Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Qudan's provocative English-language debut, set in near-future Japan, centers around an architect grappling with ethical and philosophical questions about her latest project. It begins in 2026, when 37-year-old Sara Machina receives a career-making opportunity to design a new Tokyo landmark: a prison in the form of a comfortable apartment tower. The project draws on the theories of a sociologist who argued that criminals should be rebranded as victims rather than perpetrators, due to structural issues such as income inequality that led them to crime. While Sara works on her proposal, she begins a relationship with handsome store clerk Takt, who is much younger than her. After the tower opens in 2030, Takt takes a job there as a "supporter," a euphemism for guard, and gives a tour to Max Klein, an American journalist. Max also interviews Sara, who is alternately celebrated and vilified online, "described as both a goddess who'd brought beauty and peace to Tokyo and a witch whose tower had plunged society into confusion." The blend of voices, including passages generated by ChatGPT as Takt tailors his correspondence with Max and Sara uses the platform to work through her conflicted thoughts about the tower, offers an intriguing window into the controversy following the tower's opening. It's a disarming novel of ideas. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this novel set in a near-future Tokyo, Sara Machina, a 37-year-old star architect, decides to enter a design competition for a new type of prison in which inmates will be treated with sympathy. As Machina works through her design and her personal misgivings (with the help of an AI chatbot), she meets a beautiful young man, Takt, who acts as another sounding board for her ideas. The novel then jumps to 2030, with Takt living and working in the opulent 70-story prison known as Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Public reactions to the tower range from praise to threats of violence. A foreigner's perspective comes via the character of Max Klein, an American journalist who interviews Machina and Takt. In addition to exploring themes related to architecture, racism, and Japanese history, Qudan speculates that katakana, a syllabary approximating the sounds of foreign words, is altering Japanese language and culture. In an attempt to record the impact of technology on language, she incorporates AI text verbatim to simulate conversations between Machina and her chatbot. VERDICT A bestseller in Japan and winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Qudan's third novel (her first to be translated into English) imagines a future in which language and technology have an immediate bearing on the survival or destruction of traditional culture.--Jacqueline Snider
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An architect considers the power and limits of language in this slim novel. Sara Machina has doubts about her latest project. The Tokyo architect is designing a prison that's not technically a prison--it's a tower intended to house "Homo Miserabilis," a euphemism for criminals, meant to evoke sympathy for the unhappy lives they led before they took to crime. "Come on, let's be real: my entire being was instinctively screamingno, telling me the tower shouldn't exist," she thinks. "Every inch of my body was repelled by the incursion of the Sympathy Tower." Sara is a rape survivor with an abiding interest in words; she worries that rebranding criminals, and other forms of euphemisms, will destroy the Japanese language: "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." Qudan's novel follows Sara, as well as her younger boyfriend, Takt, as they consider the tower, which is not popular with some of the public, who protest with signs reading "Sympathy for the Victims, not the Criminals!" and "Save Tokyo, Stop the Tower!" Both use an artificial intelligence chatbot regularly to try to come to terms with language--Qudan has said that AI actually wrote the chatbot's responses in the book, which is apparent. This is a baffling novel, one that seeks to reckon with our relationship with language, but it never really gets there: It's full of philosophical navel gazing, more a thought experiment than a story. The dialogue between Sara and Takt is stilted, at times sounding like a conversation between two stoners in a dorm room. Qudan is clearly intelligent and curious, but she can't make this tedious novel work. Disappointingly plodding and ponderous. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
