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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? And what might the new philosophy do to culture? To language? 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.
''Stuns and illuminates. 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 Memorial
''A brilliantly ambitious struggle and mediation on language, thought and existence. A wondrous book'', Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars<>
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Rie Qudan was born in Saitama, Japan. After she made her debut in 2021 with Bad Music, which won the Bungakukai New Writers Award, she was quickly acclaimed as one of the most exciting new writers in Japanese literature. In 2022, her second work, Schoolgirl, was shortlisted for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. Her third work, The Poetry Horse, won Noma Literary Newcomer Award. Her runaway bestselling fourth novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo was published in 2024, and won the Akutagawa Prize.Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator working from Japanese into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, his translations include Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan and A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama.
Bericht
So über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, yet it is far more than merely topical or trendy, as deep moral, political, social, cultural, architectural and lingual problems collide throughout this short novel. A contemporary gem Spectator
