Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
Sympathy Tower Tokyo
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.
Penguin, 2025
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. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. As she casts her mind to the terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might think against the grain of her time: could it be that criminals deserve the punishment and disdain of the past? 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.
About the Author
Rie Qudan was born in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, in 1990. She was the recipient of the Bungakukai New Writer’s Award in 2021 for her debut novella Bad Music, and of the Geijutsusensho New Writer’s Award for Schoolgirl in 2023. In 2024, she was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for Tokyo Sympathy Tower.
About the Translator
Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator working from Japanese into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, his translations include The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto and A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama.