On Literary Fiction: a brief mention about Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan/Kudan
Edited: I did my assignment this time.
So, it's Rie Qudan who got awarded last year's Akutagawa Prize… but openly admitted to having used 5% of ChatGPT.
...yeah.
She could've been someone on the top of my head from when I was browsing the internet some time and read an article about an author who won the Akutagawa Prize who said they used AI.
I did find a discussion thread about Rie Qudan’s admission about ChatGPT on Reddit, and the most voted comments gave me things to consider. First, the most sound argument says that it's relative to the execution and the function of generative AI as a literary production. Since Rie Qudan had motifs and themes of AI in her novel, the most voted discussion pointed out that if ChatGPT were used to produce an AI-sounding text contained alone within the theme of generative AI, then it would add texture to the novel. But if it means copy-pasting dialogues and prose from ChatGPT, these literary readers will likely not read the novel. As one Reddit comment puts it, “another author to ignore.”
Well, AI is a thing after all. In my previous essay, “On AI: ChatGPT Will Not Make You the Greatest Novel Written,” I mentioned that I, myself, use AI to such a degree that I ask it to analyze my drafts.
However, since I revolve on a different topic from the same Reddit forum but still read the conversations the Redditors commented on, my only say is that I'm really old-school. I’m old school in such a way that my own concentration on themes and subject matter of literature has something to do with the humanities and liberal arts.
Now that it's become clearer to authors like Rie Qudan, who used ChatGPT and later won the Akutagawa, I understand myself better within the position of this diverse method of literary creation wherein I'm really one of those who prefers the old painful style where you have a pen and paper, a word processor out of necessity not to waste too much paper for a slush pile, and a big dictionary or encyclopedia to consult or a Google search engine (because, come on, this is the 21st century).
I have no qualms about Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Rie Qudan is a talented writer in her own right. For her to have won an essay contest in elementary school—that's a feat. That is raw talent. Since the reason I found this out is because The Paris Review recommended Sympathy Tower Tokyo as a book to read in 2025 on my Substack feed.
The themes found in this novel are beyond what I'm usually exposed to. It's about an exploration of society, humanity, and rapid technology assimilated together until the scrutiny of this assimilation arises as one of the novel’s themes.
Rie Qudan is the only one who has the artistic vision of what her novel represents. If she says she used ChatGPT and has credentials that she could write way back as a child, I'm pretty sure she used ChatGPT with very specific prompts until she could have her authorial vision realized in that novel. If that's the case, then AI is used for assistance and collaboration in the method that AI knows best, which is to generate text. ChatGPT is an LLM after all. However, the mind behind the prompts, the instructions, and the direction of ChatGPT's generation will always be in the hands of Rie Qudan's intention.
I do not believe that she generated her prose by ChatGPT. For Rie Qudan's caliber, she doesn't need ChatGPT to write prose for her. But this is just my opinion. I don't know what else is going on. However, if she is transparent about the fact that she used AI in her novel, maybe that is because AI is part of the subject that she's trying to examine, and she knows better how to handle it than anybody else. Unlike the casual reader on Reddit who heard AI and whose quick response was to ignore her novel. Or a Goodreads book reviewer that heard about AI and ended up putting a one-star rating on her novel. Nobody can control their opinion. But if they are serious and critical, like the forum where I read the conversation about this topic, then, like reading, they should also be able to examine it with nuance.
For my own context, though, who knew I'd stumble upon the author I couldn't name before? My answer would probably be that I think I'll pass on the novel for now (I know I'm a conservative prude, and trust me, just by the text I read, I'm an ancient fossil).
So that's my own brief comment about the impact of AI inclusion on the topic of literary work, it seems.
There's an Akutagawa-awarded novel that I'm more interested in, to be honest. And it's the one written by a non-Japanese author about the Tiananmen Massacre.
These days, I get more awareness that nothing seems to make me more interested than military tanks about to fire onto their own civilians, just like in Myanmar, where authorities torture their activists with brutality that gave me trauma just by watching the documentary released by Al Jazeera.
I have searched for the author, and she's not Taiwanese. Sorry for the mix-up. It turns out, she's Yang Yi, who won the Akutagawa Prize for her novel ‘A Morning When Time Blurs’ or ‘Tokiga nijimu asa.’
There we go; I'm an old schooler who is concerned about social issues and politics, I guess.
