Sympathy Tower Tokyo explores language, architecture, and societal shifts. Generations becoming more and more sensitive, and words are found to be less and less acceptable. Chips embedded in the physical body censor language and topics as you think of them and filter out anything that could lead to offense. The generational commentary is incredible. A story highlighting the devastating downfalls of an uber sensitive society that exists to reach some unrealistic level of peace that has and will never exist in a world of true individuals. An incredibly impactful thought-provoking read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing an eARC of Sympathy Tower Tokyo in exchange for my honest opinions.

Publishing September 2nd, 2025

An intriguing premise but it didn't hit for me. It's very much an internal monologue from a variety of characters, and in the manner of internal monologues, it often wanders hither and yon for long periods before makings its way back to what readers are likely to see as "the point" of the book. I think the really interesting stuff is happening in the background, and we can infer some of it, but not enough.

In regards to the AI in this book--the portions written by AI are VERY clearly distinguished; the author is not trying to pull one over on readers here. Additionally, by the end of the book, one character is actively waging psychological warfare against the AI in question, which I found amusing and intriguing.

That said I did find it a bit of a slog overall, despite its short length, and wouldn't reach for it again.

This was a DNF for me, I was interested in the concept but only got around 30% into it and had to put it down. I thought this was going to be exploring the ideas of how criminals are treated and rehabilitated in a meaningful way, but everything I saw so far felt like the rhetoric you hear from people who very much don't believe in rehabilitation or the impact of environment and privilege on crime, trying to pretend to be the opposite.

Didn't care about this book at all. All yapping. Talking about the tower name, then rape, then any other shit about name writing in Katakana and Hiragana.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a book about an architect who is tasked with designing a tower in the middle of Tokyo to house criminals (coined Homo miserabilis here) to live in to have a better chance in society.

My favorite discourse in this book was the discussion of katakana and English words being used more and more in the Japanese language. The main character does not love that the tower she is designing is going to be called Sympathy Tower Tokyo, and would prefer a Japanese based name. The discussion of language and how it is used was very interesting to me as someone who has been attempting to learn Japanese for a few years now.

The book is pretty futuristic leaning in vibes and content (i.e. Sara's 'censor' and the talk of major societal changes in technology and views). I have seen other comments about Qudan's use of AI - AI is mentioned in the book, but with blurbs clearly marked with a question posed and different font, because the main character is querying an AI service for questions throughout the book. I cannot comment on if any of the prose was written with AI, which would be very disappointing, but with the inclusion of AI queries it made sense to me in the sections of the book it was included in.

I liked that this book made me think and question certain aspects of society, as well as how women are viewed in society. I felt like the way it was told through multiple viewpoints and media types made it an interesting take of all different types of perspective on this tower in Tokyo.

Thank you to NetGalley, Rie Qudan, and Summit Books for an eARC of ths book.

Sara is an architect who is planning to submit a design for Sympathy Tower Tokyo, a building for criminals (now known as homo miserabilis). She's grappling with how she feels about the project itself, having been a victim of rape that went ignored as a teenager. She engages in conversation with an AI chat bot and her younger boyfriend Takt to try and make meaning of the project.

This is a meandering stream of thought of a short novel in translation; that's not a bad thing provided you understand that going in and aren't expecting a clear plot. Rie examines topics like how we treat criminals, our interaction/adoption of AI, and language, specifically Japanese's increasing use of loan words and how this can change perception of language. Give this a read if you enjoy:
- works in translation
- Japanese novels/Tokyo setting
- architecture
- cerebral protagonists
- speculative fiction

Thank you to Simon & Schuster | S&S/Summit Books for an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. This book will be published on 9/2/25. I'll be posting to Instagram closer to publication.

i don’t think this book was for me. while i did really enjoy the themes of prison industrial complex abolition and mass AI adoption, this book was a bit too philosophical, i enjoy more plot-driven stories.

i also found out post-read that the author used chatGPT to write a portion of this book, which seemed very odd to me seeing as it painted AI in a negative light .....

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

I think theres a lot of interesting things here. I'd definitely say theres not much of a plot, which is so unique. I do think a lot of it gets lost in the translation which is unfortunate.

