Tokyo Sympathy Tower

by Rie Qudan

The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon: a speculative, prophetic novel following a young and brilliant celebrity architect in Tokyo who takes on her most controversial project yet—perfect for readers of Klara and the Sun and Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis.

A grand, yet controversial, skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centerpiece but is filled with doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous—and much younger—boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace and in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot...

The recipient of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new global voices. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an urgent and brilliant defense of the power of language written by humans, a moving exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send-up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity.

Genres: Japan, Fiction, Science Fiction, Japanese Literature, Literary Fiction, Dystopia, Audiobook

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 2024

About the author

Rie Qudan or Rie Kudan (九段理江) (born September 27, 1990, in Saitama, Japan) is a Japanese novelist. In 2024, Qudan won the 170th Akutagawa Prize for her novel Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō[b] ("Tokyo Sympathy Tower"). She stated that about 5% of the novel was written by artificial intelligence.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

i love when a book has two completely different titles in its synopsis. can't wait to find out how this is perfect for both readers of Klara and the Sun and Chain-Gang All-Stars.

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

immediately my reading experience was not off to an auspicious start. people flagged to me that the author says she wrote this with AI. doing my own research, i found out she used ChatGPT to write the parts of this book that are ChatGPT dialogue. in some ways this is equally bad — using AI, in my opinion, is unbelievably tacky and corny — but it is not as bad, to me, as writing the book at large would have been.

what is not less bad is the cornball edgy cancel culture energy of every other part of this.

this is just ham-handed. (one of my favorite unnecessarily gross expressions.) it’s about a nearish future AI-powered society in which they build a big luxury apartment building for criminals with pitiable backgrounds, and everyone is either like “wow that’s so crazy, damn liberals” (essentially) or “how dare you question the art of sympathy!”

also the perspectives change between the loser architect and the young retail worker she’s shtupping and a racist journalist.

all of it is bizarrely literal, with no intention of letting the reader decide anything.

so weird. so corny. so out of touch. so bad.

bottom line: don’t recommend.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize 2024
Qudan caused a bona fide global scandal when she accepted the Akutagawa, as she seized the occasion to declare that she wrote the novel with the help of AI. Mind you, the judges awarded the honor not knowing how the text was crafted, so let's discuss what might have intrigued them: The novel tells the story of Sara Makina, a celebrated architect, who enters a competition to build a new prison in Tokyo, and starts an affair with a much younger, beautiful sales assistant. The envisioned prison structure is the title-giving "Sympathy Tower Tokyo", which refers to the theory of philosopher Masaki Seto: He argues that people become criminals because of the circumstances they have lived in, labeling them "homo miserabilis" and calling on society to have sympathy with them. The new prison tower is supposed to be a modern, progressive space where homo miserabilis (the Latin plural is never used, probably to avoid declination altogether) are treated well. In order to complete her task, Sara Makina asks a chatbot for help.

The whole text is a philosophical, moral tale, mainly focusing on the good ol' crime and punishment nature vs. nurture debate, ultimately asking how we as a society want to treat each other, but also pondering what builds the world, the surroundings, the prison called reality we all live in: Is it the cityscape, the architecture, the people who create things we can touch, or is it language, so the pattern that guides our thinking and helps establish what we consider culturally "normal" and who we consider our equal. Which led me to the question: Why is the building called sympathy tower, not empathy tower? It's a lot easier to pity others from a position of strength, as a homo felix, but it's a lot harder to see them as equals and try to feel their pain, to see things from their perspective. Interesting name for the prison indeed! The question of power is of course also negotiated in the relationship between rich, influential, 37-year-old Sara and the beautiful, working class, 22-year-old sales assistant Takuto.

The character of Sara Makina (machina = machine, as in deus ex machina, get it?) is inspired by real-life architect Zaha Hadid who won a competition to build the Tokyo National Stadium for the 2020 Olympics, but then the plans were scrapped (see here)- Hadid is mentioned numerous times in the novel: In Qudan's world, Hadid's stadium has been built, and Sara wants the prison tower to be perceived as architecturally corresponding with it, as they are both supposed to be innovative structures intended to change the cityscape and the thinking of Tokyo's inhabitants. At the same time, Sara struggles with language, as she knows that words are just as powerful when it comes to changing reality - ironically, the AI chatbot is built to use the cumulative knowledge of the internet, so it's looking back and uses an established pool of knowledge and moral standards, it's not looking forward, although it's technologically advanced.

