If you get a chance to pick up the book, I hope you enjoy it. Kawakami’s speculative fiction is really something special.
I feel like a lot of American sci-fi that isn’t about explosions has become uncomfortably wholesome, with the characters doing therapy talk at each other while the tropes toe the line of Orientalism. A good example of this trend is A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which I hated.
Meanwhile, Kawakami writes nonhuman/posthuman people as unapologetically strange, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird leans into a non-teleological narrative structure without being confusing or precious about it. A lot of reviewers on Goodreads didn’t appreciate this, but I did.
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Date: 2025-03-17 12:24 pm (UTC)I feel like a lot of American sci-fi that isn’t about explosions has become uncomfortably wholesome, with the characters doing therapy talk at each other while the tropes toe the line of Orientalism. A good example of this trend is A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which I hated.
Meanwhile, Kawakami writes nonhuman/posthuman people as unapologetically strange, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird leans into a non-teleological narrative structure without being confusing or precious about it. A lot of reviewers on Goodreads didn’t appreciate this, but I did.