It could be said that Rei’s cold and factual approach, one that provides no room for emotional judgments, is a rational survival mechanism he adopted to adapt to his harsh environment. To him, being alive is the same as being human, so even if an individual possesses some sort of physical or mental deficiency it is impossible for Rei to question their humanity. The essential thing is that they are alive.
That’s why Rei is focused on the imperative of survival. Despite the fact that he flies a highly advanced fighter plane and doesn’t proactively participate in the battles on the front line, he still has a strong feeling that death is never far from him. The conviction that they must kill the enemy or be killed themselves could explain the high success rate of the SAF pilots. In the end, the battlefield demands the coldhearted living, not the empathic dead. Without recognizing that the war itself produces inhumanity, criticizing Rei’s decisions as “inhuman” is nonsensical.
Surely we could apply this to machine intelligence as well. Let’s take a look at Chapter VI, “All Systems Normal.” The unmanned Yukikaze kills Captain O’Donnell aboard the Fand II by instructing it to execute violent evasive maneuvers. If it hadn’t done so, the Fand II would have been shot down. However, there was also the possibility that O’Donnell might have been saved if Yukikaze had sacrificed herself. However, Yukikaze never even considered that course of action. Because she “learned” how to fight from Rei, whose prime directive was to survive, no matter what, Yukikaze had been trained to act a certain way on the battlefield. You could say that what she did was inevitable.
Fighter planes are built to fight. Their objective is always one of destruction. That’s true in reality and true for the reality within the novel. So long as a fighter plane’s electronic brain is given the objective of destroying an enemy so that it can survive, it will continue to carry out actions which we humans may regard as horrifying but which are, according to the logic of that objective, entirely appropriate. It is we humans alone who apply the rule of whether what machines do is “human” or “inhuman,” as a machine intelligence does not yet exist that can challenge us on the subject.
The whole concept of “humanity” is extremely vague, and tied as we are to a human point of view, and depending on our personalities, some of us can’t help but be uncomfortable with using terms like “human nature.” I secretly feel that Yukikaze is a product of that discomfort. The author devoted a lot of his later works to portraying machine intelligence in what I’ve often thought of as his search for the key to unlock the very real conundrum of the human and the inhuman.
I find the image of Yukikaze as a battle spirit dancing in the skies of Faery to be a beautiful one. In fact, it’s hard for me to believe that people can’t see the beauty in such high-performance machines. However, although Yukikaze is beautiful, she was created to fight. I have a momentary thought: if Yukikaze were not a weapon of destruction and slaughter and had been made merely for the sake of flying, would it even matter as long as we deny her her own identity? Rei accepted her as an individual. He saw her not as a goddess of destruction but as a spirit of the wind who flew free. Yukikaze herself would most likely reject his selfish view of her as nonsense either way. For Yukikaze, the simple fact of her existence would most likely be enough.
THE JAM ARE THERE
YUKIKAZE WAS FIRST released in 1984, a year when the topic of literary conversation was dominated by George Orwell’s book. Today, there are probably people reading this revised edition of Yukikaze who weren’t even born then.
At that time, Chōhei Kambayashi was already known as an energetic rising star who enthralled science fiction fans with a succession of works overflowing with a wisdom so sharp that it seemed to threaten to cut off the fingers of those who turned the pages. Even so, to be honest, I think the unusual breadth of his body of work up to that point generated a vague sense of unease in not a few of his readers. Yes, genius is a fairly impressive thing to behold, but where was this author going? What would he try to write next? Would he fall into the trap of being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, a writer who produced nothing more than a string of clever diversions? But when a lone plane soared through the skies of Faery, I was convinced: this author was going to become one whose contributions would be writ large in the history of Japanese science fiction.
With Yukikaze, Chōhei Kambayashi distilled the essence of the themes on which he would stake his life as an author and infused them fully into a single work. What are “words”? What are “machines”? What are the “humans” who make and use them, and who are made and used in return? These basic questions were not presented as abstract philosophical arguments but were instead developed as concrete reality for the characters to deal with. Kambayashi was able to take these questions, which he had initially raised in his early short works like Kotoba Tsukai Shi (The Wordsmith) and others, and turn them into gripping, exciting stories in both novel and serialized form with the publication of Kateki wa Kaizoku (Pirates Are the Enemy) and Yukikaze within half a year of each other. It was philosophical speculation turned entertainment, and the enjoyment of the stories led to fresh speculation. It was truly what science fiction aspires to be.
The reader who has picked up Yukikaze knowing it’s a special work but hasn’t yet read it might not imagine how the basic questions of human existence are hidden in what appears to just be a story about a cool fighter plane battling enemies in the skies of an alien planet. That said, you don’t have to read it as some sort of deep work that deals with these complicated issues. If you don’t go into it looking for deep meaning and simply become intoxicated by the story, as I did, then you will undoubtedly be led to think about these important things on your own.
There’re the JAM, who invade Earth via a hyperspace “Passageway” that appears suddenly in the Antarctic. On the other side of the Passageway lies the planet Faery, the actual location of which is unknown. To halt the alien invasion at the water’s edge, so to speak, humanity organizes a supranational air force and constructs frontline bases on Faery. Within the Faery Air Force are a group of coldhearted pilots who keep even their own allies at a distance: the 5th Squadron of the Special Air Force, a.k.a. Boomerang Squadron. Their duty is to not directly join in the battle but rather to single-mindedly gather combat intelligence and then get back to base alive, even if it means letting their fellow pilots die. And for this purpose, they have been given Super Sylphs, the most powerful fighter planes in the Faery Air Force, which are equipped with highly advanced computer systems, high-output engines, and powerful weaponry for self-defense. The soldiers of Boomerang Squadron are, naturally, ultra-elite pilots, and in carrying out their heartless duty they trust the judgment of their computers far more than that of their fellow humans. They’re people who require special personalities which allow them to practically become one with their machines; at one point in the novel they’re described as “machines that are, through some accident of fate, in human form.” First Lieutenant Rei Fukai, ace pilot of the SAF, flies into battle with Yukikaze, the plane he trusts more than any human, so that he can survive another day…