“I don’t feel particularly unhappy about my work being used to train AI,” says Japanese novelist Rie Qudan. “Even if it is copied, I feel confident there’s a part of me that will remain, which nobody can copy.”
The 34-year old author is talking to me via Zoom from her home near Tokyo, ahead of the publication of the English-language translation of her fourth novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo. The book attracted controversy in Japan when it won a prestigious prize, despite being partly written by ChatGPT.
At the heart of Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a Japanese architect, Sara Machina, who has been commissioned to build a new tower to house convicted criminals. It will be a representation of what one character – not without irony – calls “the extraordinary broadmindedness of the Japanese people”, in that the tower will house offenders in compassionate comfort.
In the novel, Sara, herself a victim of violent crime, wonders if this sympathetic approach to criminals is appropriate. Does this sympathy reflect Japanese society in reality?
“It’s definitely prevalent,” says Qudan. One of the triggers for writing the novel, she adds, was the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022. “The person who shot him became the centre of a lot of attention in Japan – and his background elicited a lot of sympathy from people. He had grown up in a heavily religious household, and been deprived of freedom. That idea had been in my head for a long time, and when I came to write the novel, it came out again as part of the process.”
The question of public attitudes towards criminals runs through the story, in serious and satirical ways. Potential residents of the tower must take a “Sympathy Test” to determine if they are deserving of compassion (“Have your parents ever acted violently towards you? – Yes / No / Don’t know”) … and the ultimate decision will be made by AI.
Sympathy Tower Tokyo won the Akutagawa prize in 2024 for new or rising authors when it was first published. She was “delighted”, she says, but also “liberated, because once you make your debut as a writer, there’s a constant pressure to win this prize”. In 2022, she had been nominated for her book Schoolgirl, but didn’t win. “I felt I’d let people down by not winning the prize, and that was something I didn’t want to repeat. You know, with that prize it stays with you your whole life.”
But the book also grabbed attention because Qudan said that part of it – 5% was the figure given, though she now says that was only an approximation – was written using artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel which are presented as a character’s exchange with ChatGPT. But Qudan also “gained a lot of inspiration” for the novel through “exchanges with AI and from the realisation that it can reflect human thought processes in interesting ways”. Qudan’s use of AI, in other words, seeks not to deceive the reader but to help us to see its effects.
One character feels pity for the chatbot, “condemned to an empty life of endlessly spewing out the language it was told to spew, without ever understanding what this cut-and-paste patchwork of other people’s words meant”.
Does Qudan fear that AI will supplant human writers? “Maybe a future will come when that happens, but right now there’s no way an AI can write a novel that’s better than a human author.” Among Japanese readers, Sympathy Tower Tokyo “did get attention for using AI. But more than that, it was a focus on the language itself which really generated discussion; how the changes of language over the last few decades are affecting how people act or view things.”
And this feeds into the key issue at the heart of Qudan’s book. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is really all about language, which in the book is not just how we express ourselves, but how we reveal ourselves. “Words determine our reality,” says one character.
In the novel, a key debate is around the growth of katakana in Japan – that is, the script used to write foreign-derived words. Words rendered in katakana (as opposed to hiragana script and kanji characters, which are used to write traditional Japanese words) resemble transliterations of English – “negurekuto” for neglect, “fōrin wākāzu” for foreign workers – and to Japanese ears they are “milder, more euphemistic” than traditional kanji words, and can avoid “discriminatory turns of phrase”. The character Sara thinks “Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language”. Her boyfriend wants to “stop this wretched proliferation of katakana”.
But stopping it is not easy, and probably not possible. Qudan explains that while older generations sometimes choose katakana over kanji, or vice versa, for younger generations like her – Qudan was born in 1990 – katakana “has become a standard which is not questioned”.
This is not merely an academic or cultural detail, but an urgent issue for Japan’s politics today. In Japanese elections last month, the far-right party Sanseito surged in support, winning 14 seats in the upper house of parliament, where it had previously held only one. The party campaigns on a slogan that translates as “Japanese people first”, echoing Donald Trump and Maga’s “America first”. Its success has raised fears of an anti-foreigner backlash. Is diversity valued in Japan?
“Unfortunately,” Qudan says, “the reality is that not all Japanese people welcome diversity. Twelve years ago, I had a foreign, non-Japanese boyfriend, and I introduced him to my parents. My mother was extremely unhappy. She panicked. It might have been the biggest shock in my entire life to see my own mother react in this way. I’d never thought of her as someone who discriminated against foreigners.
“There are people all around you who you would never think hold those views, who actually do hold those views. A lot of Japanese people, on the surface, they know how to act in a way that makes them seem [welcoming of diversity]. And this discrepancy between what people think on the inside and what they say is a very distinctive feature.”
This brings us back to language, and how it can both conceal and reveal. In its “Japanese people first” slogan, Qudan explains, the Sanseito party uses the katakana word for “first”, rather than the traditional Japanese kanji word. “By using the katakana equivalent,” Qudan says, “a lot of the negative associations can be replaced by neutral ones. It doesn’t trigger people in the same way.”
It creates, in other words, a sort of plausible deniability? “Yes, yes. They know exactly what they’re doing. And that’s why this use of katakana requires our attention,” Qudan concludes. “When someone uses katakana, we should ask: what are they trying to hide?”