So structures have been mentioned a lot by now: Architectural, language, and algorithmic structures. And this preoccupation with structures is also mirrored aesthetically in the novel, as it is constructed from the perspectives of Sara and Takuto, chat bot protocols and even an excerpt from Masaki Seto's philosophical text about the homo miserabilis, so the groundwork, the foundation of the whole prison tower endeavor. Whether a structure is balanced is also transferred to the discussion of language, for instance when the Japanese translation of the English name of the tower project is optimized: Tokyo-to Dojo-to, a rhythmic sound. And of course, the fact that the Japanese language is not constructed with an alphabet, but with characters (kanji) as well as a syllabary (hiragana and katakana) plays a role.

In an interview with German translator Ursula Gräfe, Qudan stated that she was unaware that her use of AI was that unusual; at the beginning, the attention was too much and she couldn't sleep anymore, but then she was glad that it led to her being able to bring attention to her art at a larger scale. Do I believe she didn't see the outcry coming? Not for one second. But Qudan is right that this is a text about all of us who can't avoid AI anymore. It's fun to read and hints at highly interesting points of discussion.

Extra fun fact: Sara likes to listen to Björk's Come To Me:
Jump off
Your building's on fire
And I'll catch you
I'll catch you

You can listen to the podcast crew discussing the German translation Tokyo Sympathy Tower here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short novel, winner of the Akutagawa Prize in Japan, is a novel of ideas. And most of the ideas are about language.

The story, if you can call it that, revolves around an architect who designs a gorgeous, luxurious tower that will house criminals - an idea born from a new, modern, social empathy. Society has been judgmental, society has been harsh and hurtful. Society has damaged and maligned, and much of this damage has been through language. Because language is what we are.

The real heart of the book has to do with the neutralization of language to the point where it becomes meaningless, much like a conversation with an AI chatbot. God forbid we make comparisons. God forbid a word causes someone to feel upset. Or feel... anything at all.

The author has admitted to writing about 5% of the book using AI (and these parts were actual conversations between the main character with AI). This is something I bristle at instinctively, can't help it. If Rie Qudan and her character hadn't shown disdain for AI, I would have thrown the book across the room. Instead, I do think she's shining a light on the soullessness of AI and where it's taking our language. (That said, part of me STILL wants the author to have written her own AI text, use her brilliant brain to have captured it as best she could, rather than use a robot to infuse even a small percentage of her book.)

She also has ideas specific to the Japanese language which are interesting but which I understood on a surface level, so I won't comment further on here.

The ideas that the author explores are provocative, timely, and sophisticated. I myself would prefer to have had more story rather than floating in contemplation. The world of the tower would have been fascinating to me, and to see her ideas dramatized could have been quite powerful. That's a personal preference for me, to see ideas in action rather than narrated in what seems to me a dreamy, half-lit, opium den. Does that sound judgmental? :D

2.5 stars

[Fumiko Miura]

When this novel won the Akutagawa Prize, I read a news lead saying ‘about 5% of the texts in this novel were the words written by AI’, and I got very curious how the texts generated by AI was incorporated in the novel. There were lots of misleading comments referring to AI plagiarism, but this novel is far from such a simple accusation.

A protagonist, Sara Makina, is an architect who was drawing her architectural plan for ‘Sympathy Tower Tokyo (Tokyo-to Dojo-to)’, which is a 71 stories super modern tower to house ‘Homo Miserabilis’ (in other words criminals, a term invented by an eudemonist Masaki Seto). The tower was her response to the National Stadium designed by Zaha Hadid (in the story, the stadium was actually built, but in reality, the plan of Hadid was discarded before the Tokyo Olympics 2020 due to high costs and being too modern). In the end, the story jumps to 2030, the timeline where the Sympathy Tower Tokyo was constructed in the middle of Shinjuku Gyoen park.

In the story, AI-generated sentences are clearly marked and quoted, and they are quoted to portrait the AI’s lack of ability for self-criticism and the frustration at the side of human being caused by responses of AI. Rather, the novel focuses on the fact how Japanese are thoughtlessly and deceptively using Katakana words and the Japanese language that we spit out every day. It sharply criticizes current Japanese society and its language use. Sympathy Tower Tokyo functions an imaginary icon to test us whether we can bear the future where no criticism is allowed and weaker people in the society are treated with extreme sympathy (opposite to the current reality in Japan). I found the theme of the novel and how it was worked out as a story super interesting.

[The Speculative Shelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

In near-future Japan, all criminals, now reclassified as Homo miserabilis, are considered victims of circumstance and are treated with extreme empathy. They are housed together in Sympathy Tower Tokyo, a hyper-egalitarian facility with conditions so humane that prisoners prefer to stay even when offered their freedom. The book follows Sara Machina, the tower’s architect, who grapples with the ethical consequences of her creation.

Qudan’s novel is surreal and conceptually fascinating, but ultimately left me cold. Its unclear structure and indistinct points of view make the narrative feel scattered and emotionally distant. For a story so rooted in the idea of empathy, it’s curiously devoid of warmth – an effect that may be intentional, but left me feeling hollow by the end.

