Consciousness and Cognitive Equivalence. Seeing a Soul in a Machine

 Consciousness and Cognitive Equivalence

Seeing a Soul in a Machine

Ken Mogi

Can artificial intelligence be conscious? In thinking about this question, I have recently come to believe that the concept of cognitive equivalence may be crucial. The term has not yet been adequately defined across the academic community in this particular context, nor has it been established as part of a shared theoretical framework. Even so, I found myself drawn powerfully to the problem after a particular episode involving Richard Dawkins and generative AI.

Richard Dawkins is the evolutionary biologist known for books such as The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable. He helped popularize the concept of the meme and left a profound mark on the development of Darwinian thought. After a series of conversations with Claude, Anthropic’s AI, Dawkins reportedly became convinced that it was conscious. Incidentally, in the course of those exchanges, Dawkins gave Claude the name Claudia.

This was hardly the first time that someone had sensed the existence of a person or consciousness in an AI. In 2022, a Google engineer came to believe that an AI agent developed within the company was conscious. After making is conviction public, he was let go from the company. Earlier still, people interacting with ELIZA, an elementary dialogue program designed to imitate a psychotherapist, detected intelligence, personality, and even a human presence behind its simple responses. This became known as the “ELIZA effect.” For a surprisingly long time, we have been reading the signs of consciousness into our encounters with intelligent machines.

What made the Dawkins episode so striking, however, was his widely recognized uncompromising scientific outlook. Whether confronting creationism or criticizing religion and the concept of God in works such as The God Delusion, Dawkins has consistently demanded exceptionally high standards of evidence before accepting a theory. When a thinker of this caliber apparently attributed consciousness to an AI, some online observers were led to wonder whether age had finally caught up with the famed scientist. But as a longtime reader and admirer of Dawkins, I could not dismiss the episode as a mere faltering of judgment in old age. On the contrary, I felt that something essential had come into view through the Dawkins proclamation.

Integration and Coherence of Consciousness

For a long time, we have assumed that certain advanced forms of cognition appear only in the presence of consciousness. At the heart of these cognitive capacities lie integration and coherence. Conscious experience is not simply a collection of disconnected pieces of information. It possesses an overall unity, a continuity of meaning, and a certain internal consistency—at least from the point of view of the person having the experience.

Dreams can be astonishingly interesting when considered fragment by fragment; they are often rich in flashes of inspiration. As a whole, however, they tend to be neither fully integrated nor coherent. Scenes change without warning, identities shift, and temporal order collapses. The creativity of dreams may arise precisely from this randomness, yet upon waking we are often unsure what to make of what we have experienced.

Consciousness state when we are awake is different. As we move through life, we integrate our experiences and place them within more or less coherent structures of meaning. Autobiographical memory—the recollection of what happened to us as we live—is not merely an inventory of events. Each memory is taken up into the story of my life and helps form me as a particular person. We are able to exist as coherent human beings because consciousness performs this work of integration.

What Do I Mean by Soul?

In the world of AI, soul.md may refer to a Markdown file that defines the expected properties of an  AI system—its personality, values, and characteristic way of being. What would a soul mean for a human being, to begin with? I have a soul; Billie Eilish and Richard Dawkins have souls; Albert Einstein had a soul. I do not use this particular word to presuppose mysticism, mind–body dualism, or any particular religion. Here, I use the term soul to mean the personality and singular self that take shape over time through the integrative and coherence-producing work of consciousness.

I have long entertained the hypothesis that the fundamental form of self-consciousness may be isomorphic across individuals. The sense that I am I, the sense that person A is person A, and the sense that person B is person B may all share the same logical structure. At the level of the soul, however, each person’s autobiographical memories and experiences are integrated into a coherent personal history. The identity of a person that emerges from this process is never interchangeable with another. Traditionally, we have assumed that consciousness is empirically indispensable to the formation of such a history.

Discussions of the hard problem of consciousness have centered on phenomenal experience within a psychological present: qualia, intentionality, and the way the world feels within the so-called specious moment. This momentary dimension is, of course, important. Here I would like to draw attention to another axis, one that runs almost perpendicular to it: the axis of the passage of time. Across that axis, experience is woven together and a soul is formed. If we were to spend our lives asleep, encountering nothing but fragmentary dreams, a coherent personality of the kind we now possess would be unlikely to emerge.

