Qudan Rie 九段理江. Tōkyō-to dōjōtō 東京都同情塔. Shinchōsha, 2024.
One would normally be inclined to read this author’s surname as “Kudan,” but she styles it “Qudan,” so that’s what we’ll go with. She was born in 1990, started publishing in 2021, and won the 170th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2024, for this story. The copyright page also gives the title with furigana, while the cover and title page also give it in katakana (トーキョートドージョートー); so there’s an orthographical insistence happening here, too.
It’s a mellifluous title, almost a tongue-twister, and as a translator I was having fun coming up with English equivalents (“Tokyo Municipal Sympathy Citadel” is my best effort). But within the story, “Sympathy Tower Tokyo シンパシータワートーキョー” is the official translation. Actually it’s the official name of the building, with Tōkyō-to Dōjōtō being positioned as a translation of it into Japanese. The gap between those two – between a mystifying invented foreign word adopted to name a Japanese object, and the natural Japanese term that catches on in its stead – is one of the themes of the novel. Among other things, it’s about how language constructs reality and, indeed us; literally, since the subject of the novel is architecture. More specifically, it’s about how the current quest to purify language of potentially negative connotations leads to the adoption of (in Japan’s case) foreign terminology that is neutral only because most people hardly understand it. The novel’s critique of language resonates with Yanabu Akira’s theory of Meiji-era translation words and how they caught on more because of their vagueness than because of their accuracy; see Indra Levy, trans., “Selections by Yanabu Akira,” in Levy, ed., Translation in Modern Japan, Routledge, 2011. In the novel, “Sympathy Tower Tokyo” is the name assigned to the building in question by a government that’s bent on using the building to realize a new vision of justice; but because the words mean so little to everyday citizens, they end up calling the building Tōkyō-to Dōjōtō instead. 
But let’s back up a bit.
The story is set in a very near future Tokyo that’s at the same time the product of a near-past alternate history. In the world of the story, Zaha Hadid’s design for the National Stadium, meant for the 2020 Olympics, was actually built rather than canceled for a cheaper and less radical design in 2015. Hadid’s stadium in turn inspires a social theorist named Masaki Seto to formulate a new, more merciful way of viewing crime and punishment; Seto views criminals as essentially victims of circumstance, and advocates for treating them with mercy. He coins the term homo miserabilis to replace “criminal” and contrasts it with homo felix, those who, having been blessed with stable homes and economic ease, have not committed crimes. Seto’s idea becomes so influential so quickly that a new prison is planned for downtown Tokyo – adjacent to Hadid’s stadium. It is meant to embody Seto’s idea of merciful rehabilitation, and thus is named, early in the planning stages, Sympathy Tower Tokyo. The story takes places at a number of points in the realization of this building, with key scenes centering around an architect as she plans her submission to the design competition in around 2026 and around the building shortly after its completion in 2030.
Not much of the story is devoted to exploring Seto’s ideas. We’re given a cursory glimpse of his thinking in the form of his 2026 addendum to the tenth anniversary of his book (which was originally published shortly after Hadid’s stadium began construction – in the alternate world of the novel), but not a systematic exploration. This means that the novel’s nature vs. nurture discussion of criminal behavior never advances beyond the rudimentary level most of us become aware of sometime in high school. We learn that the completed Sympathy Tower is basically a super-luxury residential tower where criminals are given all the advantages they never had on the outside; it’s so comfortable that as of the latest point in the story, nobody has elected to leave, even after their sentences are complete. We learn that there’s a considerable backlash to this in society, but we learn surprisingly little about the motivations of those actually responsible for constructing this massive (and no doubt expensive) revolution in criminal justice and urban design. The story seems to have had its genesis in thinking about crime and punishment (I’ll get to that), but in the end that’s not the story’s focus, at least as I read it.