This was nothing like I expected. Going in, I assumed it would be a story told from inside the tower, from the point of view of its inhabitants. I also assumed there would be… well, a plot. Instead it’s the ruminations from people on the outside looking in—the architect who designs the tower, her young lover, and an American journalist. I found the ruminations interesting enough to keep reading, and the book as a whole posed some really interesting questions about language and sociology. That being said, I much prefer books that pose questions through a narrative rather than characters’ internal monologues, so this wasn’t really for me.

I thought this was going to be a more plot-driven novel about a society that chose to rebrand their criminals and choose a different path than hard-core incarceration and all that it entails to put the residents on a path that would lead to less recidivism. That was a mere side note in the book, background noise to the ramblings of the Architect (why is that capitalized? Well, she's all knowing, sees the future, and is, in fact, God-like).

I know many are upset about the AI used in the book, but it's very clear when it's being used, and its flat tone actually fits the rest of the book, which leaves you devoid of feeling about the characters, the slow progression of events, the discussion of language and loss of self/culture/identity, and the Tower itself.

Maybe something was lost in the translation, but I've read other translated works that I've loved.

Some have said if you like Chain Gang All Stars to read this book - I disagree. CGAS let you meet the inhabitants of that world, hear their stories, understand them, sympathize with them, be outraged by them - this one is not about the stories of the residents of Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Not at all.

Thank you to Netgalley for the digital ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

I was excited to read this since it was billed as an “award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon” in the blurb on Netgalley, who let me read this book before publication. However, I don’t understand the appeal. Maybe it’s that the ideas and words don’t translate well in English with the same layers of meaning. The translator certainly went to great pains to explain the different writing types and what words mean. But I fear that I’m still not seeing these words the same way someone who is reading it in Japanese might, even if the translator is doing everything possible to bring it alive in English. After all, it’s largely a book about the meaning of words and the way they’re written in Japanese. But maybe also, this is a case where the book just wasn’t for me. I like the exploration of word meanings sometimes, but to have the whole book largely be about characters discussing the name of a prison tower was just kind of boring. I also didn’t buy into the idea of the prison tower. It was supposed to be such a utopia inside that prisoners don’t want to leave when they’ve finished their prison sentence. It’s a very communist concept, with everyone getting the exact same income and living in a great environment. Furthermore, somehow, every negative word and phrase has been removed from their brains. Honestly, I was hoping for a look inside the prison tower, but, instead, we mainly get conversation and internal monologues from the tower’s architect and her boy toy about the name. I was just glad that it was short.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Books for the ARC of Sympathy Tower Tokyo. I was drawn to this book due to the description - involving the building of a tower housing criminals as a means of a more sympathetic “prison” system. Centering on Sara Machina, a famous architect, the story weaves between multiple POV’s in order to paint a picture of the creation of the building and the aftermath. I enjoyed the characters, but this felt more like a very short story rather than a fully formed plot. I was definitely hoping for more descriptions about life insider the tower itself once it was running, as well as the actually day to day lives of its inhabitants. There was a lot of philosophical mentions about rehabilitation - but I would like to have heard more of the inhabitants and their point of view on this matter as well. Overall, this was a short think piece to me. I do feel there was potential for much more if other elements in the story had been expanded.

interesting novel idea, though at many points it felt underbaked for me and there were some.... odd metaphors and turns of phrase. 3 stars. tysm for the arc.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan focuses on structures: buildings, language, power, culture, and history. Sara Machina is drawing architectural plans for a tower where prisoners will be treated with radical sympathy. She discusses this and her thoughts on the world with her much younger, poorer boyfriend, and an AI chatbot.

This was much more of a roving consideration of how much language affects all things, and how that influences how one interacts with the world. It is an interesting question, and I enjoyed seeing it from different perspectives as the reader switched points of view between a few different characters. It is particularly intriguing to consider as AI continues to generate more of what we read, see, and hear.

I was disappointed because I was looking forward to a more concentrated consideration of how prisoners are, and could be, treated. There was some reflection about treating those who break the law in a kinder and more nuanced way, but not much in the way of ramifications or results of this type of policy. In fact, the reform is really just pushed aside to make way for the discussions of balance and imbalance: old vs. young, nature vs. nurture, creative vs. utilitarian, male vs. female, etc.

