Synopsis:

The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon. A propulsive, prophetic novel about the beauty of language and the nature of identity in the age of AI.

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort – Sympathy Tower Tokyo.

Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous – and much younger – boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace, in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot…

Awarded Japan's highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new voices in world literature. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world's unrelenting conformity.

Review:

Imagine being asked to design a skyscraper that isn’t just a building, but a philosophy: a prison built on empathy. That’s the premise of Sympathy Tower Tokyo, the Akutagawa Prize–winning novel by Rie Qudan, and honestly? It’s one of those books that makes your brain feel like it just ran a marathon—in the best way.
We follow Sara Machina, a celebrated architect in an alternate near-future Tokyo, tasked with building a 71-story “sympathy tower” where inmates are treated not as criminals but as products of their environment. The concept is both fascinating and terrifying: can radical empathy truly replace justice, or does it just blur the lines between compassion and accountability?
What makes the book even more meta is that Qudan admitted around 5% of it was written with AI—mostly the chatbot dialogue. It’s a clever trick, because it makes the AI sections in the book feel authentically hollow, showing how technology can mimic rhythm but not soul. Reading those parts gave me chills, like staring into a mirror that doesn’t quite reflect you back.
Beyond the tech gimmick, though, the novel digs into bigger questions: how language can be weaponized or softened through euphemisms, how architecture carries moral weight, and how a society that prides itself on tolerance can smother individuality. Sara is both glamorous and fragile, carrying personal trauma while shouldering a project that feels bigger than her humanity.
It’s not the easiest read—it’s dense, cerebral, and occasionally abstract. But if you like speculative fiction that forces you to wrestle with messy questions instead of handing you neat answers, this is exactly your kind of book.

Fiction or Reality:

If you're someone who is active on social media every-day, you might be aware of internet slang that were made for the soul purpose of dodging the algorithm have now become a part of our every-day conversations offline too, resulting in brain-rot and what not. The slangs don't only downplay the situation at hand but also with the increase of the use of AI. are making us dumb and illiterate. Once you start reading this book, you'll find the beautiful and artistic way with which the author explores all of that, how people around the world have started to find the intimacy of speaking your own language a bit too over whelming and find using a second language a much better decision. All of these aspects have been discussed in Sympathy Tower Tokyo, providing perfect food for thought.

Why You Should Read It:

If you’re into architecture-as-metaphor, this will be candy for your brain.
If you like stories that blur the line between human creativity and AI mimicry, it’s got that too.
And if you just want a novel that makes you pause, reread, and argue with yourself afterward—yeah, this one delivers.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo is not just a novel, it’s a provocation. It asks: what does true empathy cost us? And at what point does sympathy itself become a prison?

Themes & Takeaways

Language & Power: The novel critiques how Japanese society leans on katakana loanwords to soften or obscure meaning. Sara hates how the language has lost depth, turning labels into euphemisms
Architecture as Symbol: The Tower becomes more than a structure—it’s a symbol of empathy, a social experiment and maybe a warning. Sara feels the weight of being both architect and moral arbiter
AI & Authorship: Fun twist—Qudan revealed about 5% of the novel was AI‑generated, specifically the chatbot dialogue and scenes where Sara interacts with an AI. That was super meta, since the story itself explores AI's limits & its effect on creativity and identity
Readers on Goodreads and Reddit flagged how the AI-generated sections were clearly marked in-text, used to embody the AI's inability to self-reflect, and also how language shapes perception and society

What it is: A provocative, near-future Tokyo novel about empathy‑based incarceration, architectural charisma, and how language and identity intertwine.
Why it hits: It’s intellectually ambitious, visually imaginative, and doesn’t shy from messy ethical and technological questions.
Shock factor: The author actually used AI to write a chunk of the book—blurring creator and creation in real life and on the page.

If you’re into speculative fiction that smacks you in the jaw with questions about ethics, language, and AI—this one’s your jam. It’s sorta tongue-in-cheek yet brutal in its seriousness. Sara Machina might be glamorous on paper, but she’s haunted and fragile underneath. The Tower? Equal parts utopia & dystopia—and exactly the kind of idea that’d keep me up at night.

Jen's Book Reviews

Language, Sympathy, Architecture, AI? Are they related? In Rei Qudan's Sympathy Tower Tokyo, they are. A book Review