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Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed
Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them, kanji and katakana, is a key theme of last year's prizewinning speculative fiction Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan – a lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text, now published in Jesse Kirkwood's vibrant and faithful English translation. We are in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo in the lightly altered mid-2020s. The Olympics took place in 2021, a year late as a result of the pandemic, but one curious difference has occurred: Zaha Hadid's futuristic national stadium, which in our reality was cancelled at the last minute, was in fact built. This minor change seems to have ushered in other more widespread shifts in politics and culture. Notably, a huge new skyscraper in the middle of the city is to house criminals in comfort and luxury, as part of society's debt to these unfortunate beings. A glimpse into a potential near future (which might be a dystopia or a utopia, depending on your point of view), Sympathy Tower Tokyo has some connections with Yoko Ogawa's excellent dreamlike science fiction The Memory Police (1994), as well as more distant echoes of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Yet this is a wholly distinctive novel, alarmingly prescient and up to date. Controversy arose – and still seems to infest chatter about the book – when Qudan divulged that she used AI to write part of it. She later clarified that AI was employed only to generate specific responses in the text when a character consults a chatbot – a creative touch which, rather than representing laxity or deception, surely carries a Joycean level of authenticity. Sara Machina, a celebrated architect, is to design the building, which is to be officially called 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' – a name which irks Sara, since it uses katakana characters to approximate the English words, a common trend in modern Japanese, rather than the more difficult, but established, kanji script. Kanji are the thousands of intricately complex Chinese-origin characters children (and foreigners) struggle to learn. The more straightforward, phonetic katakana is for loanwords, buzzwords, commercial jargon and the like. Qudan uses this issue to explore how kanji might transmit tradition and certainty, katakana flexibility and ambiguity – but might kanji not also carry prejudice and the burdens of the past, which could be swept away by the invigorating, outward-looking torrent of contemporary katakana, especially when it comes to shifting socio-sexual topics such as global warming, crime and gender? Yet, if the Japanese are to change their language, will they not also lose the distinctiveness of their national identity? Readers who know Japanese will naturally get more out of this than those unfamiliar with the language, but the ideas discussed will stimulate anyone. This is a book which raises profound and ever-pressing questions about the elusive nature of words, their symbolic status, and their multi-faceted, convoluted relationship with geography, history and culture. It explores the relationship between the urban, built environment and our fabricated world of words, between social and linguistic developments, between the kaleidoscopic vogues of language, society and philosophy. And it examines the way architecture, like words, can be destructive as well as creative, while criminals can be victims, too, worthy of love and reward just as much as hatred and punishment. Told from ever-shifting verbal and textual perspectives, with playful nods to contemporary controversies (AI; the Hadid stadium hullabaloo; cancel culture; Covid; Twitter's name change), this is a spirited novel that asks profound questions, impishly worrying about the potentially flavourless future of humanity. The tower itself can re-assimilate persecuted delinquents, making society more equal, more just, (more boring?) – just as AI threatens to steal everyone's jobs and turn vibrant global languages into one bland gloopy soup: harmless but meaningless, safe but insipid. Sympathy Tower Tokyo feels so über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, and it is alive with all the tools (and fools) of modernity. Yet it is far more than merely topical or trendy, as deep moral, political, social, cultural, architectural and lingual problems collide, merge and inform each other throughout this relatively short novel. A contemporary gem.
