Rie Kudan

Rie Kudan is a Japanese novelist born in 1990. She is one of the most discussed and controversial figures in recent Japanese literary culture, winning the Akutagawa Prize for the second half of 2023 for Sympathy Tower Tokyo, a near-future literary thriller set in a Japan where AI is integrated into architecture and society. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is set in a future Tokyo where a controversial skyscraper is under construction. The novel uses this near-future setting to explore questions of crime, punishment, surveillance, and the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. The novel is notable for its author's remarkable frankness: at the Akutagawa Prize ceremony, Kudan admitted that approximately five percent of the text had been generated with the assistance of AI, becoming one of the first literary prize winners to publicly acknowledge AI assistance. This admission generated enormous debate in Japan and internationally about the use of AI in literary creation, the authenticity of prize-winning work, and the future of literature in the age of generative AI. Kudan is a significant and controversial figure in contemporary Japanese and world literature, and Sympathy Tower Tokyo is one of the most discussed novels about AI ever published.