新世界より (上)

(Review date: Nov 2011)

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.

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.

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...