Qudan’s meditation on the evolution of the Japanese language is compelling, particularly the universal idea that “words determine our reality,” a theme that threads itself throughout the book. Still, whether due to Jesse Kirkwood’s translation or the source text itself, Sympathy Tower Tokyo never quite connected for me.

Note: in keeping with the source material – roughly 5% of this review was generated with AI.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley & Edelweiss for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Bluesky

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wildly ambitious, echoing Tar and Megalopolis from Francis Coppola in conjuring an architect that tries to build a tower as revolutionary as Babel, while dealing with the changes in language under cancel culture and AI
What if uncritical self-affirmation is just a way of denying our own untapped potential?

This is a brilliant book, in only 133 pages Rie Qudan writes a novel that is breathtakingly from the now: I think this is one of the first books that captures the use of LLMs to answer questions (and the downstream impact this has on our social interactions and language) in an intelligent way.
Quoting Michelangelo in the dedication, Sympathy Tower Tokyo has ambitions, that much is clear.
It is what Booker prize nominated Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This set out to do, but now done right for 2025.

Featuring a 37 year old female starchitect Sara Machina, someone who thinks of her public persona in the third person, who feels she needs to answer Zaha Hadid’s work and stays in a hotel for a week to capture the vibes of an area. She reminded me enormously of Cate Blanchett in Tar, just using architecture as a glamorous backdrop instead of music. She has a 15 year old younger lover who works at Armani or Valentino as a sales assistant (having been at Loewe and Hermes this week in Paris, I get why the author finds this vocation for this character, these shops indeed unapologetically select their staff for their looks). She struggles with the changes in language, made more fascinating and less grumbling boomer by the different writing systems in Japan.

Interesting and very hard to translate this difference between Katakana, phonetic and used for foreign loan words and Kanji, derived from Chinese and reflecting concepts rather than sounds, and how Katakana “sound” cool. Quite similar to Dutch having more and more loan words from English and purists being troubled by this, except for Japanese apparently Katakana are more neutral and ambiguous, better able to capture terms like non-binary for instance. Fascinating example of how the Kanji term for a genderless toilet is seen as outdated by the LGBT community and the Katakana term being preferred.
So Katakana is the script for woke, with social inclusion and wellbeing being English words most often rendered in Katakana?

This simple interpretation of Sara is then however juxtaposition to the rape of the main character not being believed because of her being in a relationship with the boy at the time. Quite a complex game going on here, which creates an interesting tension. She is definitely not one dimensionally anti-woke, yet her internal monologues keep one on their toes, with statements like this to her lover:
And if we wanted a phrase that, both subjectively and objectively, more accurately conveys the reality of this relationship… I guess we’d have to say that I’m exploiting your beauty.

Humans cost money to maintain, just like buildings.

Interesting as well how Zaha Hadid national stadium is mentioned and how the 2020 olympics went through here, as this building was never realised due to spiralling costs in the real world, and this could be seen as society pushing back against architects (or even elites in general) near-utopian visions, inverse in this novel. The whole book seems to imply ongoing violence of a society where the elites leave the others behind or just think of them as a mean to satisfy themselves, clad in beautiful words and eloquence that obscure and twist this truth. The naming of Tokyo Tower, now iconic, is so interesting in this regard. Tokyo Tower (written in Katakana) was originally meant to be called Showa Tower (in Kanji) based on public voting, overturned by a committee member choosing a more future forward name that was only 13th in the popular vote. An absolutely fascinating metaphor for the central theme of the book.
On the other hand, having just visited Florence, is this not what elites have done always and now we can enjoy splendour and wonders like the Boboli gardens and the Medici chapel?
Seen through the lens of the distant future, all construction is a form of absurd destruction.
is mentioned, and seems fitting for the plans in this book, but still makes one wonder what we leave for posterity and that probably all great art was in its making seen as a shameless, reckless and way to expensive indulgence.

The central Sympathy Tower Tokyo is meant to rehabilitate criminals (rebranded to Homo Miserables) by smothering them in luxury in downtown Tokyo, to compensate for their bad childhoods that led to their crimes.
Creating a utopia always means cutting off all contact with the outside world. Same goes for dystopias.
The end of the book, where a self proclaimed racist American shows up, peters a bit out, leading to my four star rating, but I am honestly so impressed!

