Should Convicted Criminals Get to Live in Luxury?

SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO, by Rie Qudan; translated by Jesse Kirkwood

In “Homo Miserabilis: The New Subjects of Our Sympathy,” the sociologist Masaki Seto proclaims: “These days, there is simply no rational basis for blaming someone’s criminality on their personality or lack of willpower.” He proposes that we replace the word “criminal” with “Miserabilis,” Latin for “those deserving of sympathy.” Though Seto’s idea doesn’t sound out of place in today’s public discourse, he’s a made-up author of a nonexistent book in Rie Qudan’s provocative fourth novel, “Sympathy Tower Tokyo.”

Published in Japan in 2024 and now translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood, the book became a best seller and was awarded Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize, perhaps in part because it so cleverly reflects back to us our current world in which artificial intelligence infects our thinking process, determining what we write and how we speak.

But 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 — specifically, the passages in which a character is interacting with a fictional chatbot that sounds a lot like ChatGPT.

The story also tackles the thought-altering phenomenon that came just before the advent of generative A.I.: enforced equity language. This social movement to supplant common parlance with politically correct terminology doesn’t merely aim to avoid “obviously derogatory terms,” as the journalist George Packer wrote in The Atlantic in 2023; “it seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias or exclusion.” Yet the make-believe in this effort is apparent to anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds. “Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal justice system,” Packer astutely observes.

That’s where Qudan’s protagonist, Sara Machina, comes in. The 37-year-old architect designs a high-rise tower in Tokyo’s busy commercial neighborhood of Shinjuku that is to house convicted criminals in comfortable luxury. Inwardly she struggles with the ethics of the project, which ends up making prison such a pleasant place that even people who haven’t committed crimes want to live in the taxpayer-funded tower. Her creation causes controversy by essentially rewarding criminality.

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. In a helpful translator’s note at the beginning of the book, Kirkwood explains the difference between two systems of written Japanese: kanji, the complex script derived from Chinese characters, and katakana, the simpler phonetic script that approximates foreign words using Japanese sounds — making the latter ideal for vague neologisms borrowed from English.

This is certainly the case with the tower’s name — which is also the novel’s. It sounds to Sara like the name “of a resort chain.” (Her Gen-Z boyfriend, Takt, agrees that it’s “pretty cheesy” (“I can’t even bring myself to say the words out loud”). Sara obsesses over this ideological gap between the euphemistic katakana and the more literal kanji phrase Keimu-tō, or “prison tower,” not only because she worries “the Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language,” but also because natural human thought is being replaced by socially conditioned A.I.-speak.

The novel is narrated from multiple perspectives: Sara’s, Takt’s, and then a boorish American journalist’s in the form of a politically incorrect article about the tower from 2030. The tower’s authorities disapprove of the article for its “offensive language,” but Takt compliments it as “unmistakably the work of a human, something an A.I. could never replicate.”

Burdened by a “brain-censor” that inhibits her from expressing her true inclinations, Sara hesitantly tells Takt, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, but I want every object in my field of vision to look and feel beautiful.” Metaphorical or not, such self-policing — like the unavoidable tower visible forever in the Tokyo skyline — makes the public “feel like they were being strong-armed into sympathy,” as Takt puts it. “To me, that seemed like a pretty clear-cut sort of violence.”

And herein is the novel’s masterfully subtle irony: Though promoted as beneficial for humanity, both A.I. and progressivism actually harm the human spirit.

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