An extract from Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda
An inventive and immersive speculative novel about a future in which humans are nearing extinction – from the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo
An interview with Hiromi Kawakami and Asa Yoneda, author and translator of Under the Eye of the Big Bird
With Under the Eye of the Big Bird shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, we spoke to its author and translator about haiku, Greek myths and books that are a joy to recommend
Hiromi Kawakami
The inspirations behind Under the Eye of the Big Bird
What made me decide to write this book was the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011. That was a moment when we were confronted by the fact that humanity is no longer able to control the technologies we have created.
…And how I wrote it
It wasn’t until about three years after the nuclear meltdown that I was able to start writing Under the Eye of the Big Bird. It took me over two years to finish it. Between being inspired to write a story and actually starting to write, I need time to think. This one in particular needed more of that time. Even now, having finished it, I’m still mulling over many of the things I wrote about in it: about human groups, about relationships between individuals, and about where we’re heading as a species.
The book that made me fall in love with reading
Greek myths, Norse myths, Arabian Nights, Journey to the West, Japanese myths – that’s what I would read over and over again. The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, too. It’s from these books that I learned that stories can be have infinite depth.
Hiromi Kawakami
© Rinko KawauchiThe book that made me want to become a writer
It was the short story ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel García Márquez, which I read when I was in university. I thought, ‘This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to write!’ But a little while later, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and became discouraged. I thought to myself, ‘I could never write that’.
Having lived a little longer now, I’ve fortunately come to feel that, although of course I’ll never write something like García Márquez, I might be able to write something else, which takes a different form.
The book that changed the way I think about the world
Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics.
A book originally written in Japanese that I would recommend to English-language readers.
Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In 18th century Japan, haiku was on the verge of becoming a sort of game-like literary entertainment. Bashō elevated this poetic form, opening up new meaning for it. He was also a traveller who wrote poems in each place he went.
I write haiku, too, and Bashō is one of the poets I always return to when composing my own.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Between being inspired to write a story and actually starting to write, I need time to think. This one in particular needed more of that time
— Hiromi Kawakami
Asa Yoneda
The inspiration and process behind my translation of Under the Eye of the Big Bird
It’s taken the better part of a decade for this book to come out in English. Our world has definitely changed in the meantime, but as much as I wish it could have happened differently, I also wonder whether this hasn’t turned out to be the right time for Anglophone readers after all; in this story, ten years is but the turn of a page.
The book that made me fall in love with reading
When I was eight, I accidentally read part of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Boy did it scare me into learning more about the world.
The book that made me want to become a translator
Growing up in multilingual environments, it somehow didn’t occur to me that books would need to be translated at all. (If one wanted to read a book, surely one ought to learn the language it was written in?) Then I read Maryellen Toman Mori’s translation of Abe Kobo’s Kangaroo Notebook before reading the original, and realised that there were two different and wonderful books where there’d once been one (and before that, none).
The translator whose work I always look out for
I only read in two languages, but I take my hat off to the many brilliant translators working from English into Japanese – their job is very different from mine.
The book I’m reading at the moment
A book that’s loud enough to drown out the noise of the world outside: Nicola Barker’s TonyInterruptor.
Asa Yoneda
A book originally written in Japanese that I would recommend to English-language readers
When I first started translating, I was mainly interested in poetry and things like language, form, argument, emotion… When Royall Tyler’s translation of The Tale of Genji came out, I saw how narrative could exist in and through and alongside these things rather than separately or in opposition to them.
The International Booker Prize-nominated book everyone should read
As far as a book that’s a joy to recommend goes, I’m Team Cursed Bunny. My favourite is the last story, ‘Reunion’.
Why is translated fiction so appealing to a new generation of English-language readers?
Perhaps it’s because the rest of the world is more familiar and more appealing, yet less accessible as of late? (I’m over 35, but in my day we called it Brexit.) Why aren’t other readers keeping up, I wonder.
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
I take my hat off to the many brilliant translators working from English into Japanese – their job is very different from mine
— Asa Yoneda