The way how Sara Machina loses connection and access to what she created in 133 pages very much seems an apt commentary on AI. The tower of Babel of words, conjured almost in a Solenoid manner halfway in the book, leaves it creator behind, while only offering access to the beautiful youth that outsourced his thinking and writing to AI:
As the Architect spoke, Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō was steadily forming before my eyes, but I wasn't at all convinced that this mass of words was her own creation. They sounded like something else, something familiar, and after combing my memory I realized what that something was: AI- generated text. It was a model answer, an aggregate of the average hopes and desires of everyone in the world that contained as little criticism of anything as possible. Peace. Equality. Dignity. Respect. Empathy. Coexistence. I could see the characters forming in my brain, the rush of text that began the moment you posed your question and made you keep scrolling. Once I'd pictured that endless outpour- ing of words that were as positive-sounding as they were destitute of meaning, it stopped mattering that the words were coming from the Architect's lips: I could only hear them as the product of AI-built. What happened next, for some reason, was that I began to feel something like pity for the chatbot. The poor thing, I thought, condemned to an empty life of endlessly spewing out the language it was told to spew, without ever understanding what this cut-and- paste patchwork of other people's words meant or who it was for. Of course, my sympathy was basically meaning- less, because for an AI there was no such thing as pain, or joy, or life, or getting hurt. Still, even if being human was no guarantee of a comfortable relationship with language, at least we had the option of holding our tongues when we'd rather not speak.

[Sarah ~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sympathy Tower Tokyo - Rie Qudan




في اليابان في المستقبل القريب جدًا، المعتاد مجتمعيًا هو التعاطف مع المجرمين والمذنبين ويخطط لبناء ناطحة سحاب فخمة لإيواء المجرمين وليعيشوا في رفاهية، وتشارك المهندسة المعمارية الشهيرة سارة ماكينا، في مسابقة لتصميم السجن الجديد في
طوكيوالذي سـ يُسمى '
|Sympathy Tower Tokyo'.

في هذا العالم تحظى نظرية للفيلسوف ماساكي سيتو بشعبية هائلة وهي نظرية يدعو فيها إلى التعاطف مع المجرمين باعتبارهم ضحايا ظروفهم (الإنسان البائس- الترجمة من اللاتينية). وهكذا يبدأ مشروع بناء سجن فخم للمجرمين.
تفوز سارة ماكينا بتصميم التحفة المعمارية الجديدة للمدينة، لكن تتنازعها الشكوك. إذ تقض مضجعها جريمة مروعة عاشتها في طفولتها، مما يدفعها للتساؤل عما إذا كانت تختلف جوهريًا مع قيم المشروع، الذي يفترض أن يكون ذروة مسيرتها المهنية. ووسط هذه المشاعر المتضاربة تدخل سارة في علاقة عاطفية مع بائع شاب، وتلجأ إلى روبوت دردشة ذكي بين الوقت والآخر.

قصة فلسقية وأخلاقية حول جدلية العقاب والجريمة وطبيعة البشر ودور اللغة في كل هذا..
ركزت الرواية على اللغة ودورها في تشكيل واقعنا، أظن أن الترجمة قللت -أو لم تفي الفكرة حقها كما يجب وهو أمر يتعلق بخصوصية اللغة اليابانية.اسم البرج نفسه هو ما يبدأ كل هذا في ذهن سارة ماكينا، اللغة ودورها في مجتمع يخسر هويته وبالتالي خصوصيته بسبب العولمة حيث بدلًا من تشكيل كلمات أصلية جديدة لتفسير تغييرات العالم يلجأ لـ لغة أخرى، لغة المهيمن؛ اللغة الإنجليزية...
وهنا نصل لموضوع آخر ناقشته الرواية وهو الهيمنة وتوازنات القوى، في العلاقات البشرية، في المجتمع وفي الحب...

أود أن أضيف على عجل، أن الرواية تلقي عليك أحداثًا صادمة بلا تمهيد أو تحذير، مثل تعرض سارة ماكينا لاغتصاب حين كانت طالبة في المدرسة الثانوية وتعاملها مع الأمر. كتب الحدث الجلل بشكل مزعج، والعنصرية، ألفاظ صادمة كتبت بسرعة وبلا مبالاة...

العمل قصير جدًا أقرب للنوفيلا من الرواية-أقل من 150 صفحة ..


رواية|Sympathy Tower Tokyo
، هي الرواية الفائزة بجائزة أكوتاغاوا 2024-أرفع جائزة أدبية يابانية. وعلمت بعد أن أنهيت قراءتها أن الكاتبة راي غودان اعترفت بعد فوزها أنها
استخدمت الذكاء الاصطناعي-تحديدًا|ChatGPT
في كتابتها.

وهكذا دخلنا حقبة جديدة، حقبة الأدب الذي كتب بمساعدة الذكاء الاصطناعي، لو كنت أعرف هذه المعلومة قبل قراءتها لم أكن لأقرأها...
من حقنا كقراء معرفة هذا-ويترك لنا الخيار لا أن يفرض علينا الأمر ونعرف هذا في وقت متأخر.

[Kitai · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was originally interested in Sympathy Tower Tokyo because the translator Jesse Kirkwood has translated several cute books I have read recently such as Kamogawa Food Detectives!

