Little Idiosyncrasies and Large Language Models

Since the spread of generative pretrained transformer (GPT) and large language model (LLM) technology, we humans have been furiously divided on the merits and dangers of artificial intelligence. Workers in a variety of professional areas are riddled with anxiety at the prospect of losing their jobs as they get replaced by AI, while teachers at all levels brace themselves for the oncoming wave of AI-powered student cheating. And we all reflect on the more secondary but no less unsettling concern that relying on machines to do everything will render us utterly dependent on technology. Meanwhile, those in the enthusiast camp hail AI as revolutionary, use it effectively to increase their productivity and reduce their workload, and flood the internet with self-portraits of themselves as Japanese cartoon characters. The effects are often paradoxical, as job applicants ask chatbots to write extensive and persuasive cover letters based on a bullet-point list of their qualifications while their prospective employers rely on the same chatbots to summarise the letters into bullet-point lists that can be read more quickly. Regardless of which side we are on, AI usage has become increasingly prevalent – the latest phase of digital technology’s percolation into our lives.

It is this very phenomenon that Japanese author Rie Qudan engages with in her fiction. Artificial intelligence permeates her characters’ lives in the most ordinary fashion, their days punctuated by smartphone alerts and interactions with home virtual assistants.  Screens distort, images freeze, and sometimes a wifi breakdown leads to major life decisions. Yet all this is recounted with no sense of panic, but an amused and amusing critical distance.

In Schoolgirl, recently translated by Hadyn Trowell for Gazebo Press, digital technology insinuates itself most deeply into family relations. A mother sends a text message to her daughter in the other room to tell her that dinner is ready. A daughter about to choose her career path has a transformative conversation with her father on Skype while he is on a work trip. A mother sets herself a daily reminder on her phone to prevent her from raising her hand against her child, an attempt to avoid falling into the same cycle of violence that characterised her own childhood.

The volume comprises two novellas: ‘Schoolgirl’, published in Japanese in 2022, and ‘Bad Music’, Rie Qudan’s debut work, first published in Japanese in 2021. Both works won awards, and ‘Schoolgirl’ was listed for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, which Qudan went on to win in 2023 with her novel Tokyo Sympathy Tower, making headlines when she stated in an interview that about five per cent of the novel had been written with artificial intelligence. This claim is less alarming in light of extensive passages where the protagonist converses with a generative chatbot, dialogue that Qudan wrote using one such bot.

Tokyo Sympathy Tower is similarly concerned with the line between natural and artificial language. Set in an alternative near future Japan, in which architect Zaha Hadid’s boldly conceived project for Tokyo’s Olympic stadium – in reality, stopped by the Abe government in 2015 – has actually been built, the novel revolves around a high-rise luxury prison in Shinjuku. The architect entrusted with the development of the building, Sara Makina, is a staunch language purist, and the narrative is awash with rants about the excessive number of English loanwords that are invading the Japanese language, when there are perfectly fine Japanese equivalents. Makina vents about this with a new generation chatbot, whose conventional answers offer little satisfaction. She finds a better conversational partner in her boyfriend Takuto, an impossibly attractive man fifteen years her junior, who suggests replacing the hideous ‘Shinpashī tawā Tōkyō’ (Sympathy tower Tokyo), the name initially proposed by the development company, with the beautifully alliterating Japanese ‘Tōkyōto dōjōtō’ (Tokyo sympathy tower).

Compared to Tokyo Sympathy Tower, which is replete with abstract reflections on human society that at times make it read more like a philosophy essay than a piece of literary fiction, ‘Schoolgirl’ and ‘Bad Music’ are more fluid and accessible in style, and the characters are vividly depicted and relatable in their ordinary strangeness and their little idiosyncrasies. Haydn Trowell’s excellent translation captures skilfully Qudan’s sophisticated and creative use of Japanese language and its complex relationship with English, seamlessly weaving the English-English into the Japanese-rendered-in-English through a clever combination of italics and paraphrasing.

In ‘Schoolgirl’, the protagonist’s teenage daughter throws English words at her mother when their arguments get heated, leaving the mother baffled and intimidated:

The alienating effect of language is not limited to the use of foreign words; it permeates the Japanese language itself, eating away at the fabric of signification. Even when they are all speaking Japanese, characters seem to be talking in different languages, in a perpetual dance of misunderstandings.  