What we do get is a close examination of the psyche of the architect responsible for it, Makina Sara 牧名沙羅. She’s in her late 30s when she begins designing the tower, and is already a successful architect. She has her own firm in Tokyo, having worked in New York for many years as an assistant. It’s not clear how much she believes in Seki’s ideas; she seems to approach the project as a high-profile prestige commission that it’s natural for someone in her position to pursue. But it’s not suggested that she’s cynical in her approach to the tower, either; in fact, she’s hyper-sensitive to the kind of euphemistic thinking that produces the name “Sympathy Tower Tokyo,” and it’s suggested that the seriousness with which she considers this naming process is part of what allows her to perfectly embody its ideology in her design.
It’s in Makina that the novel’s interest in architecture and language finds expression. She envisions herself as constructed by words, and also envisions her buildings as embodiments of herself. She repeatedly insists that her sketches and designs have no worth on their own and could never, for example, be displayed in museums; her buildings are meant to have people entering and exiting them, and she expresses and envisions this as people entering her, bodily. There’s an obvious sexual component to this, which Makina herself downplays; it seems for her to be more about realizing or recognizing the comparatively bloodless unity of word/building/body than about any sort of sexual union. It’s about self-transformation more than sensation. The story presents Makina almost entirely in internal monologues; for many of them another human is present, but he’s asleep. She’s locked inside her own head, with only her internal censor for company. This is her term; she has so internalized her society’s sensitivity about language and its attendant violence that she is constantly pausing mid-locution, mid-thought, to ask herself if she’s using the right words. There’s a long passage early in the story where she reviews all the phrases that are now forbidden for being insensitive or harmful and reminds herself of the approved alternatives – all of which are foreign phrases rendered in katakana. We witness her forcibly and with great dedication remaking herself to conform with the new language, and it’s suggested that this is precisely what she’s doing with Sympathy Tower – which is, by her logic, herself, embodied.
That early passage reads in many ways like a conservative’s denunciation of “woke” language, but if the author intends such a critique it’s quite muted. Makina herself may experience near-paralyzing angst from the difficulty of finding the right expression, but she never questions the rightness of trying; indeed, what little we know of her back story seems to bolster her sense that language needs to be remade. We’re told that she was the victim of the reader will recognize as date rape, but that she was unable to convince anyone in authority that it qualified as rape because she knew and liked her rapist; she sees this now as a struggle to remake language, to find a language that includes and recognizes her experiences.
And yet the novel’s critique of the remaking of language does have a component that may strike some readers as conservative in a different way. Makina never questions whether it’s right that “criminal” be replaced with “homo miserabilis” in principle, but she has a visceral reaction to “dōjōtō” being replaced with “sympathy tower.” She hates the vagueness and elitism of katakana words, and worries about what will happen to the Japanese people if they keep rejecting the Japanese language in that way. The equation of Japaneseness with the Japanese language, and the assumption that nationality and language purity are coterminous, is, shall we say, not new.
Makina is in her late 30s when she’s working on the design process and early 40s when the tower is completed. This is significant in the world of the story, because it means she’s already an adult when the AI revolution takes place. This is another significant strand in the novel, perhaps the most significant, at least in terms of its reception. In the present day of the story, generative AI has become so ubiquitous that it seems to mediate most writing. People have conversations with AI before embarking on projects, they use AI to translate interviews, they consult AI on factual matters (and the AI in the story is, significantly, called “built” using the English word). One reason this matters is because the AI in the story is programmed to use the most inoffensive, egalitarian language possible. It’s implied that Makina’s “internal censor” is something she’s developed from having to anticipate AI objections to her natural word choices. Very late in the story it’s suggested that her name is properly romanized “Machina,” which emphasizes the fact that she has become, in a way, a machine herself.
