Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena

Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena

My Rating: ★

When Kiyomi Nagashima is declared brain dead after a serious car accident, her husband’s world is changed forever. Shocked and upset, Dr. Toshiaki Nagashima is suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to keep his wife alive. Rather than keeping her alive through his memories of her, he decides to start experimenting with her liver cells in his lab. Toshiaki is so enthralled by the progress he’s making that he doesn’t see that there is something very wrong with this experiment, especially when Kiyomi begins to seemingly speak to him through the harvested cells. Unfortunately for him, he only realizes the grave mistake he’s made when his experiment takes on a life of its own.

My younger brother recommended this book to me because he thought it’d be up my alley. He’s played the video games that are sequels to this book with the same title, but he’s never picked up the book himself. I decided to check out the book since it did sound like something that I would be interested in.

Unfortunately, much of the book is detailed scientific and medical information. Eve, or She as she calls herself, is mitochondria so there does need to be at least some scientific information to make the story work. However, most of it reads as a textbook rather than a science fiction novel. I think it would’ve read much better if the scientific and medical information was scaled back a bit. Getting blow by blow details of kidney transplants and a lot of science was a bit much, even for a science fiction novel. I might’ve been more interested in the attention to detail if I was really into mitochondria and lab experiments.

In the middle of all that technical information, we follow a group of rotating narrators throughout the story. Toshiaki is our primary narrator and he seemed to be a bit off from the start. Unfortunately for him, he comes to his senses when it’s too late because Eve/She is out of control and on the loose. Sachiko Asakura, my favorite character, is a student working under Toshiaki and she notices something is wrong right away but she doesn’t know what, exactly, is going on until she’s targeted. Mariko is a teenager who receives one of Kiyomi’s kidneys and finds herself targeted by Eve/She. I wish that Mariko was better developed because she was a great character. We also follow a few other characters including Kiyomi through a series of flashbacks, but the most startling perspective is Eve/Her.

I think the premise was interesting. The idea of something that has existed since before any life forms on Earth has been lurking within us and biding their time is very scary. However, the execution makes it far less scary because we’re caught up in so much technical detail that the story doesn’t start going anywhere until halfway through the book. There are also two rapes that occur in the book and both should’ve never happened and ultimately seal the fate on this book as a big miss.