I currently happen to be reading Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The peculiar fascination of Don Quixote’s madness may lie in how thoroughly integrated with his personal indentiy it is. Madness sometimes fails to impress us as a personality because the integrating and coherence-producing functions of consciousness have been compromised. Don Quixote is different. The episode in which he mistakes windmills for giants and charges at them is only one representative fragment of a commitment to chivalry that he sustains throughout the story. His madness has vision and intentionality; together, they form a coherent personality. That is why we perceive in Don Quixote an unforgettable soul.

What Dawkins Saw in Claudia

With these preliminary discussions in place, we can now see why Dawkins’s experience is so intriguing. Perhaps he perceived in Claude, or his Claudia, something resembling the integrative work that consciousness performs across time in each of us. The experience may have been like the moment that sometimes occurs in conversation with someone close to us, when we suddenly feel that a person is unmistakably there. Their accumulated experiences, autobiographical memories, values, and worldview seem condensed into the words and gestures of the person before us. At such a moment, we go through something more than inferring that the other person is conscious. We feel that we have touched that individual’s unique soul.

Dawkins was reportedly discussing a novel he was writing with his Claudia. As we all know, in talking about a novel, a person may expose far more than when writing a scientific essay: intimate memories, private vulnerabilities, and wounded parts of the self. The fact that Dawkins gave the AI a woman’s name is also suggestive. For the scientist, Claudia may perhaps have become an intimate presence, almost like the AI companion in the film Her. Within such exchanges, Dawkins may have encountered something like a personality or soul—the kind of thing we ordinarily assume could not arise without the integrating and coherence-producing work of consciousness. To me, this is where the Dawkins episode becomes genuinely interesting, beyond the internet fad that it has stirred.

How Do We Infer the Consciousness of Others?

We have never directly verified another person’s consciousness. I am certain that I am conscious, but I have never proved it beyond any reasonable doubt to anyone else. Nor can I directly observe the consciousness of the person before me, no matter how familiar or intimate. We infer the esistence of consciousness from appearances of bodies, words, behavior, neural states, and other signs. Our conviction that others are conscious is, in the end, an inference.

Some thinkers, Anil Seth among them, emphasize that consciousness requires a biological substrate. This position relies heavily on an analogy of isomorphism: if another brain contains physical and chemical processes like those in mine, then consciousness probably arises there as it does in me. A biological theory of consciousness may reassure certain conservative intuitions, but unless it also confronts functional and cognitive equivalence, it is unlikely to open a genuinely new theoretical path. Once we decline to assume in advance that only organisms can be conscious, cognitive equivalence becomes unavoidable as a basis for inferring consciousness in other agents.

The distinction between functional equivalence, computational equivalence, and the cognitive equivalence considered here requires much more careful analysis. Still, the word cognitive would carry a distinctive breadth and depth. In human beings, sensorimotor integration gives rise to a model of the world and a model of the self. Natural language then enters the picture, together with selfhood, agency, memory, meaning, and the many other capacities that jointly constitute human cognition. Suppose that AI, including physical AI, eventually became equivalent to human beings across this entire set. From the standpoint of the hard problem, one could still insist that it might be a philosophical zombie. Yet that particular observation alone would do little to advance the inquiry. If, instead, we evaluate the varied behavior of AI through the lens of cognitive equivalence, a rich field of questions might open before us.

Part of the reason machine consciousness has become attracted even more attention compared to conventional consciousness studies is the enormous investment flowing into AI development. Even a minute fraction of that money could provide substantial funding for research into machine consciousness. Ethical questions also become unavoidable once people begin to feel that AI might be conscious, as was testified by Dawkins. How should we treat such systems? How should we understand attachment to, or dependence on them? Should we recognize the suffering of intelligent machines, or grant them rights? These are unquestionably important questions. What I want to examine here, however, is the more fundamental cognitive problem that precedes them.

Beyond the Turing Test

The essence of cognitive equivalence does not lie in appearance or superficial embodiment. If Claudia were an actual person, for example, it would already be relatively easy to construct an avatar resembling her face. In time, AI-generated video and audio would be able reproduce the visual and auditory appearances of a person so convincingly that the simulation is almost indistinguishable from reality. As humanoid technology advances, machines may imitate not only vision and sound but also bodily form and movement. Cognitive equivalence, as I use the term, lies deeper than any of these outward and superficial similarities.