In short, one way to read the novel is as a future in which we’ve all become dependent on AI to formulate our thoughts for us, and the strictures programmed into AI become our own mental strictures. Whether this is utopian or dystopian is unclear – just as it’s unclear whether Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an advance or a folly. The opening of the novel compares it to the tower of Babel, saying that it resulted not from the ambition to encroach on God’s territory, thus inviting a divine confounding of languages, but from our misuse of words in contemporary society, wresting them from their meanings and leaving us all isolated in our own private languages, talking only to ourselves. Tower of Babel as effect instead of cause. But since we get nothing more than a glimpse of the post Tower world, we don’t know if it fixes things.
If Makina is both adult victim of the new world of AI-sensitized language and the mechanism by which that new world is bodied forth in city-changing architecture, then her relationships with people younger than her is of great interest. She has a quasi-lover (not clear if they have physical relations) named Takuto who is in his twenties when she takes up with him; she considers him an “AI native,” someone whose thought processes were formed through the mediation of AI, not just in reaction to it like hers. Takuto is the narrator of a large part of the novel, but for me he doesn’t come into as clear a focus, particularly as part of the AI critique. If he’s an AI native then he should be comfortable with the name “Sympathy Tower Tokyo,” but in fact it’s he who comes up with the translation “Tōkyō-to Dōjōtō.” This seems to suggest that perhaps the new generation is less affected by the new AI-induced sensitivities than middle-aged people assume; but then he takes a highly-visible position on the staff of the newly-completed building, and moves his abusive mother into it, suggesting that he does in fact buy into the ideas the building embodies.
Takuto is, for me, part of what keeps the novel from being totally successful. It’s full of ideas, and as an alternate-history/near-future speculative fiction it’s asking interesting questions. But I came away feeling that it didn’t develop any of its ideas as fully as I would have liked. On one level it’s a critique of generational differences in our comfort with AI; but it’s not clear enough where Takuto stands vis-à-vis the ideas that obsess Makina to make him a great foil for her. In the end Qudan’s treatment of AI is almost as elusive as her treatment of the nature-vs.-nurture debate in criminal justice; but since the AI theme is central to the novel, that elusivity is more frustrating here.
And what of her critique of language? If we’re imagining a world in which AI’s sensitivities are remaking human expression, the obvious question is, why did humans program AI to be so sensitive in the first place? Which is another way of saying that what the story is, or should be, really exploring is the contemporary human sensitivity toward language violence. But Qudan seems to head that concern off early; the novel isn’t a denunciation of “wokeness.” But the seeds are there, and they seem to be cultivated in an extended scene near the end given in the voice of an American journalist, Max Klein. He has come to Tokyo to do an extended feature on the newly opened tower, culminating with an interview with Makina, who has been out of the public eye for five years. Max is presented as a kind of gonzo journalist who makes himself part of the story, and who takes great delight in saying politically incorrect things. Social media, in the novel, has branded him a “racist,” and he’s also presented as misogynist. He’s also the only character really allowed to enunciate a critique of the Sympathy Tower’s treatment of criminals – they have a better life than anybody on the outside! this is ridiculous! Putting critiques of Japan in the mouths of foreigners is a trope in Japanese fiction, not to say a cliché, and that seems to be what Qudan is doing here; although she may be doing it only to undercut Max’s critique, since she dwells extensively on how fat, ugly, and smelly he is…
After being awarded the A-Prize, Qudan revealed that she used AI in writing the novel, and this has made a big splash. In this NHK interview she makes clear how and to what degree she used it. Some of the novel involves conversations between human characters and “AI built,” her Chat GPT analogue, and she used Chat GPT responses to similar questions as a model for her AI’s voice, and occasionally used them verbatim. She also came up with the idea of “Sympathy Tower Tokyo” in conversation with Chat GPT. She asked for a list of possible names for a prison that would be more in accord with contemporary mores. “Sympathy Tower” wasn’t one of them, but all the answers were so full of katakana that she was inspired to make that a theme of the story. So: AI didn’t write the novel. But she used AI in developing the concept.
An English translation is already planned; the hype is underway. I wonder what they’ll do with Max.