifying while retaining the texture of prizes at the bottom of a cereal box. Not quite a world through rose-colored glasses, but the despair is amethyst.
If a timeline coalesces, it follows the work of the “watchers,” a group of clones raised by the aforementioned mothers to travel by hovercraft and “maintain continuous observation over the population.” One chapter clocks in at 5,000 years ahead of our present moment. It’s all the future, but which parts are closer than they appear?
“Under the Eye of the Big Bird” bucks linear narrative, constantly swerving and doubling back — a descendant might resemble an ancestor, until we realize the chapters have been marching in a different direction. In “Roaming,” a watcher discovers a community so deeply unfamiliar, so far from his idea of humanity, he experiences disgust: “Some kind of preverbal, instinctive rejection dawned in me the more I observed them.” It’s a moving reversal; this community has already been introduced in the prior chapter, through the experiences of a young girl named “8 of 15” whose strange world is presented with clarity, curiosity and affection.
The reader, too, has watched these characters living, falling in love, wondering about the meaning of hate. In Kawakami’s soupy chronology, neither evolution nor extinction is linear. We might become what we’ve already been, and we might have already been what we can’t imagine becoming.
The post To Survive in the Future, Humanity May Need to Become Less Human appeared first on New York Times.