This was not in any way cute with the first chapter casually comparing the building of a new tower in Tokyo feeling like r*pe

I then also found out the author has admitted to using ChatGPT in the writing of this book. I am disappointed to see this published.

ARC received from Simon & Schuster

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be Babel all over again. Sympathy Tower Tokyo would throw our language into disarray; it would tear the world apart. Not because, dizzy with our architectural prowess, we had reached too close to heaven and enraged the gods, but because we had begun to abuse language, to bend and stretch and break it as we each saw fit, so that before long no one could understand what anyone else was saying.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo is the translation by Jesse Kirkwood of 東京都同情塔 by 九段理江 (Rie Qudan).

The original won the 170th Akutagawa Prize. The novel was subject to a, somewhat manufactured. scandal at the time when the author 'admitted' that around 5% of the text was written by AI. In fact, the parts written by AI were where the narrators of the novel interact with AI, and the author used AI programs to see how AI would respond. The author explains here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

And the novel, or at least the narrators, are not particular a fan of the technology:

This I liked less - his tendency to mansplain things I hadn't actually asked about. Was his smooth, polite facade really just an attempt to mask his greatest flaw - that he was, at heart, illiterate? For all his computational might, it seemed Al-built didn't have the strength to face up to his own weakness. He'd become so used to stealing the words of others without repercussion that he felt no shame, had no awareness even, of his own ignorance. The question of how humans had learned to use the word 'discrimination', of the ordeals that had led us to it and which of us had suffered through them, was of no interest to him. He was incapable of curiosity. He did not thirst for knowledge.

And this is a novel where language, communication, identity and humanity are at its core.

The book is set in an alternative near-future (2026) Tokyo. Alternative because in this world the Tokyo Olympics went ahead in 2020, despite Covid, and more crucially the Zaha Hadid design for the stadium was built, rather than cancelled in favour of a less ambitious project.

Sara Machina (牧名 沙羅) is a renowned Japanese architect in her late 30s. The translator's note, which is extremely useful for non-Japanese speaking readers, comments that the character's name is a reasonably natural one in Japanese, but would normally be Romanised as Makina, which is closer to the original pronunciation, but the character (in the original novel) has chosen to use Machina as the English equivalent, and Sara is something of an artificial intelligence herself, highly skilled at maths and drawing, highly ambitious and focused on turning her designs into actual buildings not just artistic concepts (more Bath than UCL in English uni terms), rather impersonal in her dealings with others and fond of referring to herself in the third person, and having dialogues with herself and the language-monitoring units that whirrs into action in her head, censoring what she says. She also converses with 'AI-built', a Large Language Model.

Sara is actively considering entering a contest to design and build a new tower next to, and, in her design, in architectural dialogue with, Hadid's stadium, the novel opening with her thoughts:

In the gleaming black tiles of the bathroom where my reflection lurked, I was seeing the future again. Architects can always see the future. It reveals itself to us whether we like it or not.
Sympathy... Tower... Tokyo?
Of course, as architect, the building's name wasn't mine to decide, and whatever my misgivings I was hardly in a position to change it. And yet the moment the high-pressure jet of shower water hit my face, everything about that name
Sympathy Tower Tokyo
シンパシータワートーキョー
- the sound of it, the katakana characters used to approximate the English words, and what those words meant, and all the currents of power swirling around the project - started to bother me, and now there was no going back.

The concept of the tower as envisaged by the municipal authorities who organised the contest (as Sara notes entering a design competition didn’t have to mean the architect endorsed the ideas behind it) is based on a book by the renowed sociologist and happiness scholar, Masaki Seto, 'Homo Miserabilis: The New Subjects of our Sympathy.' In it he proposed that criminals - 犯罪者 in Kanji, should instead be called ホモミゼラビリ, phonetically "homo mizerabirisu", a Katakana rendition of 'Homo Miserabilis', arguing that those who commit crimes are usually those from less fortunate circumstances.

Rather appositely, when the book was first mentioned in the novel, I was not clear if it was real, so asked ChatGPT, which promptly (see what I did there!) told me it was and gave me various details of the book and author. Only as I read on in the book, and the one described in the novel and that produced by ChatGPT diverged, did I realise this was a classic hallucinatory response.

The concept of the highly controversial シンパシータワートーキョー, again a Katakana rendition of Tokyo Sympathy Tower (the English translation has chosen to transpose the words), is for a luxury high-rise prison building in a prime part of Tokyo, where those incarcerated will be unable to live, but otherwise given complete freedom.

There are a lot of ideas in the novel, but a key one is the increasing use of Katakana both as a way to render foreign words phonetically into English, but also, the novel suggests, as a way to brush over concepts that would be starker and more controversial in Kanji.