I did enjoy this short speculative fiction work but wish that it had been advertised in a way more consistent with its direction.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster/Summit Books for the eARC.
3.5 rounded to 4 stars

I don't really know what to make of this novel. The description led me to expect a slightly more plot-driven story, but it's much more philosophical. The form seems more important than the content, honestly; I'm not sure there's much more to say about the latter than the blurb everyone has access to. For a short book, it jumps around a lot, changing perspective and voice, often without warning (I had to backtrack the first time the POV switched from the architect to Takt). And....in the end, I don't even think it was worth it, to try to figure out whether I had missed something. There might be a revelatory point in there, but getting too it feels like too much effort.
I also feel like I have to acknowledge the author openly using AI to write 5% of the book. Had I known that, I probably wouldn't have requested this; my lack of interest in reading something computer-generated aside, the choice to withhold my attention from AI feels like the only tool I have to opt out of the ethical and environmental concerns I have with it. And I'm curious what the author would think of her IP being used to train AI for someone else's profit?
Oh well - thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the arc!

Diversity and Representation: Japanese language (translated)
Genre: literary fiction, speculative fiction (science fiction, dystopia)
Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Notable Quote: "By endlessly churning out new words, what are you trying to hide?"
Read this if you enjoyed: The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

Elephant in the room. According to Qudan, around 5% of this book is written by AI. The context: Qudan is explicit in calling the use of AI linguistically and creatively bankrupt. From what I can gather, the "AI-written" portions are comprised of scenes where characters ask their in-universe chatbot, AI-built, questions. The AI's answers are presumably lifted wholesale and copy-pasted from ChatGPT or something similar.

With that context given, I don't think I support the AI use here. "Actively doing the bad thing so that you, the artist, can do social commentary about how it's bad actually" has never hit with me. There were twenty other ways Qudan could've critically portrayed AI without using it herself (and publishing a book with uncredited/uncompensated words non-consentingly aggregated from other writers in the process). I ultimately decided to average out a 1 and 4 star rating for this book for that reason. The 95% of it that isn't AI-generated is very interesting and worth discussing, but it's held back by Qudan's ethically-dubious attempt at meta-commentary.



Now, let's talk about the rest of it.

I am a linguist and language nerd who- at one point, anyway- was fluent in Japanese, so this book's meditation on the Japanese language and how so many aspects of it have been subsumed by non-Japanese loan words that are considered "more progressive," "more universal," or "more intelligent" is very interesting. The literal title of this book plays into that. The Japanese title is 東京都同情塔 (Tokyo-to Dojo-to), which is the Japanese name the architect wants her tower to be called. However, the title has been transliterated into English (シンパシータワートウキョウ/Sympathy Tower Tokyo) for this release, expressing the very tendency to treat English as universal that the book is criticizing. That is honestly much more effective meta-commentary than any of the AI stuff.


The main character Sara is a linguistic prescriptivist- she thinks language should be a certain way, that Japanese should not incorporate non-Japanese words. She likens the growing number of (mostly English) loan-words into her native language to a bodily assault. She also constantly worries that she's being too conservative or sounding like a nationalist. In many ways, these English loan-words are synonymous with cultural progress. They're used to describe "more progressive" gender and sexuality terms and sociopolitical concepts. They're embraced by the youth, while Sara sees them as an outside encroachment to her country and her culture. She compares it to being linguistically dead, like the "illiterate" output of an AI chatbot.


This extends into her views of the tower itself. Sara is conflicted about building it because Sara doesn't believe in the "radical sympathy" for criminals approach behind the tower's creation. She was a victim of a violent crime in her youth, and that experience resulted in not only her rigid expectations for language (she laments "not using the right words in the right way" to get justice for herself) but also her beliefs that criminals- or Homo miserabilis- should be punished, not treated with sympathy as victims of circumstance and societal failure. The idea that the tower will be given an English/katakana name just cements these two ideas in her head.


