Qudan has an ambiguous relationship with generative A.I.; the 34-year-old author herself admitted to having written 'about five percent' of the book using ChatGPT ... A breeze to read, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is light on story and heavy on ideas. Underneath its political questions about criminal justice, this is really a novel about the corruption of language ... The novel’s masterfully subtle irony: Though promoted as beneficial for humanity, both A.I. and progressivism actually harm the human spirit.
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 ... 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.
Has all the hallmarks of compelling fiction ... Though I have misgivings about the grandiose plot and sparse character development in Sympathy Tower Tokyo, the metaphor of the tower is a fitting image for any novel ... Within this story, which is slight and didactic enough to be a parable, Qudan plumbs sympathy ... Suffers from placing heavy philosophical questions on a fragile foundation ... It is fitting for a novelist to focus our attention on what AI’s usurpation of our most vital lifeforce — our language — might portend.
A bestseller in Japan and winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Qudan’s third novel (her first to be translated into English) imagines a future in which language and technology have an immediate bearing on the survival or destruction of traditional culture.