So here Sara takes umbrage at the use of the name シンパシータワートーキョー to avoid the controversy over the building but also believing the Katakana characters to be aesthetically ugly and architecturally flimsy, embracing enthusiastically the suggestion of Takt (a man 25 years younger, who works in a designer-clothes shop and who is her companion, sort-of muse, and potential future lover) that 東京都同情塔 (Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō - essentially a Kanji version of Tokyo City Sympathy Tower, the “to” suffix for city added to make for an more pleasing sound) would be a better name:

If they called it Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō, I'd be happy to design it,' she said, suddenly changing the subject as she mopped up the oil from her spaghetti aglio e olio with a piece of bread. She spoke as though the connection with everything else she'd been saying was perfectly clear and I'd simply failed to recognize it.

'It's the insistence on having the English word "sympathy" in there that bothers me. I mean, at this rate, what's going to be left of the Japanese people ? Hang on, does that make me sound like a nationalist?'

Takt suggests that if she wins the contest then she can essentially change the name by regularising the use of the alternative any time she speaks of the building soon the public will forget the original Katakana name - it will be like those two-thousand yen bills they issued, which you hardly ever see anymore, an apt comparison that resonates personally as I was living in London but largely working in Tokyo in July 2000 when the notes were first issued, and to me they felt a perfect denomination for regular use, but were very clearly not embraced locally.)

This is an ambitious idea-driven novel - although Sara is also a memorable character - and all credit to the author for achieving what she does in just 132 pages. A very strong contender for the International Booker prize, assuming they aren't distracted by the 'controversy'.

[Dona's Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Using words to think about words was a terrible idea, really, and not something any self-respecting person would do." p82

Some books, often brilliant (like this one) but not always, can reveal their readers moral values in their responses to the book. If you like it, or don't, or could take it or leave it-- each says something different about what you value morally. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is one of those books. Themes include how we use words, how words shape our experiences, how labels affect our emotions and vice versa and how they impact group morals, and more, so much more.

This story dabbles in several linguistic and epistemological thought experiments, so if you're into philosophical fiction, like Albert Camus or Milan Kundera, I encourage you to check this out. If you're not into that, you likely will not enjoy this book.

I don't know anything about the writer's use of AI but since I know how AI works, I don't care if he did. In fact, I hope we start seeing more of this-- writers using AI without shame or embarrassment. It will help divert pressure away from disabled creatives who have been using AI for years to help them create despite their own limitations.

Thank you to Rie Qudon, Jesse Kirkwood, Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO. All views are mine.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is the decrepitude of language a symptom of an ailing culture? Or do current linguistic trends toward a political lexicon instigate a cultural turn away from the progressive that the very language suggests? How does generative AI shift our use of language? Is human speech's iterative nature analogous to that of ChatGPT's? None of this gets into the novel's dissection of architecture, criminal justice, relationships/relationality, victimhood vs. agency, utopia vs. dystopia, beauty as a ideal or praxis, etc.

I adore how this stylistically bucks various trends in translations from Japanese to English. This is not minimalist/evocative. Not contrarily baroque, but dense with explication and implication. Maybe THE most contemporary novel of the 2020s thus far while remaining surprisingly timeless. Extreme dramas of the interior with an incisive sense of humor and a persistent provocative edge. There's a narrative bravery present that few recent publications can seem to muster up.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel of ideas. Of really, really interesting ideas. But ideas that are just sort of presented, that don’t necessarily go anywhere, that stubbornly don’t cohere.

I was fascinated with this book when I started and very eager to see where Qudan was going to drive this thing. We’ve got the shifting dynamics between the Japanese script katakana, which represents sounds and is used for foreign words, and kanji, which represent words and ideas. We’ve got a luxury prison where criminals, now called Homo Miserabilis, live better than their peers on the outside. We’ve got ideas about the use of language in constructing a world and how the younger generation’s preference for katakana over kanji may or may not cause an identity crisis in the Japanese population. We’ve got the ways in which words are softened, made more sensitive, how we censor ourselves and those around us so as not to offend. Then there’s the AI component, which personally felt extraneous to everything. Perhaps it’s because I never intentionally use AI and prefer to stay outside of that realm that I did not see how this fit in or added to the previously mentioned bits of the novel.

See what I mean about filled to the brim with ideas? And I didn’t even touch on them all. Each time I was intrigued with where Qudan was going with a train of thought, we drifted somewhere else. I truly would love to see a book that has the explore all of the previously mentioned topics, this all just felt like too much for one tiny book.

The shifting dynamics between different language systems reminded me a bit of Yee-Wa’s Tongueless. In both cases the ideas are there, but the executions leave much to be desired.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should make a too-didactic shelf on here. Rie Qudan is more focused on staging ideas and shaping the readers’ thoughts rather than telling a story that sweeps you along. The architecture of the novel is the argument, and that, for me, makes the characters feel secondary and unconvincing.