Sara is not the only character we see, however. She has a foil in her much-younger boyfriend Takt. His name literally cannot be spelled/pronounced in traditional Japanese. It has to be written using the loan-word katakana alphabet that Sara despises. He uses AI freely and frequently for simple tasks and questions and lets it dictate multiple interactions. Not only does he not seem to mind the building of Sympathy Tower Tokyo, but his own mother is one of the Homo miserabilis promised a suite there. He is happy for her despite the abuse she subjected him to. Takt is passive and accepting almost to a fault, preferring to just be pretty and enjoy the present without ruminating on the past or future. He is happy to have the words and wants of others- whether it be Sara or the suggestions of his AI chatbot- projected onto him without complaint.


Both Sara and Takt are depicted as very flawed characters who do/say very questionable things. They are positioned less as an example of good vs bad or right vs wrong, but as cautionary tales for the two extremes. Sara values heritage and justice, and that's a slippery slope to being a nationalist who refuses valid progress and change. Takt is younger and values adapting to circumstances, but that can be a slippery slope to embracing an external locus of control, passively accepting societal change and societal ills without question.


There is a lot of interesting commentary here, and I really wish the AI stuff wasn't a factor so I could recommend this book more. For now, though, I'll just say pick it up if the broader context of the AI-generated parts doesn't bother you.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster for the ARC!
Sympathy Tower Tokyo was right up my alley.
✅ Translated Novel - focuses heavily on Japanese language
✅ Prison Industrial Complex abolition
✅ Consequences of mass AI adoption
✅ Cultural erasure
Let me just start by saying that the irony of reading a book so heavily focused on the erasure of the Japanese language translated into English was not lost on me. It felt like a betrayal to the original text. I just kept wondering what I was losing in translation.
This book was thought provoking and complex. It’s only ~100 pages but took me over a month to get through because I had to read a few pages and digest. Rie Qudan provided a masterful dialogue on not just one, but four topics that each could have their own book. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is punchy and doesn’t hold back in its feelings.
Note: make sure you read the translator’s note! I went into this read with a very basic understanding of the Japanese language which greatly aided my understanding of the story. The translator’s note covers basics for anyone who hasn’t studied Japanese.

Thank you NetGalley and Summit Books for an opportunity to obtain the Arc for an honest review!

To be frank, this book was not for me. When I engage in reading translated literature, I often walk into it with an open mind and ready to learn. Though I did walk into this work with that mindset, the immediate understanding that AI had been used to help write it really took me out. While the moments and sentences written by AI are clearly marked and often come with a larger conversation about the use of AI, it’s inability to feel, and it’s lack of human qualities, I just could not get passed it.

Given the AI portion taking up much of my headspace while reading, I did find myself appreciating the conversations surrounding language and the rapidly changing langauge systems in Japan. I had never known there were different types of scripts with different uses in the Japanese language prior to reading this book. It was fascinating to understand the mechanics of a language foreign to me, especially given that I speak and read English as my first language. The meditation on script in other languages that is meant to imitate English was absolutely fascinating, and I wholy enjoyed that part of the book.

"I've always had a soft spot for vagueness," -Takt

There are a lot of things going on in Sympathy Tower Tokyo, but the one that stood out the most to me is it's discussion on how we use language and how it's changed. By changing the way we refer to 'prison' and criminals', things don't actually change but people's impressions DO change. I really like the different ways this is presented. Sara, the architect, is obsessed with the abundance of loan words in Japanese and finding a better name for the prison tower than Sympathy. A writer in the book writes a who book on what kinds of language we should change, what we should use. The tower itself bans "comparative" and negative language.

I've seen a lot of criticism for the use of AI to write the AI character in the book, but it's really minimal and, honestly, kind of interesting. I'm not sure if it was completely necessary, but I do think it adds another layer of complexity to the idea and use of language, considering AI is not human,

This is really a book that makes you think. It's short, but it was NOT a fast read for me because I needed to let things sit for a bit. I liked the quote about vagueness because I have recently been thinking about how much I like a little vagueness in novels, and in my opinion this book also has a lot of that. I think Sympathy Tower Tokyo will be on my mind for awhile, and I want to buy a copy for my physical shelf.

I was originally interested in Sympathy Tower Tokyo because the translator Jesse Kirkwood has translated several cute books I have read recently such as Kamogawa Food Detectives!

This was not in any way cute with the first chapter casually comparing the building of a new tower in Tokyo feeling like r*pe

I then also found out the author has admitted to using ChatGPT in the writing of this book. I am disappointed to see this published.