Shinsekai Yori by Kishi Yusuke
This SF novel won the Nihon SF Taishō Award in 2008. It's a very long book -- in the paperback edition I have it is over 1500 pages split across three volumes. It's not a huge world-spanning adventure; it's an examination of a small and essentially isolated community living in Japan perhaps a thousand years in the future. The author has won prizes for mystery fiction before, and some of the way he unfolds the plot is reminiscent of a good mystery.
I'm going to start this review with the opening paragraphs because they helpfully set the scene:
深夜、あたりが静かになってから、椅子に深く腰掛けて、目を閉じてみることがある。
浮かんでくるのは、判で押したように、いつも同じ光景だ。
お堂の暗闇をバックに護摩壇の上で燃えさかる炎。地の底から響いてくる真言の朗唱に、
そのたびに、なぜこの光景なのだろうと不思議になる。
わたしが十二歳だったあの晩からは、すでに二十三年の月日が流れた。その間、
本当にさまざまな出来事があった。想像だにしていなかった悲しく恐ろしい事件も。
わたしが、それまで信じてきたことは、根底から覆されてしまったはずである。
それなのに、今でも最初に頭に浮かぶのは、どうして、あの晩のことなのだろう。
わたしに与えられた催眠暗示は、それほど強力だったのか。
ときどき、わたしは、いまだに洗脳から脱し切っていないような気さえするのだ。
The story is framed as a sort of memoir written by the narrator, Saki, so that people in the future might be able to avoid the recurrence of an (undescribed) tragedy.
It starts with her childhood in a small community which seems quiet and tranquil, but of course we know from the opening paragraphs that not everything is as it seems here (and Saki in her narrator's voice drops in the odd ominous reminder from time to time). I really liked this opening section -- it's quite slow moving, but you get to build up clues about how this community actually works (and of course about what is going to go wrong). For instance, Saki mentions early on that her father is the town mayor but her mother's job as head librarian is much more important to their society, but she doesn't say why, leaving you to make your own guesses.
At the end of the first section there's an event where the characters (and thus the reader) find out a big chunk of information about what's going on in their society; this then leads in to the first of a sequence of more action/adventure sequences, which eventually culminates in the 'tragedy' Saki mentions in the introduction. Along the way we find out more about the choices Saki's society has made and some of the prices they've had to pay for those choices.
Mostly I found this not to be a particularly difficult read once I got started, although obviously the sheer length means I couldn't recommend it to a beginner. There are one or two sections with descriptions of the local wildlife which were painful to work through; if you don't look up a list of bird names in order to find out whether they're birds that currently exist in Japan or new ones that only exist in the author's universe, then you might have dropped a subtle hint that the author put in. (You don't actually miss too much if you skip those vocabulary lookups, in fact.)
I really enjoyed this; I was worried that the length of it would make it a bit of a slog, but the story drew me in and I raced through all three volumes in less than a month. I particularly liked the way the author gradually introduces the reader to the society his characters live in, and to the reasons why they made the choices they did, as well as the problems that result. Strongly recommended -- if you're happy to tackle a 1500 page novel...
Your review was helpful, the book seems to keep it up till the very end, so I'll be sure to continue reading it.
Thanks a lot!
There's an anime and manga based on it, and the anime is airing on Japanese TV now, making this story fairly well known in Japan. If you look at the manga, the characters are nothing like what I imagined them to be--the images seem to be playing up the prepubescent sex appeal of Saki, which wasn't the feel that I got from of the novel at all. But if I have a chance, I would like to watch the anime from the beginning after reading the whole novel.
I love the ominous foreshadowing that Kishi Yusuke does so well. He feeds the reader just enough information to excite your curiousity and makes you read between the lines to imagine new horrors at every turn. In this sense I'm reminded of what he did with his very controlled information disclosure in The Crimson Labyrinth, but this novel may have more social relevance since it purports to portray Japan in the far furture.
OMG, the ミノシロモドキ were awesome. I loved the バケネズミ too.
What I had in mind for the birds was a pretty small thing really, but I think that in the early sections if you know that some of the birds and animals they casually mention are actually completely new species it adds a bit to the "this is like our world but there's something definitely different, though the characters themselves aren't conscious of it being different" effect the author is creating. It's not a big deal if you miss that at the time and then pick it up later when there are more specific descriptions of some of them, though.