Posts by Leanne Ogasawara

The Erosion of Meaning: A Review of Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan

November 12, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Leanne Ogasawara

In the novel we see the ways in which AI . . . neutralizes and algorithmicizes language, rendering it less precise and more ambiguous. . .

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Penguin, 2025

Rie Qudan’s latest novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo, garnered controversy in Japan when it won the prestigious Akutagawa Award in 2024. Questions immediately arose after the author announced that she used AI to help write parts of the story: around 5%, she specified. This led to the expected outrage regarding the dangers of AI in the arts, especially considering that the prize committee was unaware of its usage when they selected the novel. This is particularly interesting when at its center, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a book about language—how words shape our thoughts and build our dreams—but it is also about the social consequences when language begins to lose its meaning.

Set in the near future, the novel’s igniting incident is a gigantic new prison being constructed in the heart of Tokyo. The commission for the building’s design has gone to celebrity architect Sara Machina, who wants to create a big beautiful tower, one that will stand in conversation with Zaha Hadid’s National Stadium. In this alternative Japan, Hadid’s stadium was built in time for the 2020 Olympics, which took place as originally scheduled (contrary to its delay due to COVID). The new prison, the titular “Sympathy Tower,” is intended to be a place of rehabilitation for those labeled Homo miserabilis, or “humans deserving sympathy.” It is thus meant to convey the idea that incarcerated prisoners are themselves victims of systemic economic and social injustice—including murderers and rapists. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Kōtarō Takamura

December 8, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Leanne Ogasawara

Chieko, who has become an element, / Is even now within my flesh, smiling at me

Master poet and sculptor Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956) candidly explores his grief and longing in these selections from the Chieko Poems, our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. As translator Leanne Ogasawara writes: “The Chieko Poems tell the story of the poet’s love for his wife. Reading the anthology chronologically, we begin with poems that describe the passion of their early romance and elopement against the wishes of their parents, following along as the poems become concerned with the trauma of Chieko’s mental illness and early death in 1938. Even after she is gone, Chieko remained the central figure in Kotaro’s life, and he would continue to write poem after poem about her. [. . .] The Chieko Poems are unforgettable as much for their early romance and passion as for the sense of loss and recovery expressed in the later poems. Kotaro slowly came to take comfort in this idea that through her death, Chieko returned to nature becoming imbued in all the things around him—even within his own body.” The selections below are three poems written after Chieko’s death. Kotaro’s sorrow accompanies his longing and desire as the speaker fixates on the beauty of his beloved’s physical form. With imagery that is at once reverential and abject, the speaker views his beloved’s body as something inhabiting both the natural and spiritual worlds.

A Desolate Homecoming

Chieko, who wanted to return home so badly
Has come home dead.
Late one October night, I sweep a small corner
   of the empty atelier
Cleaning, purifying
There I place Chieko.
And in front of this lifeless body
I remain standing a long time.
Someone turns the screen upside down.
Someone lights the incense.
Someone puts makeup on Chieko.
Things somehow get done.
As the sun rises and then sets
The house grows busy, buried in flowers
There is something like a funeral
Then, Chieko is gone.
And I stand alone
      in this now empty and dark atelier.
Tonight people say the full moon is beautiful READ MORE…