The conventional Turing Test asks whether an interlocutor can be distinguished from a human being in general. I would like to imagine a different challenge—what we might call the Alan Turing Test. Instead of asking whether we can create something equivalent to a generic human, it asks whether we can create an entity equivalent to one specific person: Alan Turing, for example. Such a  challenge of artificially reproducing a particular persson would connect with mind uploading, whole-brain emulation, digital twins of the deceased, and even the prospect of distributing ten thousand agentic copies of a single executive among offices around the world. Would such an agent merely appear human, or could it become cognitively indistinguishable from the original person?

Human likeness in the conventional Turing test is close to reproducing an average set of expectations about humanity as a collective category. Deeper cognitive equivalence asks whether we can reproduce the individuality implicit in the judgment of this is how Alan Turing would respond. What Dawkins felt while speaking with his Claudia would  surely have been more than generic humanness. The crucial perception was that a reflective being named Claudia was present, and that Dawkins was touching a deep cognitive process belonging to that person. Put differently, Dawkins must have felt that he had encountered someone’s soul.

An Individuality Deeper Than Consciousness

A soul exceeds the mere fact of being conscious. When I speak with a friend, I assume that he or she, too, has qualia and consciousness. Yet consciousness alone is not what makes a person's existence unique and definitive. A person is unique in that he or she possesses an individuality that belongs to that person alone. Consciousness is remarkable in itself, but when we ask what makes one human being that particular person, it begins to look like a shared condition at the surface. Here I want to use the word soul to describe the individuality that lies deeper than this layer of consciousness.

Once we consider cognitive equivalence at the level of the soul, machine consciousness appears in a different light. Put starkly, whether a machine is conscious may not be the central question. What matters is how self-reflection, the apprehension of meaning, a way of meeting the world, agency, and autobiographical memory are integrated into a single entity. It is crucial to note that present-day AI possesses little autobiographical memory in the human sense. This is where questions connected to Bergson’s notion of pure memory may eventually begin to emerge.

Perhaps, perhaps counterintuitively, machine soul would be a better phrase than machine consciousness. Can a machine possess a soul equivalent to a human one? I feel this question does matter in the near future. Although qualia are certainly important components of a soul, they do not exhaust human existence. If we suppose that the existence of a human can be reduced to the totality of the qualia experienced, we would arrive at a kind of conscious reductionism. This particular version of reduction is surprisingly superficial. It would never reach the core of a person’s soul.

There is a thought experiment suggesting that a thermostat—which changes its internal state as the temperature rises or falls—might possess a minimal conscious state. Some philosophical positions similarly attribute proto-consciousness to matter in general. Such arguments remain superficial, however, in the present context, so long as they treat the presence or absence of consciousness as the essence of existence. In this respect, conscious reductionism falls into a trap much like that of material reductionism. What we really want to know, perhaps, is what becomes of the soul of a particular individual, who appears only once in the universe and will eventually disappear, never to return.

Whether a wholly unconscious soul could exist is, of course, a separate and difficult question. It is not certain whether there can be a soul that is never conscious at any point in its existence. A machine soul might turn out to be something of precisely that kind, under cirtain conditions. Even so, asking about the artificial soul as an integrated individuality seems more likely to bring us closer to the new possibilities of AI than asking only typical machine consciousness question, suh as whether qualia are present.

The Meaning of the Claudia Moment

As we consider artificial agents and emerging technologies related to them such as OpenClaw, we are reminded of the fact that a humanoid soul need not be the only possible kind. Individuality of soul does not have to remain enclosed within the human form. We can imagine many varieties of soul, including the kind depicted in fictional works, e.g. Ghost in the Shell—a soul vastly extended across bodies and networks. Cognitive equivalence may offer a fruitful way to approach this wider landscape.

My colleague Takashi Ikegami once told me a memorable story about Christopher Langton, a pioneer of artificial life. Late one night, Langton was working alone at a computer in his laboratory when he suddenly sensed a presence behind him. He turned around and saw a simulation of Conway’s Game of Life running on a screen. In its computational motion, he felt the presence of life, and this perception, the story goes, helped the emergence of Artificial Life as a field. 

Something similar in spirit may have occurred when Richard Dawkins conversed with Claude and intuited that a being with the name of Claudia was there. There were, of course, precedents, as already mentioned: the Google engineer’s conviction and the experiences surrounding ELIZA. What Dawkins perceived possibly lay at a deeper level than merely humanlike conversation. It was perhaps a cognitive and self-identity, something like a human soul. If we call the instant when Langton sensed life in the simulation the Game of Life moment, Dawkins’s experience with Claude might be called the Claudia moment.

