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Sara Machina, the protagonist of Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo, is, like much in this funny and sharp Japanese novella, a multitude of contradictions. She is, variously, a celebrated architect, recluse, victim, fetishist, a figure of esteem to some and hate to others. In this novel, knowledge and identity are worryingly fluid.
The story opens in the present day with Sara in her late thirties pitching for a once-in-a-lifetime commission: the design of the Sympathy Tower Tokyo, a progressive project intended to reconsider notions of crime and punishment. When the tower opens in 2030, it will house criminals — or “Miserabilis” as they will now be known — in a non-judgmental fashion. Perpetrators are to be seen as casualties of circumstance.
This vast skyscraper is set to rival Zaha Hadid’s design for an Olympic stadium — cancelled in reality but completed in Qudan’s fictional Tokyo — as the dominant landmark on the city skyline. Sara is thrilled to be competing but conflicted over the building’s purpose. As a teenager, she had been raped, an act that went unpunished by an awful reframing of the facts. As she sketches her plans, her professional ambitions clash with her feelings.
She was living in ‘a world ravaged by ranting. The era of the endless monologue’
To corral her thoughts, Sara turns to that most unreliable of narrators, an AI chatbot. Qudan has used her own interactions with ChatGPT — and discomfort at its limitations — to explore how meanings and definitions can be diluted and confused.
“We had begun to abuse language, to bend and stretch and break it as we each saw fit, so that before long no one could understand what anyone else was saying,” notes Sara, adding that she was living in “a world ravaged by ranting. The era of the endless monologue.”
Sara is a fascinating puzzle. She is, perhaps, on a spectrum, or traumatised, or simply a difficult person. There are various readings of her character. Certainly, she is at odds with the zeitgeist. Her brain is constantly “language-monitoring” as she attempts to decipher ever-changing social codes. She longs for the “soothing universality” of numbers and the fixed framework of building regulations.
Just as the reader begins to grasp Sara’s opaque personality, the perspective switches to that of her much younger boyfriend Takt. Their relationship is similar to that of a puppy and its owner. Sara desires Takt as she does her high-end bathroom appliances. It is arguable whether this is — on either side — affection, fixation or exploitation.
The couple’s courtship delivers some amusing intergenerational observations. Sara complains that Takt, as an AI native, thinks an algorithm can solve any problem. “Try having a guess or coming up with your own theory from time to time,” says Sara — while Takt thinks: “It was like she’d just googled ‘how to lecture the young’.”
Subsequent shifts in viewpoint — to the manifesto of Masaki Seto, the “happiness scholar” who invented the concept of the Sympathy Tower, and to a jaded American journalist researching its effect several years later — further cloud an already hazy situation.
A bestseller in Japan, where it won the Akutagawa Prize in 2024, the novel appears in a masterful English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, who balances various voices, both human and artificial, with a flitting timeline and numerous cultural references. In his foreword, Kirkwood explains the difference between two Japanese alphabets featured in the book — traditional kanji and the more modern, phonetic katakana — a contrast that highlights an ongoing historical slide to less nuanced communication.
This tiny book, Qudan’s fourth, is an architectural feat in itself; at the length of a novella it houses satire, polemic and complex characters. While calling for clarity of expression, Qudan also asks what it says about a species that it is willing to outsource its own intelligence.
Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, Penguin £10.99, 144 pages/Simon &Schuster /Summit Books $27, 208 pages
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