Book Review: Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"There was a time when language was an unparalleled means of communication - a time when we still knew how to wield it, and relied on it to achieve peace and mutual understanding. But now it is simply tearing our world apart...A world ravaged by ranting. The era of the endless monologue."

The author of SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO, Rie Qudan, (in)famously declared that she had used ChatGPT to write 5% of her Akutagawa Prize winning novel. The use of large language models (LLM's) is the most pressing issue now in the academe and in the workplace, and today's literature is now reflecting society's ongoing dialogue with rapidly changing times and social mores.

Where do we draw the line? Does 5% of LLM assisted writing render the human 95% null and void?

Happily, with this specific book, the 5% consists of the human characters "conversing" with an LLM or giving it a prompt. In order to truthfully show what an LLM would say, the author had to use one.

It's a memorable book. Tackling multiple themes such as the increasing bastardization of the Japanese language (as illustrated by the use of katakana over kanji), the ethical way societies should treat its criminals when one considers the state's partial responsibility in allowing them to become law breakers, as well as delving into the role of architecture in forming a city and its people... for such a short volume, it gives the reader plenty to think about.

I found it very interesting that in the beautiful tower that our architect protagonist builds to house criminals, the top two rules are: "One: Words must only be used to make yourself and others happy. Two: All words which do not ..must be forgotten." And at the very top floor? A library.

Does the future hold more books co-written by LLM's? If architecture is meant to "show cities where to go," as Qudan writes, then perhaps this book is her literary structure pointing a path forward.

After all, "words determine our reality."

(English translation by Jesse Kirkwood)

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Book Review: Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley

Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"There will be plenty of times for celebration in your life...but you haven't earned the right to celebrate. Not yet."

Can a British author write a convincing J-Lit novel, with the flavor and profundity its genre is known for? Nick Bradley's FOUR SEASONS IN JAPAN answers a resounding YES, with its keen observations of Japanese culture and the author's love and respect for the Japanese shining through. Perhaps this is the appeal of a gaijin, for who better to write of a culture than one who observes it from the outside, and yet knows the language and its literary traditions well enough to work as a translator?

It's a novel within a novel, and works so well as both stories blend and merge: a tribute to how life on the page and reality so often coincide as they feed off of each other.

An American translator, in the midst of both a professional and personal slump, finds a mysterious book left behind on the train. This is our frame narrative.

The charming heart of the book is the Japanese novel, with a lost Tokyo pre-college student learning about life when he comes to live with his grandmother in his late father's hometown. (The novel made me want to visit Onomichi someday!)

The story seems simple enough, but the delight comes in the clash between generations, the passing on of knowledge paid for with a terrible price, and the overcoming of personal tragedy.

Bradley's novel is a reflection on life's seasons, and a beautiful literary tribute to Japan's authors and way of life.

It begins with a poem by Miyazawa Kenji, which is now one of my new favorites. May the books we read enable us all to keep smiling through life, "without losing to the rain, without losing to the wind."

~ ~ ~
WITHOUT LOSING TO THE RAIN by Miyazawa Kenji

Without losing to the rain
Without losing to the wind
Neither beaten by snow
nor summer's heat
Keep a strong body
absent of desire
Neither angry nor resentful
always smiling calmly
Four cups of brown rice
miso and a few vegetables each day
Observe all things
impartially and selflessly
Look, listen, understand deeply
never forget lessons learnt
Dwell in a humble thatched house
in the shade of forest pines
To the east if there is a sick child
go nurse them to health
To the west a weary mother
go help her harvest rice
To the south a person dying
go tell them there's no need to fear
To the north a fight or squabble
go tell them to make peace
In the time of drought shed tears
wander at a loss in cold summer
Called a nobody by all
without praise or being noticed
That's the kind of person
I wish to be

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Book Review: THE TAINTED CUP (Shadow of the Leviathan # 1) by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"What a tool cynicism is to the corrupt, claiming the whole of the creation is broken and fraudulent, and thus we are all excused to indulge in whatever sins we wish - for what's a little more unfairness, in this unfair world?... There can be no wrong doing in an Empire so broken."

I've been a fan of Robert Jackson Bennett ever since I read and fell in love with his Divine Cities Trilogy half a decade ago. 😍 Recently, his first book in The Shadow of the Leviathan trilogy, The Tainted Cup, won the 2025 Hugo Awards for Best Novel, and so I rushed to finish it.

(If you thought this was good, wait til you read City of Stairs and the rest of the previous trilogy!)