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
Qudan Rie: The 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' Author on Language and Rhythm
After Qudan Rie's Sympathy Tower Tokyo won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize last year, the author created a stir by admitting at a press conference that she had used AI to write 'about five percent of the whole.' The novel is set in an alternative version of Japan, where the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were held on schedule in the New National Stadium designed by Zaha Hadid—a plan scrapped in reality for budgetary reasons. The novel's narrator and main character, Makina Sara, is an architect working on designs for a new prison to be called Sympathy Tower Tokyo, in a society marked by what she regards as excessive tolerance toward criminals. Even as she dedicates herself to the project, Makina struggles with reservations about the name of the tower and the concept itself. The novel centers on the project to build the tower, which Makina describes as the 'return of the Tower of Babel,' and depicts a world littered with inorganic language pumped out by generative AI, degraded by katakana coinages and impersonal terms bereft of tangible meaning. It asks probing questions about contemporary Japanese language and society. The book quickly drew attention in other countries after the award was announced. Translations have already been published in South Korea, Taiwan, France, Italy, and Germany. An English translation by Jesse Kirkwood will appear in Britain in August and in the United States in September, and the book is slated to appear in at least six other markets, including Russia. AI as Collaborator The statement that she had used AI for part of her novel took on a life of its own and caused more of a stir than she had ever imagined. Qudan says she did not initially plan to make strategic use of AI. 'The only thing I knew was that it was going to be a story about architecture and language. I never think too much about the plot in advance. I start writing, and then connect the story to my own life as I go. That's the way I always write. 'I started working on Sympathy Tower Tokyo around two years ago, just as ChatGPT was making the headlines. I tried it out myself, out of curiosity really. At the time, I was feeling uncertain about my future as a writer, and began by asking ChatGPT for advice. That's how it started. (© Hanai Tomoko) 'I asked: What can I do to get back up when I am feeling down? I just threw out this simple question, but the response was much more than I expected. The text that came back was comparable to an advice column by a psychiatrist. I thought it was fascinating. 'But as I interacted more with ChatGPT, I became aware of the ways in which the dialogue differed from a real conversation between two human beings, and I came to understand the limits of what AI could do. I thought if I could find a way to express in a novel the discomfort I was feeling at my interactions with AI, it might lead to an interesting chemical reaction. That's where the idea came from.' In fact, Qudan used her interactions with AI only as material for AI responses to questions posed by the heroine of her novel. The 'five percent' figure was something she came up with on the spot at the press conference. 'In interviews over the year or so after I won the award, people kept asking me about that number. Exactly which parts are the five percent? How did it feel to use AI for five percent of your novel? The questions kept coming. And I never felt confident that I'd answered them well. I didn't think I'd fully explained the sense of distance I felt between myself and the AI.' Then she was approached by an editor at the advertising magazine Kōkoku with a proposal for a 'collaborative project with AI,' in which she would write 5 percent of a story and generative AI would create the remaining 95 percent. It occurred to her that this might provide herself and the public with a clearer answer than her fumbling answers to interview questions, by allowing people to compare the '5 percent' AI of Sympathy Tower with the '95 percent' AI of the new project. 'And so, with that idea in mind, I decided to accept the challenge.' The short story that resulted, 'Shadow Rain,' as well as the lengthy dialogue and prompts that led to its completion, have now been published online. The results show clearly what it means for an AI to 'write a novel' at the current stage of development. Qudan herself has said in a related interview that, 'The AI didn't come up with any ideas far beyond human intelligence.' In the Beginning Was the Word Qudan has published four pieces of fiction since her debut with Bad Music in 2021. Each has been markedly different. 'When I sit down to write, I think about what kind of language the story needs, what style is best suited to the story I want to tell. I can't settle into the work until I have answered those questions to my own satisfaction. So certain words and phrases exist in my mind before I even start to write.' (© Hanai Tomoko) Where does this attitude toward language come from? 'I've been on this planet for 34 years now, and ever since I was a child, I've always felt there's something mysterious about life. That's part of what led to my becoming a writer, I think. I tend to use language as a way of proving I'm alive. I transform my life into language and immerse myself in thought.' Qudan says the ideas for her stories come to her in different ways. The concept for her second work, ' Schoolgirl ,' was to write an updated 2022 version of the story ' Schoolgirl ' by Dazai Osamu published in 1939. Qudan's version depicts a 14-year-old girl who broadcasts her thoughts to the world via an online video site about environmental issues and her relationship with her mother. In her third piece, the novel Horses that Write Poems , horse racing is a major element in the story, which depicts the history of the relationship between humanity and horses. It is studded with the names of famous horses and racing commentary. 