In the Japan of the future, criminals are considered victims of their environment. A grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. The architect, who grapples with memories of a crime that she experienced when she was younger, turns to an AI chatbot for assistance when she realizes that she may inherently disagree with the values of the project.
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.
