By my reckoning, as I start to write this, the announcement for the winner of the International Booker 2025 is about a full day away, taking international time differences into account. Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird is shortlisted this year. I thought it was an interesting book, but my initial gut instinct is that it won’t win. This is despite it being the favourite at 2/1 odds. However, the book has all the hallmarks of a winner. It is well written and engaging. Its multiple narrative perspectives and shifting chronology defamiliarize and dislocate the reader, as the narrative requires, while still delivering a cogent and compelling story in the broader arc of the novel. It’s the sort of thing Booker judges like. And the novel addresses several current issues that concern the long-term prospects of humanity, relating to advancements in science and computer technology that have become increasingly salient in popular culture.

The main reason I feel the novel won’t win – though it very likely might – is a sense that while the issues it raises are important, Kawakami’s narrative treads well-covered ground, and I thought the second last chapter was a somewhat obvious exposition. Against this judgment is the fact that I have not had time to read further into the shortlist than this one book.

One other aspect of the novel that some readers may dislike is the fact that Under the Eye of the Big Bird lacks any main characters, even though each chapter presents personal stories, sometimes developed further in succeeding chapters. There is the story of Rien and her uncertainties about her relationship with her husband, or Emma who feels targeted for being different at her school. Or the story of Noah and Kyla, and the common experience of infidelity. Kawakami’s skill as a short story writer serves her well in these instances. These are common and identifiable human experiences. But this is a novel about future history: about where we, as a species, are heading. It is a speculative path other writers and films makers have already explored, about our viable future on this planet and the increasingly real advancement of machine intelligence. Blade Runner and its replicants did it. The frightening HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey did it. Stories like these blurred the line between human and synthetic intelligence. They made us fearful of the possible outcome of creating machines with intelligences that surpassed our own; of machines with agendas antithetical to our own interests. In The Matrix films humans have largely become redundant, except for the power drawn from our warm bodies. In The Terminator films computers have taken over and they have weaponised powerful physical avatars which can combat humans in the real world.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is not so intensely frightening, partly because its action is not as temporally focussed and urgent, and Artificial Intelligence has been reimagined from the bogeyman of much science fiction. Roy Batty in Blade Runner fought desperately to prolong his artificially shortened life, while for Sarah Conner it was a matter of kill or be killed in her battle with the Terminator. Kawakami’s premise is far more protracted and gentler. We are about eight thousand years in the future, and the action of the story takes place over thousands of years, too. This is because the story centres upon a plan to save humanity which will take many thousands of years to succeed, if it does at all. Kawakami draws upon the promises and fears associated with current science and technology to tell her story. Human cloning is an important aspect of that story, as is the emergence of fully autonomous artificial intelligence. But the crux of the plan, the brain-child of two men, Jakob and Ian, who clone themselves throughout the centuries to guide its implementation, relies upon evolution, itself. Human fertility rates have dropped and the world’s human population has fallen to dangerously low levels. The idea that humans might become extinct is a serious premise of this novel.

Now, this thought had my attention. Again, Kawakami is ploughing a well-tilled field here. P.D. James’ The Children of Men raised the unthinkable thought, that we are only a generation or two away from going down if there is a fertility crisis. The premise of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale rests on how a fertility crisis could affect social and political change. Kawakami puts her own twist on this idea. Her novel seems to respond to a presumption that humanity has reached a biological and social apogee in the early 21st century. We study early humans, for instance, but the idea that we might still be in the process of evolving is not generally discussed. Of course, religious thinking has possibly contributed to this attitude. A belief that humans were created and therefore complete and perfect in their incarnation is a presumption implicit in several theologies. But with human populations dangerously in decline, Ian and Jakob’s grand plan is to kick start human evolution once more. That is, to create circumstances that might encourage beneficial human mutations so as to more successfully cope with a changing world. To do this, small collectives of humans have been isolated from each other so that the forces of evolution might once again impact human development. It’s an idea that may have been drawn from Darwin’s study of the Galapagos Islands, where he saw distinct differences in animals from one island to the next, where populations were isolated by the sea. In Under the Eye of the Big Bird, human evolution turns up some interesting mutations that might seem familiar to fans of the X-Men: mind-reading; telekinesis; even the ability to photosynthesise. Is a human who has plant attributes anything like what we understand to be a human anymore? The common science fiction trope that humans might merge with machines as they evolve is also explored. But most challenging of all to our notion of humanity, is the emergence of humans whose DNA is patterned upon animals. Is this thought a travesty, or are radical changes in the human genome something to be expected over vast tracts of time? To think otherwise is to believe our species is now fixed and unchanging: that the social world has overcome the natural. But to accept the premise is somewhat disquieting.

So, Under the Eye of the Big Bird explores topical issues, many of which have some antecedent in fiction or film. However, the appeal of this novel will also depend upon your expectations as a reader. I personally enjoyed the unfolding narrative and the sense of mystery surrounding the opening chapters, along with the long reveal of the full scope of this story: of exactly how far the author was willing to take her premise. But for readers who prefer a chronological narrative, this may be a challenge. The opening chapters, for instance, logically occur after the last chapters of the novel. The use of cloning and the extended lifespans of some characters means timelines are more ambiguous, too. For those who may feel a little lost in the opening chapters, skipping ahead to the sixth chapter, ‘Echoes’, might help to contextualise what is happening in the earlier chapters. For those wanting a broader context, still, reading the second last chapter, ‘Destination’, first, really spells out what the entire novel is about, which some readers may find useful if waiting for answers and relishing some of the mystery of the novel is not your thing. Nevertheless, the existence of this second last chapter is one of the weaker aspects of the novel, in my opinion, not for its ideas, but the heavy burden of exposition it bears to help explain aspects of the story and tie its plot together.

Given the timescales involved, the novel is not heavily character driven. There are characters who span several chapters, or whose story is revisited later in the book. We can follow the sad story of Noah, for instance, who is capable of reading minds yet finds it difficult to connect with others on a personal level. But I found that characters who drew out the intellectual premise of the novel seemed most compelling. Aisha, who can predict the future and heal with the laying on of hands, predictably finds herself the centre of a cult. Her following raises questions about the nature of belief, of course, but also the long and difficult path science offers when pitted against the immediate needs of humanity: for understanding, for our natural desire to be together, and security. And this is the point: characters serve to tell the story of a new emerging world rather than serving the traditional desire a reader may have to connect with characters over the course of a novel. For some readers, this will be a downside of the novel, though the structure of the story dictates it. We are humans after all, interested in the lives of others when we read. But the novel very directly asks whether our propensity to love and hate one another is a defining aspect of humanity, or whether we would be better served collectively if we did not to feel these emotions. The issues of race, social outcastes and othering feature heavily in the text, as a result.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is an interesting exploration of these ideas, and it becomes easier to see the shape and structure of the novel as it progresses. But it is a groping, tentative reading experience that brings you into this world, curious and doubtful, and you will have to trust that Kawakami has a definite path she wishes you to follow. I found this a fascinating read, even though I was not as engrossed as I was when I read Kawakami’s short story collection, People from my Neighbourhood. Initially, Under the Eye of the Big Bird feels like a collection of related short stories, too, but it emerges as a coherent and thought-provoking examination of the likely fate of humanity through the use of science fiction tropes.