The spectre of extinction hangs over the Japanese writer’s brilliantly strange and unsettling vision of evolution

In Keepsakes, the opening section of Hiromi Kawakami’s haunting novel-in-stories, a woman describes her world. Although peaceful and orderly, it is an unsettling and strange place: people are made in factories from animal DNA, then live startlingly brief lives, growing to adulthood in a handful of years and often dying young. Memory, both personal and historical, is fragmentary and, in the case of memories of childhood, actively suppressed. Meanwhile, the society’s anxieties are focused on preserving the children the woman helps raise and the biological diversity they embody: as one of the characters declares, “If we lose the children, that’s the end of the world”.

This spectre of genetic decline and extinction stalks all 14 of the stories that make up Under the Eye of the Big Bird. In one, men – now vanishingly rare due to their genetic fragility – are assigned to breed with particular women; although they “marry” them, the question of consent is never invoked. In another, one of the characters reflects that, “as a species, we simply don’t have what it takes”.