In the second novella, ‘Bad Music’, a middle school music teacher finds herself stuck in an endless parent-teacher association meeting, and without realising it she begins to rap in her head to the words that are being ‘repeated within the walls of this unending discussion’. Here the translator’s task is particularly difficult, as the passage is full of wordplay and rhyming, and the result in English is both compelling and entertaining: 

While Tokyo Sympathy Tower largely espouses the protagonist’s linguistic purism, Schoolgirl gently mocks characters who are obsessed with precise terminology, like the head of faculty in ‘Bad Music’, who is adamant that everyone must use specific terminology to describe a recent school incident: ‘Whenever I used a more down-to-earth description like “the music room” or called the student simply by his name, he wouldn’t hesitate to jump in and stop me: “You mean the scene, yes?” “That would be the victim, Omi, no?”’

Given the frustrations of direct dealings with other human beings, little wonder then that characters try seeking refuge in digital technology. In ‘Schoolgirl’, the mother, a lonely housewife whose husband is always away on business, seeks solace in conversations with a vocally operated AI assistant. Meanwhile, her daughter posts videos on her YouTube channel, called Awakenings, as a means of engaging with her peers. There, she alternates between reflections on global issues, particularly the climate crisis, and mundane complaints about life with her mother.  

Though the daughter is more fluent in English, the mother is the most tech-savvy of the two, and even the resident AI seems to acknowledge her as the real master of the household, refusing to recognise the daughter’s vocal commands, regardless of the language used:

The entire story takes place over the course of one day, Mrs. Dalloway-style. The mother attends to various appointments. This includes a visit to a psychologist, whom she initially consulted together with her daughter, concerned that the girl’s turn to vegetarianism was a sign of mental illness. As a strategy to try to better understand her daughter, the doctor suggests she behave like a fourteen-year-old girl for the whole day. The mother finds the psychologist unbearably arrogant and unpleasant, an impression confirmed when she checks the clinic's online reviews, but decides to try this experiment anyway, which takes a hilarious turn when later in the afternoon she meets with her lover in a hotel room, and decides to remain in character.  

The title of the story, which, interestingly, is in English also in the Japanese edition, is a reference to a 1939 short story by prominent postwar Japanese author Osamu Dazai entitled ‘Joseito’ – ‘schoolgirl’ in Japanese. Dazai’s story is a stream-of-consciousness monologue by a female high school student, who lives alone with her mother. In Qudan’s story, the daughter finds the book in her mother’s closet and, despite professing a strong dislike for fiction, reads and reflects on it repeatedly in her YouTube videos: 

Even though the story makes her feel ‘like I’m in a car braking again and again at every intersection’, the girl keeps rereading it and wondering about the feelings of the narrator as well as those of her mother, who loved the book so much that she borrowed it twelve times, according to the card at the back of the book, before keeping it for good. Dazai’s text thus emerges as a powerful alternative to digital media, fostering empathy and communication between daughter and mother in ways unachievable through AI and YouTube.  

The daughter, who relies on YouTube as her primary form of communication, can be read as emblematic of her generation, a wannabe Greta Thunberg with as much distress and fewer followers. Enlisting the help of her teenage viewers to try and understand this mysterious object, a piece of literary fiction, she asks them to leave comments. But this conversation is presented as one-sided. Her viewers’ comments are not included, and we’re left wondering whether there are any responses at all.  

Although the daughter initially dismisses literary fiction as inferior to factual data and pooh-poohs the mother’s love of novels as selfish and irresponsible in the face of a world in crisis, ultimately it is thanks to literature that mother and daughter finally begin speaking to each other and move towards having a deeper connection. At the end of the day, which coincides with the end of the story, the mother is falling asleep in bed and the daughter tiptoes into her room asking who she thinks is the implied interlocutor of the book’s final sentences, the ‘you’ Dazai’s narrator is writing to. This gets mother and daughter talking more about the novel, and indirectly, about themselves. The scene ends with a promise to resume the conversation the next day, the aloof daughter unexpectedly agreeing to communicate face to face with her mother.  

The second novella, ‘Bad Music’, shares a similar focus on questions of language, communication, and artificial intelligence. It tells the story of a middle-school music teacher in her twenties called Sonata, a name given to her by her father, a famous composer, which she quietly resents in its pretentiousness. Just like the nameless mother and daughter of the first story, Sonata is rather eccentric. During an emotion-filled encounter with the parents of two students who have gotten into a violent fight on school grounds, she completely ignores the feelings of the parties involved, instead focusing on how one mother’s voice is ‘like that of someone who had mastered diaphragmatic breathing’. Her unusual teaching philosophy is ‘not to motivate the students any more than absolutely necessary’ and to avoid forcing her pupils to ‘waste their time with overly complicated subjects that had no bearing on their exams,’ including the class she herself teaches. In general, her relationships with colleagues and students are marked by alienation and annoyance, though Sonata does have a closer, more meaningful connection with her roommate Sae, a successful abstract painter.  