⇝ 2.5 stars

[Stacia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A small book with quite a few intriguing ideas & topics. But the whole didn't fully cohere for me.

Topics include: architecture, criminal justice, language, woke-ness, AI, generational differences, & many more.

I think, even though it can spawn numerous discussion points, it never really delves into any of them &, therefore, feels like it has the overall depth of a bunch of writing prompts. You can have some heavy & open-ended prompts, each person who sees the prompt will layer on their own interpretation & meaning, but the prompt or a group of prompts still does not a story make. I'm being a bit hyperbolic when I liken it to the depth of writing prompts but there is a vagueness in this novel in spite of the intriguing topics. Ultimately I found it ambitious, thought-provoking, & also somewhat unsatisfying in the end.

[Anika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Klein, aber oho - und mit relevanter und guter Verarbeitung von digitalen Themen (KI). Rie Qudans Spiel mit Gegensatzpaaren ist eine wahre Freude, dazu kommen spannende soziologische Betrachtungen und kommunikative Ansätze (wie prägen Worte die Wirklichkeit)? Eine Prise alternative Realität gibt's obendrauf. Fazit: zeitgeistig und klug.

Mehr zum Buch in unserer ausführlichen Besprechung @ Papierstau Podcast: #323: Der Fatzke mit der Fratze

[Trin · Rating 1 out of 5]

At the start of this novel, Qudan raises some interesting questions, via a complicated and even unpleasant female protagonist, about language and identity and criminality and AI. She then farts around for 125 pages without really engaging with them. She does, however, manage to randomly engage with (unconscious -- I think) antisemitism. Fun!

I didn't find out until after I'd finished that the AI exchanges in this novel were actually written by AI. No wonder they felt so meaningless. Knocking this down a further star just for the negative impact on the environment.

Truly, what was the point?

[Valeria Triglia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vincitore del premio Akutagawa, Tokyo Sympathy Tower ha creato grande clamore quando la sua autrice Rie Qudan ha dichiarato di essersi servita dell’AI per scriverlo.
Prima di prendere torce e forconi gridando allo scandalo, il consiglio è quello di leggerlo prima di dire qualsiasi cosa.
Sapete perché? La scrittrice è la prima a metterci alla prova stuzzicando o il nostro cervello, o le nostre ugule.
E lo farà in ogni pagina scritta in questo breve ma impattante romanzo.

Siamo in una Tokyo di un futuro prossimo dove troviamo gran fermento per la costruzione di un imponente e magnifica torre super accessoriata destinata al compatito Homo Miserabilis (degno di empatia) che possiamo tradurre semplicemente come criminale. In sostanza: una prigione che debba sgretolare tutte le forme di discriminazione.
Con l’idea di essere più inclusivi possibile, non si sta facendo altro che crearne di più proprio scegliendo di usare o meno determinate parole. Epoca di giudizio, di etichetta e non sostanza. Vi viene in mente niente? Sembra che da tutti i terremoti di linguaggio che stiamo vivendo in questi anni, Qudan voglia portarli al capolinea, immaginandosi uno scenario estremo ma non impossibile da crederlo realizzabile.

L’altra faccia della medaglia è costellata da un popolo che parla come un’intelligenza artificiale, piena di dubbi e incapace di far quel tipo di critica che smuove l’intelletto. Su questo punto, il mio paragone è andato alle lobotomie di cui la storia è tristemente piena di esempi.

“Ma come si possono far progressi senza mettersi mai in dubbio? Un’autoaffermazione acritica non limita lo sviluppo del proprio potenziale?”.

[Carola · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice! One of those rare books that I thought was actually quite interesting (and maybe even good), but oh do I hate it!

[Dylan Kakoulli · Rating 1 out of 5]

Holy crap on a cracker folks -why do I continually appear to keep picking up (and reading!) SUCH dull and disappointing books recently …

Seriously folks - WHY !

All I’ll say is, thank god it was a short slog (only 132 wasted pages of my life I’ll never get back though), and if this is the best 5% (if I believe the authors being honest with that figure) A-I generated, literary content can come up with -best of luck to ya ChatGPT!

utter trash.

-1 star

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfocused meditation on the role of rehabilitation, the nature of utopian vs dystopian societies, and something modish about AI (the author used AI in writing the novel). The novel is lyrical and exploratory, nibbling around the edges of its ideas, characters, and story, never cohering into anything substantive.

