SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO

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 screaming no, 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.