Sympathy Tower Tokyo

A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:
Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

support the site

Sympathy Tower Tokyo

by
Qudan Rie

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Sympathy Tower Tokyo
Author:	Qudan Rie
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2023 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	136 pages
Original in:	Japanese
Availability:	Sympathy Tower Tokyo - US
	Sympathy Tower Tokyo - UK
	Sympathy Tower Tokyo - Canada
	Tokyo Sympathy Tower - France
	Tokyo Sympathy Tower - Deutschland
	Tokyo Sympathy Tower - Italia

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Japanese title: 東京都同情塔
Translated by Jesse Kirkwood
Awarded the Akutagawa Prize, 2023 (II)

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : pulls in too many directions, but interesting approach(es)

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Asian Rev. of Books	.	30/7/2025	Peter Gordon
Financial Times	.	19/8/2025	Christian House
Frankfurter Rundschau	.	8/5/2025	Martin Oehlen
NZZ	.	2/6/2025	Daniela Tan
The Spectator	A+	16/8/2025	David Vernon

From the Reviews:

"This focus on language, the nature of received wisdom and the role and effects of technology carry through into Qudan’s Akutagawa-Prize winning Sympathy Tower Tokyo. At twice the length, it is a more substantial work, but still hardly long enough to deal with all the ideas bubbling within it." - Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books

"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. (...) 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." - Christian House, Financial Times

"Überhaupt spielt die Sprache eine tragende Rolle in diesem entspannt schillernden Text. (...) Tokyo Sympathy Tower punktet nicht mit einem ausgefuchsten Plot. Der Roman bietet kein Actionfeuerwerk, sondern Reflexion. Seinen kontemplativen Reiz bezieht er aus der originellen Verbindung von Architektur und Philosophie, von Sprache und Identität. Rie Qudan wirft einen Blick in die Zukunft, bei dem noch nicht feststeht, ob es sich um eine Utopie oder eine Dystopie handelt." - Martin Oehlen, Frankfurter Rundschau

"Die im deutschen Sprachraum noch unbekannte japanische Autorin illustriert die Einleitung mit einem Bild, das man auf der ganzen Welt kennt: dem Turmbau zu Babel, umgeben vom Stimmengewirr der Menschen, die einander nicht mehr verstehen. Die gemeinsame Sprache ist ihnen abhandengekommen, ebenso die Bereitschaft, einander zuzuhören. Das Nachdenken über Sprache und ihre Wirkungsweise in der Gesellschaft ist Programm in diesem hochaktuellen Roman" - Daniela Tan, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"(A) lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text (.....) 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, their symbolic status, and their multi-faceted, convoluted relationship with geography, history and culture. It explores the relationship between the urban, built environment and our fabricated world of words, between social and linguistic developments, between the kaleidoscopic vogues of language, society and philosophy. (...) Sympathy Tower Tokyo feels so über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, and it is alive with all the tools (and fools) of modernity. (...) A contemporary gem." - David Vernon, The Spectator