[Maurizio Ferrero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro complesso seppur nella sua brevità, che parla di architettura, linguaggio, tradimenti di traduzione, sociologia applicata agli ultimi, intelligenza artificiale, cultura e società giapponese, a cui viene anche mossa una certa critica di omologazione, cosa che non mi sarei aspettato da un'autrice di quella nazionalità.
La storia c'è ma è evanescente, labile, quasi in contrapposizione alla solidità dei palazzi progettati dalla protagonista. Narrativa mainstream, di certo non per tutti, specie perché raccontata da una voce "aliena" come quella di una giapponese, lontana dai nostri ideali occidentali.
Non so se è un libro che consiglierei, ma di sicuro mi ha spinto a parecchie riflessioni.

Una parte del libro (circa il 5%) è stato generato con l'utilizzo di una IA. Credo sia uno dei pochi casi in cui non ho nulla in contrario al suo utilizzo, perfettamente integrato e motivato nella storia stessa.

Una nota: ho comprato questo libro di getto, attirato unicamente dalla copertina. La libreria della zona l'aveva infilato nella sezione di fantascienza.
Constatato dopo averlo letto che di fantascienza non ha nulla (sì, c'è l'elemento utopico, ma niente di trascendentale), se non fosse stato lì in mezzo non l'avrei probabilmente notato.
Questo mi ha fatto riflettere su due cose: la scarsa preparazione delle librerie di catena su ciò che vendono e l'importanza di essere costretti a uscire dalla confort zone, anche con l'inganno.

[Sésame · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ce livre aurait pu être un livre sur la traduction et la linguistique, sur l'IA, sur l'architecture ou sur les expérimentations alternatives à la prison.

Au final c'est surtout un livre sur rien, qui semble tirer un plaisir immense à faire dire des banalités à des personnages tous plus froids et antipathiques les uns que les autres

[Michela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banger, as always. I obsessed over every single page. To me there’s contemporary Japanese lit, and then there’s everything else, and the gap in quality between one and the other is immense.

I see why it’s not for everyone, but it’s for me and I agree with the Akutagawa’s judges that this was “practically flawless”.

150 pages of philosophy, architecture & linguistics is my definition of perfection.

[Wiebke (1book1review) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a total cover buy and I went into this completely blind. It takes a while to get into and figure out what it is about. Although to be honest, I am not sure I know.
It mostly is about language and how it shapes our understanding and world as well as creating a prison for ourselves.
Yes, it's also about the tower that is basically a luxury hotel for prisoners and the effect it has on people.

[sabryrpwp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non ho mai letto un libro del genere. Mi piace molto che siano stati trattati temi come il linguaggio (e il suo evolversi) e l'empatia

[my_names_jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un libro labirintico, dovuto ai numerosi temi trattati.
Si tratta della mancanza di comunicazione e l’appiattimento del linguaggio in una realtà in cui abbiamo più strumenti per capirci.
Ho voluto leggere questo libro anche perché so che ha vinto un premio importante per la letteratura giapponese e c’è stato l’utilizzo dell’Ai per una piccola percentuale del testo.
È stata una bella scoperta, nonostante mi aspettavo si concentrasse più nel descrivere come funziona la torre che dei concetti che ci sono dietro (nonostante abbia apprezzato molto questo approccio)
3.5 stelle

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 134-page novel is as compact and dense as a neutron star, every paragraph, every sentence pregnant with numerous implications, symbolisms, and possible interpretations. It’s hard to rate. I found it confusing and exhausting, but it provoked me into thinking about it a lot, and I like a novel that does that. Though it is short and features only 4 characters (maybe 6 if you think of the AI-built and the Tower itself as characters), it touches upon so many issues: societal impact of words and language and AI, crime theories, incarceration and corrections systems, poverty and societal neglect of solutions, power dynamics (age, wealth, education, and sex), a woman’s right to control and define her experience of her own body, flipping gender roles, changing norms of empathy and acceptance versus intolerance, censorship, public morality, cost and value and influence of publicly funded art, problems with the importance of beauty (soul soothing or unethical, shallow, exploitive), artistic process and compromise when the artist has to meet patron demands, the competitive pressures of surviving in a capitalist society, mistrust of the government (or "stakeholders" whoever they may be) and more.

After the architect has built the Sympathy Tower and suffered some negative consequences because of it, she says, “we should probably give up on the idea that words are ever going to help us truly understand each other. If we could swap ears, maybe things would be different.” Maybe this is the true key to inspiring empathy and inclusion.

[sirius sol · Rating 2 out of 5]

miss Qudan needs to maybe read books on history and political economy, instead of simply reiterating conservative phase points from mid-2010's twitter and youtube...

[Joe.reads]

Got about three quarters of the way through this before discovering the author used chatbots to help her write it which is an instant dnf for me

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

possibly rounding this off to a five later, unbelievably underrated piece of writing, this - if i've given it a lower rating - it's probably because i'm too 'dumb' to understand its brilliance - might need another read at a later date.