RJB is master of plot and personality, crafting stories that pulse with energy in worlds unique and unlike any other.

THE TAINTED CUP is a mystery novel set in a distant empire, where underwater leviathans constantly threaten to end all human life. When engineers essential to the upkeep of The Wall get murdered by mutant vegetation that hurriedly grow from their bellies, our young hero has to solve a crime that implicates the highest levels of government.

So many lines from the book resonate, especially in light of recent news involving corruption with our own nation's leaders and their contractors.

Patronage politics and selfish leaders make this spec fic novel feel so relevant, yet the exotic characters make everything seem fresh and new.

I also appreciated how, as was seen in another trilogy of RJB's, the main character just so happens to be gay, yet the author handles it matter-of-factly and doesn't make an entire subplot out of it. You only find out about his orientation towards the very end of the book. I feel that this is also a valuable form of representation: focusing on the hero's other qualities instead of merely emphasizing his gender. After all, citizens in the Empire of Khanum have more important things than pronouns to think about, like how death is knocking daily at their sea wall, and how deadly dapplegrass can grow unchecked and take over an entire country.

"Civilization is often a task that is only barely managed. But...the towers of justice are built one brick at a time."

You can never go wrong with a Robert Jackson Bennett book. Now, on to Book 2 (#A Drop of Corruption)!

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Book Review: ENDLING by Maria Reva

Endling by Maria Reva
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It’s what you all do, in the free world. You waste your freedom and your clear skies on things that don’t matter, like politeness and the perfect lawn… is it better to live in a world where a gas station with nukes gets to call the shots?”

ENDLING was my fifth book in the Booker Longlist, and so far it has proved the most memorable, though decidedly not easy reading.

An endling is the last known representative of a species. When it dies, a whole branch of the evolutionary tree becomes extinct.

Author Maria Reva (born in the Ukraine, raised in Canada) has written what I suspect to be an autobiographical novel that manages to be both urgent call to action and an indictment on the apathy of the entire world. Reva points at the absurdity of our world where aesthetic Booksta reels coexist along with full-scale invasions in these contemporary, supposedly civilized times.

The novel is satire, awkward romance, and war epic all in one, as it jumps from the main narrative to chapters between author and editor. Memorable technical details include an ABOUT THE AUTHOR portion in the middle that had me flipping pages to and fro, panicking that the book had abruptly ended, as well as a chapter in the end written three different times.

Some books have clever details that sometimes come across as mere technical braggadocio, but in this book, it seems to highlight the book’s message: the impossibility (futility?) of crafting a cohesive narrative in the face of genocide. When the blood of innocents soaks the chernozem, Ukraine’s fertile soil, what is the point of writing, or even reading?

For Reva, she is torn between preserving memory, and railing at the craziness of Russia invading Ukraine, and how the rest of humanity is fine with the mass extinction of an entire country, an entire people. She shows how we cling to empty shells of what we think constitute a meaningful existence, lies easily torn apart in the face of the first enemy bomb.

This is the first time I’ve put down a book, doubting if it mattered. Perhaps my reading doesn’t. But her writing of this marvelous book certainly does. She writes now with anger, then with laughter mixed with tears, and all the vast ocean of humanity’s infinite heart lie within this remarkable novel. What a tribute to the heroes of Ukraine. What a strong contender for the Booker Prize.




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Book Review: PORTRAITS OF A MOTHER by Shusaku Endo

Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"With one single exception, there had been no mistakes or corrections in his father's life. What could possibly be the point for such a man to write anything?"

Reading this newly translated novella and 5 stories (the latest to be added to the list of books by the great Catholic writer Shusaku Endo) is an intimacy of an almost sacred kind. We peer through a glass darkly and find different poses and faces of Endo's remarkable mother, who emerges as the complicated, flawed, yet cherished heroine all throughout the autobiographical tales.

Like a theme with variations, the violin-playing independent woman who shapes the future novelist into being comes across as a force of nature, a gale whipping the pages into life.

"There is something higher, much, much higher... an asphalt-paved road is safe, so anyone can walk along it. There's no danger... but if a person turns and looks behind them, not a single one of their footsteps has been left on that safe road. A sandy beach by the ocean is difficult to walk along... but when you look behind you, every single one of your footsteps remains there...Please, whatever you do, don't live a worthless life by walking on an asphalt road."

For Endo, his mother is intricately tied up with his identity as a Catholic (not an easy religion to belong to, in wartime Japan). It's very poignant how he remembers his mother and his childhood priest in various points of his adult life.