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       Sympathy Tower Tokyo is set in the near future -- ending in 2030, when the tower of the title has been completed and is already in use --, in a slightly alternate reality, already earlier diverging some from the one we are familiar with, notably in Zaha Hadid's planned (for the 2020 Olympics) new Tokyo National Stadium plans actually having been realized (and not, as was actually the case, having been canceled (already in 2015)).
       Several characters come to voice in Sympathy Tower Tokyo, albeit in different forms, with architect Sara Machina and the much younger man she has a relationship with for a time, Takt, presenting more traditional first-person accounts while there is also a book excerpt -- Masaki Seto's 2026 'Foreword to the Special Edition' of his Homo Miserabilis: The New Subjects of our Sympathy -- as well as the August, 2030 article 'Between Sympathy Tower Tokyo and Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō: Inside Japan's "Prison" Tower', by Max Klein (a self-admitted: "third-rate journalist"). Some of the characters also turn to the ChatGPT-like chatbot, AI-built -- to translate Klein's article ("into natural Japanese", Takt prompts), for example, but with Sara, in particular, also engaging with it to get information or simply using it as a kind of sounding board.
       (Note that there was some to-do when, upon winning the Akutagawa Prize, Qudan admitted to using generative AI for some of the novel -- five per cent, she said at the time, though apparently the AI-sections are limited to ... the responses given by the AI-built when Sara engages with it (which seems an appropriate-enough use). The 'issue' of the author's use of generative AI seems, at best, something of a rather overblown (and, beyond the actual passages in question, quite uninteresting) red herring.)
       Sara enters and then wins the competition to design a novel sort of penal facility -- a prison, to be built as a huge tower (it winds up being seventy-one storeys tall, making it: "the third-tallest building in Tokyo"), built in the Gyoen gardens ("one of the most hallowed and verdant plots of land in Tokyo") next to Hadid's grand stadium, with Sara suggesting: "imagine that the National Stadium, and Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō -- or, to put it another way, Zaha Hadid and Sara Machina -- are a parent and child who closely resemble one another". Throughout, however, Sara has her doubts about the project, specifically two facets of it: its purpose (and the premise behind it), as well as what it is to be called.
       The tower is to be a new kind of prison -- whereby, more importantly, the imprisoned criminals are to be seen and treated differently, understood to be 'Homo Miserabilis' rather than criminals and convicts, an idea promulgated by self-styled 'happiness scholar' Masaki Seto. His thesis is that people who have avoided becoming 'criminal' have done so simply because they had the good fortune: "to be born into an environment capable of fostering goodness", while those who become criminals should, in fact, be seen, as victims, their circumstance leading them to their criminal acts; the original dream Seto had was of convicts: "relocated from their prison to a luxurious high-rise apartment building in central Tokyo, where they led a utopian existence". The tower is to be a tranquil safe harbor -- where, for example: "all language of comparison is forbidden" (and: "Social media is the ultimate form of comparison, which is why we prohibit its use"). And the tower does then become an idyllic sort of place, more sanctuary and retreat (also from the real world ...) than prison -- with those jailed there then not even wanting to leave once they have completed their sentences. (A nice touch is that Seto was inspired by the building of the National Stadium, with Seto saying that if it had never been completed he would never have been able to finish his book (and, presumably, his 'Homo Miserabilis'-thesis would never have caught on) -- as in real life Zaha Hadid's version of the stadium was, of course, in fact never built .....)
       Language plays a very significant role in the novel -- as suggested already by Qudan's opening lines, where Sara worries:

It would be Babel all over again. Sympathy Tower Tokyo would throw our language into disarray; it would tear the world apart. Not because, dizzy with our architectural prowess, we had reached too close to heaven and enraged the gods, but because 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.

In the completed tower, not only is social media banned but, as Seto reminds all the Miserabilis when they first move in, the most important rules of living here are:

One: Words must only be used to make yourself and others happy.
Two: All words which do not make yourself and others happy must be forgotten.

       (The new residents have all signed a consent form to that effect.)
       Such a diminishment of language is of course also problematic.
       Sara is convinced that: "words determine our reality", and she struggles greatly with a variety of linguistic issues in the novel. Among the most prominent is that of what the tower is called and known as.
       Translator Jesse Kirkwood includes a Note at the beginning of the novel, explaining how Japanese writing uses kanji ("characters originally borrowed from the Chinese") as well as two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana, whereby the latter: "is primarily used for writing foreign words, names, onomatopoeia and scientific terms". Sara rails against the katakanaization of Japanese -- amusingly, she can't even neatly write the simple strokes, as: "Whenever I tried to write them my loathing twisted them out of shape". There's even a page of examples of kanji-terms that have been replaced by foreign and phonetic ones, written in katakana, such as: 外国人労働者 ('gaikokujin rōdōsha') being replaced by フォーリン・ワーカーズ ("fōrin wākāzu"; 'foreign workers') -- whereby the most intriguing is the final entry, which might slip by readers in the English: 犯罪者 ('hanzaisha') becoming ホモミゼラビリス ("homo mizerabirisu"), presented as: "'Homo Miserabilis', formerly 'criminal'" (the point being that the kanji 犯罪者 does literally mean 'criminal' but has now been replaced by a completely different concept (unlike, or at least to a much greater extent than, the other examples presented here)).
       For Sara this is all part of her concern that it seems that: "the Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language" -- with the naming of the tower a prime example. The Stakeholders -- the powers that be -- decided to call the project 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo', written in katakana as: シンパシータワートーキョー. This rubs Sara in all the wrong ways. It's Takt who comes up with the (final touch to the) alternative that she can embrace: Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō -- written with kanji, as: 東京都同情塔. That, Sara can get on board with:

'If they called it Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō, I'd be happy to design it,' she said, suddenly changing the subject as she mopped up the oil from her spaghetti aglio e olio with a piece of bread. She spoke as though the connection with everything else she'd been saying was perfectly clear and I'd simply failed to recognize it. 'It's the insistence on having the English word "sympathy" in there that bothers me. I mean, at this rate, what's going to be left of the Japanese people ? Hang on, does that make me sound like a nationalist ? The thing is, I can see the future ... One where they abandon their own language and stop being Japanese altogether.

