Keiichirō Hirano (平野 啓一郎 Hirano Keiichirō, born June 22, 1975) is a Japanese novelist.
Hirano was born in Gamagori, Aichi prefecture, Japan. He published his first novel (Nisshoku, 日蝕) in 1998 and won the Akutagawa Prize the next year as one of the youngest winners ever (at 23 years of age). He graduated from the Law Department of Kyoto University in 1999. In 2005 he was nominated as a cultural ambassador and spent a year in France.
The title "本心" meaning "true feelings" is a story set in a near-future Japan. The year is 2040 and everywhere you go there's AI and VR. There's even a new law where if people feel the need to die they can whenever if they get doctors' approval. We follow a guy who's mother just died in an accident. But before that, his mom tells him that she decided to die on her will, because she's "had enough." He wants to find out what made her want to choose death when things were going well. He goes to a place where AI is created and he asks them to create his AI mom. Will he ever find out what really made his mom want to end her life when she still had more years to live? My heart would break and I'd panic if my mom says "I'm thinking about ending my life because I lived plenty. I even got a doctor's approval" WHAT?
This book was so thick but was worth reading. It touched on many subjects. Life and death. Inequality. Happiness. AI vs Humans. AI can only work in a pattern, but humans, we can change. You're a different person today than you were yesterday and I feel that is something I should feel appreciative and fortunate about.
I'm always impressed the way Mr. Hirano reflect real social issues in his novel. The protagonist seems too naive to sympathise (but it's understandable as he's early 30 whose mother suddenly died away by an accident), but the story made me think how to adopt the death of someone very close, and also multiple personas that we all have.