Sympathy Tower Tokyo: A Novel

by Rie Qudan, Jesse Kirkwood (Translator)

Overview

The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon: a speculative, prophetic novel following a young and brilliant celebrity architect in Tokyo who takes on her most controversial project yet—perfect for readers of Klara and the Sun and Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis.

A grand, yet controversial, skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city’s new centerpiece but is filled with 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 and in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot…

The recipient of Japan’s highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new global voices. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an urgent and brilliant defense of the power of language written by humans, a moving exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send-up of our modern world’s unrelenting conformity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668094143
Publisher:	S&S/Summit Books
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Rie Qudan was born in Saitama, Japan. Her third novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Japan.

Jesse Kirkwood was awarded the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize in 2020 and has translated the bestselling Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, and Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

Provocative...an intriguing window into the controversy following the tower’s opening. It’s a disarming novel of ideas.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. It considers the implications and limitations of language in a way I've never seen before. In these considerations is offers a new paradigm through which we might reimagine incarceration and the idea of so-called ‘criminality.’ A wondrous book.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of National Book Award finalist Chain-Gang All-Stars

“SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO stuns and illuminates. Qudan's characters are as complex and present as the worlds they inhabit - and her protagonist, Sara Machina, is original beyond measure. SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO is an ode to language and possibility and the ongoing question of how to be in an ever-changing world.” —Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial

"A haunting excursion into the space between words and reality. This novel is a marvel of precision engineering: compact, multi-layered, with unobstructed views on society, present and future. A unique construction that slowly envelops the reader to show from the inside the tower of language that imprisons us. Stimulating, unsettling, an ingenious piece of work." —Charles Yu, author of the National Book Award-winning Interior Chinatown

“Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan is unlike any book I’ve ever read. This brief, mesmerizing novel explores the ways we shape our spaces and the ways our spaces shape us. I was struck by its wit and its wisdom, its structure and its subversiveness, and I consumed it in a single gulp.” —Helen Phillips, author of Hum

"The work is flawless." —Shuichi Yoshida, Akutagawa Prize judge

From the Publisher

Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. It considers the implications and limitations of language in a way I've never seen before. In these considerations is offers a new paradigm through which we might reimagine incarceration and the idea of so-called ‘criminality.’ A wondrous book.

author of National Book Award finalist Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

"A haunting excursion into the space between words and reality. This novel is a marvel of precision engineering: compact, multi-layered, with unobstructed views on society, present and future. A unique construction that slowly envelops the reader to show from the inside the tower of language that imprisons us. Stimulating, unsettling, an ingenious piece of work."

author of the National Book Award-winning Interior Chinatown - Charles Yu 

"The work is flawless."

Akutagawa Prize judge - Shuichi Yoshida

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan is unlike any book I’ve ever read. This brief, mesmerizing novel explores the ways we shape our spaces and the ways our spaces shape us. I was struck by its wit and its wisdom, its structure and its subversiveness, and I consumed it in a single gulp.

author of Hum  - Helen Phillips

SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO stuns and illuminates. Qudan's characters are as complex and present as the worlds they inhabit - and her protagonist, Sara Machina, is original beyond measure. SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO is an ode to language and possibility and the ongoing question of how to be in an ever-changing world.

author of Lot and Memorial - Bryan Washington

2025-06-07
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 screamingno, 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.

Kirkus Reviews