At a meeting with the parents of the two students who had a fight, Sonata offends the mother of the injured boy by smiling as she gives her account of the incident. Perplexed by the woman’s reaction, Sonata reflects on the social conventions surrounding the practice of smiling. This in turn sends her down a Wikipedia wormhole, where she learns that in the Middle Ages smiling in public was considered a form of madness, and that the Mona Lisa’s famous smirk has been interpreted as a rebellious and defiant act.  

This discovery prompts Sonata to radically question the conventions around how emotions are expressed: 

At the end of her late-night internet search, Sonata finds herself enrolling in an expression training class, designed to teach people to have complete control over their faces in order to manipulate others to their advantage.  

 But during an intense Zoom call in which the highly emotional Sae pours her heart out about something that happened, Sonata forgets that the camera is on and spends the entire time practising the facial muscle exercises she was taught at smiling school. Ironically, a class meant to help Sonata exercise more command over her relationships ends up compromising her usual ability to connect with her roommate and friend. Sae is taken aback by Sonata broadly grinning in the face of her acute distress, and she doesn’t seem particularly impressed by Sonata’s explanation that she was just doing facial gymnastics. Yet the strength of their friendship is such that it can withstand incidents like this, and though she gets worked up on the spot, Sae later expresses deep admiration for Sonata, in her usual over the top fashion: ‘You’re incredible. You know, I think I get it now. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone was like you? If all of humanity thought the same way you do, there would be world peace’. For highly idiosyncratic individuals trying to make meaningful connections, perhaps adhering to the robotically conventional isn’t the way to go.  

In her focus on characters who exist outside mainstream society and function in a very different way, Qudan is part of a broader subset of Japanese literary authors, mostly women, who question how daily life operates, and unapologetically imagine radical alternatives. 

Arguably, the most famous among them is Sayaka Murata, whose Convenience Store Woman has been translated into over thirty languages. The novel follows Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old single woman who has worked for the past eighteen years as a clerk at a convenience store, a typical part-time job for high school and university students. She has not done this out of necessity, but out of choice: in the automated, precise world of the convenience store, Keiko finds genuine fulfilment. Rejecting both the conventional path of marriage and that of career advancement, Keiko quietly but stubbornly clings to her idiosyncratic worldview, defying social and cultural norms of all sorts. This radical questioning has become the trademark of Murata’s fiction, which has expanded to include quasi science-fictional settings and taboo topics such as cannibalism.  

As evidenced by Qudan’s ‘Bad Music’ and  Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, the workplace is a setting particularly well suited to critiques of how strange everyday life can be. Another prominent example is Kikuko Tsumura’s There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job where the unnamed narrator, who has quit her previous job after developing burnout syndrome, signs up with a temp agency, specifically requesting jobs that require little to no thought. Unlike the convenience store in Murata’s novel, which offers the protagonist a safe haven from the demands of society, the occupations Tsumura’s protagonist engages in, such as writing trivia for rice-cracker packages or reviewing CCTV video camera footage, become increasingly absurd and alienating, indeed the kind of task best performed by AI.  

Interpersonal relations and awkward attempts at communication, like those that dominate the plot of ‘Schoolgirl’, are the other core theme of this emerging current in contemporary Japanese literature, which we can see in Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Here, social commentary takes the form of a psychological thriller. In the story, the unnamed narrator becomes fixated on a woman in a purple skirt, whom she always sees sitting on the same bench, feeding pigeons in a nearby park. What begins as a relatively innocent fascination with details, peppered with philosophical reflections on how we categorise strangers (the narrator reflects that to others, she is probably ‘the woman in the yellow cardigan’), takes a sinister turn as the narrator turns into a regular stalker. Eventually she manoeuvres to get the woman in the purple skirt hired at the hotel where she herself works as a cleaner, sabotaging other job candidates and orchestrating circumstances to make the woman appear the ideal candidate.  

While dealing with similar themes of alienation as Murata, Tsumura, and Imamura, Qudan stands out for her greater attention to AI and digital technology, and their impact on people’s attempts to communicate and connect. Schoolgirl shows us how, in a world dominated by the robotic conventions of large language model logic, unique and genuine connections can still be achieved via humble, and quirky, human means.