But even if the reader were not Catholic, there is still much to relate to, in the universal struggle to form an independent self from a strong parental figure; in the burning quest to fulfill parental expectations after a parent's death.

And again, we see Endo at his excoriating best. For him, writing is his confessional, where he analyzes "the major rivers that have given shape to my life." He analyzes his weak deeds and thoughts, and in so doing, the book reflects the reader's own faults back to her.

Yet these faults are not irredeemable, as Endo constantly writes. And I suppose this is what makes Endo "Catholic," as he continues to find God in all things, even in the most wretched of men, even in the vilest and darkest night of the soul.

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Book Review: ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The Question of Questions wasn't 'Why are the stars in the sky?' but rather 'Why is anything anywhere?'"

I dove into the 3rd Booker Longlister's ocean of melodic phrases, swam amidst its memorable characters and emerged excited for the possibilities of language, especially its ability to preserve the fleeting flash that is one human life.

In ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley, our heroine (a lawyer with literary ambitions) is a divorced English woman who revisits a Greek provincial town after 9 years. The first time she was there, she met some of the townsfolk, healing a broken heart through the pursuit of human connection. The second time, she seeks a similar salvation through conversing with these same people: an old lover, a poet/philosopher, and the former waitress-turned-owner of the local tavern.

The story is simple enough, and yet there is a great deal unsaid, a lot of the story shimmering beneath the surface. What is the real reason behind the mysterious injury of the town poet? Did the random stranger confessing to planning murder actually carry out his revenge?

And through it all, thoughts of the female lead's dead parents arise. How she longs to share her experiences with her beloved mom and less beloved, yet dearly missed dad. How absence is presence, the blessing of memory. And how transitory a human life is, brilliant in its brevity until we all go "into the great indifference."

The novel becomes very meta towards the end, as all throughout the writer reinterprets her experience as she records her thoughts in her diary, later submitted for publication. I smiled as the editor (himself a Booker Longlister, who rewrote his book five times) suggested ways by which our heroine might try "increasing the 'narrative torque.'" But she lets the seemingly ordinary holiday remain as is, without embellishment. Because even in its most banal, a life truly lived (talking to people, looking at the sunrise, and being in the moment) is already an unearned abundance.

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Book Review: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finished this book on the day that a high school student shot a fellow student in Nueva Ecija, mere months after two knife stabbing incidents in local schools. Our children are not OK, and this book helps explain why, and offers a course of action.

I’ll just go out and say it: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION is perhaps this generation’s single most important book for parents, educators, and policy makers. Necessary and timely, it’s for anyone who has fallen asleep and woken up only to reach for their phone to check social media notifications, for everyone who has spent an inordinate amount of time online.

Social psychologist, parent, scholar, and professor Jonathan Haidt has written an extremely alarming book on “the psychological damage of a phone-based life.” The accessibility of his language in presenting scholarly findings makes it so that his message comes across even more urgently.

He presents scholarly research on how the deadly combination of underprotection of children online (unsupervised access to screens with Internet for hours), combined with overprotection of children in real life (preventing them from gaining feedback through overcoming meaningful challenges) has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and mental illness in our youth. And the evidence he shows points to social media as the cause, not as a correlate.

Smart phones are “experience blockers,” Haidt explains, and the current epidemic of mental health goes hand in hand with too much screentime and too much helicopter parenting. From reducing our students’ interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience (I remember a student asking me what’s the point in going on a field trip to listen to World War II veterans when she can just watch a YouTube video online), to mass social media - induced illness (kids claiming to have Tourette’s after a German influencer who really had the condition went viral, or the sociogenic spread of gender dysphoria)... the book covers a lot of ground, but every page is important.

The book provides a historical background of a cultural shift towards “Safetyism” as well as a timeline of the rise of smart phones and social media companies deliberately targeting psychological vulnerabilities, or what he calls “The Great Rewiring.”
His closing chapter offers suggestions for collective action, on what parents, schools, and governments can do to fight this global crisis.

“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us… There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble or elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”

The irony is not lost on me that I am posting this on social media, but perhaps this is the start: recognizing the evil that the algorithms have done in the past, yet using these same tools to spread awareness, to shed a bit of light in an ocean of doom and gloom.

And after posting this, I shall turn off my gadget and read. Or play the piano. Or do countless other life-giving activities offline.

In the book, Haidt quoted Thoreau: “The cost of a thing is the amount of… life which is required to be exchanged for it.” Life cannot and should not be lived online. Here’s to not spending a single minute on social media, more than is absolutely necessary.

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