Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
[This review was published in the September 2025 issue of Locus. After some back and forth exchanges, I was informed that the editors of Locus's website had decided not to run the review online. I am reprinting it here, both for my own records, and because I think this is one of the most intriguing science fiction novels published last year, one that is worthy of more public discussion.]
Looking out at the Tokyo skyline in an early scene in Rie Qudan's Sympathy Tower Tokyo, architect Sara Machina considers Zaha Hadid's iconic Olympic stadium, designed for the 2020 games. The expensive, controversial design, Sara tells us, was nearly abandoned and replaced by a more conventional structure. To Sara, however, the stadium feels inevitable: "only [Hadid's] stadium could supply Tokyo with the beauty it desperately needed. If it went unbuilt, the city would never be content. The stadium would be built because it had to be built; it would exist because it had to exist."
As Qudan's Japanese readers are no doubt aware, Hadid's stadium was never built. Its design did prove controversial and prohibitively expensive, and was replaced, after a campaign of public pressure, by a less ambitious structure. Qudan thus subtly signals that her novel takes place in an alternate near future. The difference between this world and ours, however, lies less in the material reality of steel and cement as in national mood. In our world, the mood of the Japanese people leaned against Hadid's fantastical design and towards something more pragmatic. In Qudan's novel—winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award—a single work of social advocacy so inflames the imagination of the Japanese people that they seek to remake not just their cities, but their society and language.
That work is "Homo Miserabilis: The New Subjects of Our Sympathy". It argues for the abolition of the term "criminal" and a reclassification of humans into two groups: Homo felix and Homo miserabilis. The latter are victims of society, compelled to commit crimes because they were raised without the experience or expectation of happiness. The solution, the treatise argues, is to construct the titular tower, a luxurious high rise where the incarcerated can experience the comfort and beauty denied to them in their outside lives. The novel's narrative shifts between Sara, the tower's architect, Takt, a young shop assistant who becomes a counselor in the tower, and several other people who observe the project.
Qudan includes a long excerpt from "The New Subjects of Our Sympathy", and the almost deliberate glibness with which it discusses crime—including the way it uses "happiness" as a gloss for social causes of criminal behavior such as poverty and prejudice—can lead one to wonder whether she isn't mocking the argument for prison reform. The choice to position Sara as the chief skeptic towards the tower's project has a similar effect. As a girl, Sara was raped, and then disbelieved when she reported the rape. That experience—the denial of sympathy as much as the fact of the rape—has stunted her identity and her life. Her presence in the novel is thus a reminder that crime is a more fraught, more complex subject than advocates of the tower allow.
Qudan's interest, however, is less in crime—there are hardly any criminal characters in the novel, and no victims of crime except for Sara—as it is in language. It is the force of language that has traumatized Sara more than the experience of rape. Because the boy who raped her was her boyfriend, and she had told him that she loved him, it is determined that what happened between them could not be termed "rape". She has spent her life in terror of once again saying something that will leave her open to abuse. A woman described in "The New Subjects of Our Sympathy" (whom we later learn is Takt's mother) describes, as a teenager, trying to procure an abortion after being impregnated and abandoned by a much older man. "At the time, she wasn’t equipped to explain her cruel situation to the doctors. The words that would have accurately conveyed her reality simply lay out of her grasp."
One might expect the new era of "sympathy" to address such gaps, but the novel suggests that the expansion of language can create new barriers to true understanding. As an architect, Sara is frustrated by the growing use of katakana (the phonetic syllabary with which Japanese incorporates foreign loan words) in public signage, many of which are intended to be more inclusive—"jendāresu toire" for genderless toilets, for example, instead of the kanji-based phrase "zenseibetsu toire", which Sara's young colleague decries as outdated and insensitive. But is the adoption of these foreign terms a means of furthering understanding, or are they merely tokens without true meaning, whose use obviates the need to engage with new, sometimes uncomfortable ideas?
A similar detachment of language from meaning is seen in the characters' interactions with AI, which they use to explain the new prevailing ideas of "sympathy" in their society (Qudan has acknowledged that she generated these passages using ChatGPT). Sara, in an early scene, observes to the AI that for all its loquaciousness, it is illiterate. Later in the novel, however, she appears to have been adopted its approach to language. When she describes her design for the tower, sublimating her doubts about the project by embracing buzzwords like "equality", "empathy", and "coexistence", Takt likens it to AI-generated text: "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."
This equation of inclusive language and meaningless language has implications that Qudan perhaps didn't intend. Within the setting of the novel, however, it echoes with our introduction to the tower itself. A beautiful structure full of natural light and spaces for contemplation and relaxation, it is also, we soon come to realize, an engine for the erasure of language. "Words must only be used to make yourself and others happy," its future inhabitants are instructed before entering. "All words which do not make yourself and others happy must be forgotten." When Takt observes the prisoners, they are largely silent, unable to express any negative concept because they have forgotten the words for it. Many of them decline to leave the tower once their sentence has concluded.
Sympathy, it turns out, means not the pursuit of genuine understanding, but a more pronounced, more final separation between groups whose differences (as well as their causes) remain unexamined. In a novel that makes several Biblical references, this is a clever reversal of the tale of the Tower of Babel, in which the standardization of language, not its proliferation, imposes separation. As Takt explains: "Creating a utopia always means cutting off all contact with the outside world. Same goes for dystopias."
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