Flying Lizard

My curiosity was piqued when I heard the author say on a TV news program that she’d written a novel with the help of ChatGPT. In January 2024, her book was awarded the Akutagawa Award, one of the most prestigious accolades for a work of Japanese fiction.

As I was reading the book, I discovered online that the author was due to attend an autograph session at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku on February 24, so I signed up. The last time I went to an autograph session was about 25 years ago, when I lined up for an autograph from Kyosen Ohashi, also at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku.

Anyway, there I was, standing in line at Kinokuniya’s second-floor lounge on a Saturday in February. I was surprised by how well-organized things were. There was no crush of people. Was it because the store had spaced things out very evenly? Or do not very many people go to writer autograph sessions these days?

The line was progressing smoothly, and everyone was chatting with the author, so it seemed like I’d get to ask a question. When my turn came, I blurted it out: “Did you have to practice a lot, go through a lot of trial and error, when asking questions to generative AI? How easy was it to get a desired response?” The author seemed to let out a little laugh, maybe smirking a little bit with a not-this-question-again type demeanor. The second part of my question elicited a minor reaction with the author saying something along the lines of–it’s not easy to get a desired response.

Looking back, I’m not even sure what I meant by “desired response.” My train of thought was that the author would give ChatGPT specific prompts to generate a particular type of sentence or writing-—I imagined it to be something like learning how to program a computer. But the author probably wasn’t using AI to simulate human writing, or to come up with fantastic and fluid prose that would be mistaken as being written by a human author. A distinguishing characteristic of generative AI is it’s commitment to correctness, blandness and offending nobody. Or at least that’s the way the book’s protagonist seems to think.

The protagonist, an accomplished architect, has an axe to grind against the increased use of English words in situations where their Japanese equivalents would suffice. She believes such substitution obfuscates the word’s original meaning, that its harshness and bluntness gain a softer, gentler, less offensive-sounding veneer.

So, it’s only natural that she is upset when a new prison complex that she helped design, due to be built in the middle of Tokyo, is given the name “Tokyo Sympathy Tower.” At the behest of a young male cohort, she begins referring to the building only by a Japanese name that the two of them agreed on: Tokyotodojoto.

One of the characters in the book promotes terminology that seems to mean something like “people from unfairly miserable backgrounds that deserve sympathy” to describe people who committed a crime. The author does a convincing job of describing a person accused of theft that might be deserving of such sympathy and euphemism. While reading the book, I found it hard to argue against that idea, as extreme as that may sound.

Reading the book made me want to go see the New National Stadium that was rebuilt for the 2020 (2021) Tokyo Summer Olympics. The description was so convincing and captivating, that it made me forget that the project was cancelled. The book left me yearning for a structure that was never built.