ChatGPT controversy is the least interesting part of 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo'

A book trailed by controversy for its use of AI, “Sympathy Tower Tokyo” by Rie Qudan is a fun and quick read — but it shouldn’t be mistaken for easy or breezy. This speculative work, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, is as ambitious and intellectually agile as its megalomaniacal protagonist.

The story set in contemporary and near-future Tokyo won Qudan an Akutagawa Prize in 2024. When accepting the prestigious literary award and in subsequent interviews, Qudan said she conceived of the novel and included text verbatim from conversations with ChatGPT, an admission which brought out trolls and critics in Japan and abroad. She doubled down later, publishing an experimental story almost entirely drawn from AI-generated text.

The use of AI, though, is one of the least notable parts of “Sympathy Tower Tokyo,” which is perhaps a sign of the times we already find ourselves in. The characters use a fictional chatbot seamlessly, as a part of life; they’re aware that they talk to it, vaguely wonder what its limitations are, and carry on.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo, by Rie Qudan. Translated by Jesse Kirkwood. 144 pages, PENGUIN, fiction.

Sara Machina is a rising star in the world of architecture with a Randian sense of self-grandeur and a penchant for her own mythmaking. “Even when she wasn’t drunk, (Sara) the Architect spoke quickly, and when she was, she reeled off the words so fast it was hard not to worry about her as you listened,” observes her lover, Takt.

The beginning of the novel finds the 37-year-old spiraling in a hotel room, working on her firm’s bid for a new tower to be built within the grounds of Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden. She’s fixated on what the tower should be named; she dislikes the katakana “Sympathy Tower Tokyo” and prefers the characters “Tokyo-to Dojo-to,” which is also the novel’s Japanese title. Sara opines at length that this is a better name, relishing its pleasing rhythm when read aloud. (Non-Japanese speakers may or may not enjoy getting lost in the long passages on the various Japanese scripts and how concepts are rendered differently in each.) When complete, the tower will be the third highest in the city — also, it will be a prison.

In this world, Japan has re-evaluated what defines a “criminal” based on the circumstances in which people were born, and the tower is envisioned as a radical social experiment, housing both violent and nonviolent offenders in a futuristic luxury high-rise.

Yes, many questions — and only a few answers.

The story takes place in an alternate reality in which Zaha Hadid’s Tokyo Olympic Stadium design was completed, a feat breathlessly praised by the books’ characters, including Sara. (In reality, the government scrapped plans for Hadid’s stadium in 2015 citing budget constraints, and Kengo Kuma took over.) This imagined present foregrounds a rare female “starchitect” with whom Sara puts her work in dialogue.

“Sympathy Tower Tokyo” seeks to cover a stadium-sized amount of ground, taking on topics as widely varied as chatbots, nationalism, criminology, the devolution of the Japanese language, internet troll culture and skin care trends. But perhaps more interesting than any of its ideas are the novel’s two main characters, whose pleasantly weird romance is somehow both stilted and tender.

Sara’s much younger lover is, in his words, “an undereducated, low-earning youth.” This is a self-aware think-thoughts-aloud novel, and in a characteristic scene, Sara tells Takt apropos of nothing that “objectively speaking” people would probably describe her as his sugar mommy. Though he agrees, Sara then disagrees with the stated assessment, saying she doesn’t feel anything like his okāsan or his “mommy.”

“‘I don’t think of myself as your son, either,’ I said, which was only about thirty or forty percent lying,” says Takt. “I guess we’d have to say that I’m exploiting your beauty,” says Sara, asking if this characterization hurts Takt’s feelings. “Not at all,” he responds.

The two make a compelling pair, however unromantic the dynamic can be, at times recalling a mother and son, at others a boss and assistant.

Their mutual exploitation feels entirely fitting in a novel that privileges beauty, portraying its architects as artists who create aesthetic feats on grand scales, no matter the cost. But ultimately, we’re left wondering if the strive to build is not all an exercise in ego; Sara is punished, though it’s not exactly clear for what.

Maybe she’s a casualty of a rapidly shifting future, or the city of Tokyo itself, or her moral hypocrises. She initially has misgivings about bidding for the tower design: She was raped by a boyfriend when she was still a schoolgirl, a strangely perfunctory biographical detail that seems to merely serve as a vehicle for Sara’s views on criminal rehabilitation.

Qudan’s satirical eye spares no one — public intellectuals, language police, starchitects and, oops, Western media. Just by reading this book in English and reviewing it, I feel I might be guilty of some cultural transgression, risking the orientalist gaze of the book’s Max Klein, a Yukio Mishima-invoking, third-rate American journalist who also happens to be fat and smell bad.

There are many times this novel feels like an exercise in erudition, a book that gestures toward depth without actually doing the digging. But Qudan’s fecund world is an exciting one, and well worth a visit.