If I remember correctly, this book was recommended quite a few times on the Our Opinions Are Correct’s Discord server. Always looking for Japanese Sci-Fi stories, the fact that this book had been translated in English made it even more accessible.

What is it about?

The book is hard to summarise simply without spoiling its core ideas or twists. The premise is that the human population has dropped to dramatic levels. Each chapter follows a specific group of people through the eyes and thoughts of a different person each time.

A bit more

I had a hard time getting into the first chapters. I didn’t like the writing style, a very dry Subject-Verb-Complement sentences. Furthermore, the first chapters introduce a lot of elements without providing context. You could say that’s common in Sci-Fi stories but here, it felt like a wall and it didn’t draw me in Hiromi Kawakami’s world. So, as I too often do, I put it aside for a few months.

Flash forward to now and I picked it again because my ongoing pile was reaching dangerous levels once again. I pushed through and was finally sucked into the world. What I felt unwelcoming at first became a pointillist description of Kawakami’s world. Not a high-definition picture with a lot of details but hints, vibrant points across places and time. A beautiful collage of points of view, of divergence of lifestyles, bodies etc

I don’t know how much the Japanese situation informed the human decline storyline. Some elements echo the country’s situation but other don’t. I have not read any of Kawakami’s other books but it seems this one is her first Sci-Fi story. I do not really like her idea of reproduction being the core driving force imposed to both male- and female-presenting characters, even though she presents groups who seem to being able to offer other paths to population growth or raison d’être. Some of the characters whose viewpoint we follow are described as exceptions or aberrations but Kawakami doesn’t seem to be able to decide wether these characters are to be emulated or disappeared.

I think the last two chapters are a failure. Up to that point, the story flowed quite nicely. These two chapters come as an intrusion, a will to close the story at any cost, a scorched-earth tactics to the world she built up to that point. The twist in the penultimate chapter is both very simplistic and current. Much better and interesting things have been written in the past 70 years on AI/robotics. This reads like something written in a few minutes by someone who just read a few OpenAI/Anthropic press-releases on Twitter in the past 2 years. It’s bad.

Final word

Overall, I liked the book. I just wish I could forget the last two chapters.