In “Under the Eye of the Big Bird,” Hiromi Kawakami creates a new speculative future for humanity. Translated into English by Asa Yoneda, the book is a series of interconnected vignettes that take place in a world in which sexual reproduction, family ties and societal roles have been reimagined.

Kawakami has been publishing works of speculative fiction since the 1990s and is perhaps best known among English-speaking readers for her novel “Strange Weather in Tokyo.” She often depicts societies in which transfiguration is par for the course and invents creatures who blur the lines between human, animal and plant.

The chapters in “Under the Eye of the Big Bird” are brief, and we rarely hear about the same characters twice, leaving us to focus, instead, on the dynamics of Kawakami’s invented world more than any individual narrative.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird, by Hiromi Kawakami. Translated by Asa Yoneda. 288 pages, SOFT SKULL, Fiction.

The book skirts along the edges of a wide range of themes, with reproduction being one of the most dominant. In some stories, for example, humans are conceived as they are in our world, but in another, they’re born from the stem cells of various other animals while in another, they’re cloned.

Kawakami questions social and familial functions: “Mothers” are plural, and they are a nameless, faceless mass of nonhumans who are infinitely benevolent, cheerful and compassionate, but ultimately dull. On rare occasions, a “great mother” appears, and though she has a much shorter life span than typical mothers, she is flawed, funny and more human — and therefore more likable to children. In one story, men have become scarce, with women outnumbering them 20 to 1, giving men even greater social and sexual power than they enjoy in our world. Genetic mutation is in play, too. Some mutants can “scan” people, or read their minds, and a few mutants carry a gene for prophecy, giving them messianic status.

The world is not exactly a dystopia, nor does it seem to be an improvement on reality. “As a result of multiple impacts and other catastrophic events, the human population was in free fall,” says one of the societal elders.

Japan Times

Kawakami’s speculations don’t have any apparent single upshot. The world-building seems intentionally underdeveloped in places, with the reader awash in vague impressions and sketchily outlined rules of the world order, and the stories devoid of details that would indicate any place or time in the past or future. Though places once called “countries” like “Japan” are mentioned in one story, they’re something that the narrator learns about from her husband, apparently long forgotten.

The stories do not invite us to probe further, nor to try and piece together the puzzle of this world. As one character whose role is “traveler” hints at, it’s possible that all the stories actually occur contemporaneously, and each is a different community with arbitrary rules and natural laws. This vagueness creates an atmospheric vision of a civilization adrift.

The large cast of characters and voices are better served when grounded in specificity. Few chapters are concretely linked, but in two successive ones, lovers Noah and Kyla each narrate a chapter. Their romantic story employs a predictable narrative device, in which the change in perspective illuminates a vast gulf between how the two characters perceive each other. Noah believes Kyla is an angel, but her chapter reveals a much darker and more complex woman.

Though it’s not a shocking twist, the discrepancy offers the possibility that many of the characters in the book may be unreliable narrators, suggesting that they operate under a childlike naivete, free of suspicion and cruelty, but also that they’re subjected to the control of some larger and more sinister force.

In this somewhat passionless world, it’s the rare characters bucking society with their random moods, tireless questions and obsessive behavior who give readers something worth turning the page for.