       (It is perhaps worth noting that the original Japanese title of the novel is the kanji-version, 東京都同情塔, and while the French, German, and Italian translations have stuck with that (though in literal English translation ...), 'Tokyo Sympathy Tower', the English-language editions of the book have adopted the katakana version, Sympathy Tower Tokyo .....)
       Takt cleverly suggests that Sara should simply go around everywhere referring to it as 'Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō', believing that: "If Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō is a more fitting name than Sympathy Tower, it'll stick" (as in fact it does, becoming: "the name by which the tower has come to be popularly known").
       AI also comes into play some: as noted, characters use (and try to use) a generative AI -- whereby Qudan places her story in a world: "thirty years into the twenty-first century, with the majority of jobs replaced by AI". Yet despite their -- and author Qudan -- turning to it some, it falls short for them. Takt finds an AI text to be: "a model answer, an aggregate of the average hopes and desires of everyone in the world that contained as little criticism of anything as possible"; he even: "began to feel something like sympathy for the chatbot. The poor thing, condemned to an empty life of endlessly spewing out the language it was told to spew, without ever understanding what this cut-and-paste patchwork of other people's words meant or who it was for". And when Takt tries to write about his experiences and Sara, feeding his stories into AI-built, the results are disappointing: "The censor in my head tells me it isn't a biography, just a load of words. No form, no texture, nothing but fucking text". He continues to believe in text that's: "unmistakeably the work of a human, something AI could never replicate".
       The relationships in the novel are also of interest, with only a few characters figuring at all prominently in the text. One reason Sara engages with the chatbot would seem to be her inability to maintain human connections. She picks up pretty-boy Takt, fifteen years her junior, -- taken by his good looks -- but that also doesn't last, and when she grants an interview to journalist Max Klein she literally can't stand the smell of him. (Max is literally the dirty foreigner, passionate about Japan, and twice falling for Japanese women, but: "I think both Naomi and Kyoko dumped me because of how bad I smelt".) Sara winds up holed up in a hotel, avoiding pretty much any human contact; she can't accept her accomplishment as the triumph it seems to be (though there are certainly enough people who condemn her for what she did as well).
       Crime, and how criminals are treated, is also part of the story -- not least because Sara still struggles with a trauma from her youth which she has never been able to come to any sort of proper terms with; tellingly, too, language was part of the issue: even though she told people, they chose to interpret events differently: she "lacked the words to make people see that he'd raped her, and so the accepted truth became that he hadn't". Takt also has connections to what was considered and judged a crime -- and he winds up in the tower (as an employee, not an inmate -- though the difference is small).
       Sara tells journalist Max that she believes: "there isn't all that much difference between being understood and being misunderstood". It's not just the uncertainty and ambiguity of language (and writing systems) that are the problem, but they play a significant role. Beyond that, however, the crystal-clear also remains elusive -- as happiness scholar Masaki Seto, so sure of himself and his beautiful idea, also comes to learn .....
       Qudan tries to do quite a bit in Sympathy Tower Tokyo -- including in using different forms (a book foreword, e-mail, an article, along with more conventional narration -- and, of course, some AI-exchanges) --, stretching her story quite far and wide in rather limited space. But part of her point is how difficult it is to find clarity, or come up with a completely convincing explanation or answer (to many things), and that certainly comes across. It makes for an engaging and thought-provoking text -- under-developed in parts (especially also regarding some of the issues she raises), but still with a lot there.

- M.A.Orthofer, 4 August 2025

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

Sympathy Tower Tokyo:

Summit Books publicity page
Penguin publicity page
新潮社 publicity page
Denoël publicity page
Hoffmann und Campe publicity page
L'ippocampo publicity page
Q & A at The Guardian
Profile at nippon.com
Profile at Domus
Profile at Futuro Prossimo

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

Mizumura Minae's The Fall of Language in the Age of English
Tawada Yoko's Exophony
See Index of Japanese literature
Index of Akutagawa Prize-winning works under review

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

Japanese author Qudan Rie (九段理江) was born in 1990.

- Return to top of the page -