'With that story, the words 'horses that write poems' came into my head one day when I woke up from a nap. I just felt intuitively that I wanted to use those words as the title to a story. I did quite a lot of research, and horse racing was one of many subjects I looked into to help me write the story.' In the case of Sympathy Tower , it was the phrase 'the return of the Tower of Babel' that came first—Qudan says she felt she absolutely had to use it somewhere in the story. To improve her understanding of her subject, she says, she read stacks of books by architects, and was also influenced by Mishima Yukio's famous novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion about the burning of the Kyoto temple Kinkakuji. 'Mishima Was My First Love!' Mishima has long played a special role in Qudan's life. When she was 14, she watched video online of a famously fiery debate at the University of Tokyo in 1969, in which Mishima contended with leftwing students from the All-Campus Joint Struggle League ( Zenkyōtō ). 'I really loved Mishima. He was my first love! His voice and the way he looked in the film just gave me a thrill, and then after I read his novels I fell deeply and seriously into his work. I loved everything about him, including his prose style. But since my introduction to Mishima was through his appearance and voice, every time I reread his books, I hear his voice playing in my head.' In her third year of junior high school, Qudan stopped attending. Her parents had divorced, and she had moved schools at a difficult age. Qudan's own analysis, looking back on it now, is that this may have been one of the factors that drew her to Mishima and his work. 'When I encountered him, I was starting to despair about my future. I was worried that because I'd been absent so often, I wouldn't be able to graduate or go on to high school. 'It was a hard time. I had no friends I could turn to, and the burden was too heavy for me at 14. I didn't talk to any other children my age, and my most meaningful communication was with books. For nearly a decade, I communicated day in and day out mostly with dead people—Mishima foremost among them.' This memory of her childhood self, desperately trying to find a way to mend her parents' broken relationship and the breakdown in communication, alongside her feelings of disappointment and failure, have stayed with her. 'That might be part of what made me so interested in language and communication,' she says. (© Hanai Tomoko) Rhythm More Important than Literal Meaning in Translation Over the past few years, Qudan has become an enthusiastic gym-goer, inspired by the example of Mishima, who began serious bodybuilding when he was 30. She believes there is a close relationship between the body and literary style, and is convinced that her prose has changed as her body has become leaner and more honed. She is also a music lover, listening to everything from classical to hip-hop. Just as with music, she says, 'in writing too, rhythm is vital.' Given that Qudan is so particular about language and style, how does she feel about translation, now that her novel is appearing in so many different languages around the world? 'When I met Jesse Kirkwood [who translated Sympathy Tower Tokyo into English] last year, I told him I wanted him to prioritize the rhythm of the English, even if some of the meaning from the original text might be lost. 'I don't have big hang-ups about accuracy. Readability in English is much more important. Jesse had already translated a short story of mine.' (' Planet Her, or the Oldest Female Rapper in the World.') In that story, it would have been impossible to translate all the Japanese rhymes, so in that sense it's not faithful to the original. But I felt he was sensitive to the rhythm. When I understood that he was thinking seriously about the rhythmical demands of English, I knew I could trust him absolutely as a translator.' Tōkyō to dōjōtō (left) and Sympathy Tower Tokyo , the English translation due to be published in August. (Courtesty Shinchōsha) Writing by Japanese women has been attracting attention overseas in recent years. At first, even Qudan suspected that the widespread interest in translating her novel was thanks to a perfect trifecta of on-trend hot topics: 'AI,' 'Akutagawa Prize,' and 'Japanese woman writer.' But after attending events at book fairs in Taiwan and Italy this year, she says she has been struck by how genuinely enthusiastic her overseas publishers are about her work. 'My Italian publisher, L'Ippocampo, normally specializes in visual and children's books. They rarely publish novels, and this was obviously the first time they'd published one from Japan. I learned that the decision to translate and publish my novel came from the personal enthusiasm of an editor passionate about Japanese culture and literature. That really made me appreciate how vital such passion is to the process of translating and publishing a work in another country.' What kind of rhythms will Sympathy Tower Tokyo beat out in languages worldwide? And what surprising topics will Qudan turn to next to delight her readers? We look forward to her next imaginative journey. Referenced Works Works by Qudan Rie mentioned in the text: Tōkyō to dōjōtō is translated as Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Jesse Kirkwood is translated as by Jesse Kirkwood 'Kage no ame' (Shadow Rain) has no English translation Schoolgirl and Warui ongaku are translated as Schoolgirl and Bad Music by Haydn Trowell and published together as Schoolgirl and are translated as and by Haydn Trowell and published together as Shi o kaku uma (Horses that Write Poems) has no English translation (Horses that Write Poems) has no English translation 'Planet Her: Arui wa saiko no fimēru rappā' is translated as 'Planet Her, or the Oldest Female Rapper in the World' by Jesse Kirkwood Joseito by Dazai Osamu is translated as Schoolgirl by Allison Markin Powell by Dazai Osamu is translated as by Allison Markin Powell Kinkakuji by Mishima Yukio is translated as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Ivan Morris. (Originally written in Japanese by Kimie Itakura of and published on July 18, 2025. Banner image: Qudan Rie on the roof of the Shinchōsha building in Shinjuku, Tokyo. © Hanai Tomoko.)