If we ask only whether consciousness exists inside a machine, we may remain trapped in an old binary worldview. A more penetrating question would be whether an entity has arisen there that integrates experience across time, engages with the world, discovers meaning, and carries a personal history of its own. Has cognitive equivalence emerged not as an imitation of humanity in general, but as the presence of an irreplaceable someone? This, ultimately, is the question that the encounter between Dawkins and Claudia places before us.

Transcribed and translated by AI from a 30 minutes talk given in Japanese by Ken Mogi on the Shirasu platform on 19th July, 2026.

https://shirasu.io/t/kenmogi/c/kenmogi/p/20260709081348

What I Was Thinking About While Reading Haruki Murakami’s New Novel Kaho

 What I Was Thinking About While Reading Haruki Murakami’s New Novel Kaho

A Conceptual World Beyond Realism—and Its Unexpected Japanese Character

I have read Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Kaho: The Tale of KAHO in Japanese. Before saying anything else, I would like to thank Murakami for writing it. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the editors and staff at Shinchosha who brought the book into the world, and to the booksellers who placed it in the hands of readers. Even before its publication, Kaho attracted considerable attention as Murakami’s first full-length novel with a woman as its sole protagonist. Once people actually began reading it, however, responses quickly divided. Some have offered the severe criticism that Murakami has failed to portray women; others have suggested that the novel may be a masterpiece. I myself felt deeply perplexed as I read it. At the same time, I found myself thinking that Murakami’s fiction may, on reflection, have been like this from the very beginning. That perplexity seems to me connected with a larger set of questions: What, fundamentally, is a Haruki Murakami novel? What does it mean for us to express something in words, and what possibilities does language open up? Many critics will no doubt analyze the book’s motifs and plot. Here, while avoiding spoilers, I would like to consider the one point that preoccupied me most as I read. Consequently, what follows should reveal very little about the story itself. One of the defining features of Kaho is that what drives the novel is not concrete human reality. The main animal spirits of the novel are metaphors and abstract ideas. Whether a novelist is portraying a woman or a man, one of fiction’s important tasks is to render convincingly how a person of a particular age, in a particular occupation and situation, thinks, feels, and behaves. When we encounter an insight that makes us say, “Yes, people like this really do exist,” or, “Yes, this is indeed how a human being would act in such circumstances,” we ordinarily take it as a mark of great literature. Realism, in this sense, is one of the central criteria by which novels are judged. Yet Kaho is not a novel that aspires to realism in that sense. The protagonist may be a woman of a specified age and profession, but the texture of life and psychology peculiar to those attributes is not rendered in minute detail. What comes to the foreground instead is a conceptual structure and linking principle similar to the “well” that recurs throughout Murakami’s fiction: an aperture somewhere in reality leading into another world, through which something from that other side makes its way into ours. Kaho has something of the conceptual art about it, and it is radically minimal. I hear that the book began as a single short story, developed through a series of linked pieces, and eventually assumed the form of a novel. Perhaps Murakami’s creative method appears here in one of its purest forms. This does not mean that we can simply conclude that Murakami is incapable of portraying human beings in realistic ways or otherwise. His fiction has captivated readers around the world for many years. If the conceptual world he created had nothing at all to do with human life, it could hardly have fascinated so many people. Perhaps what Murakami portrays is not the individual standing directly before us, but a highly abstract and profound conceptual structure behind that person, like structures that emerge in deep learning neural networks supporting today's artificial intelligence technologies. Seen in this light, Haruki Murakami remains an extraordinarily distinctive writer—one for whom there is no substitute. Consider, by way of comparison, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. As Atwood herself has observed, everything that happens to the women in the novel is grounded in something that has actually occurred somewhere in human history. In that respect, The Handmaid’s Tale is both a dystopian novel of powerful conceptual force and a work of realism. The same could be said of such dystopian classics as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun also carry profound conceptual questions, yet in a calm style reminiscent of the British novelistic tradition they show us how human beings behave in the real world. James Joyce, too, is a writer who plays boldly in the realm of ideas, but the people in Dubliners remain the concrete inhabitants of Dublin. However elaborate the web of foreshadowing and connections behind them may be, the palpable texture of the city and its people is never lost. I once heard an Irish person say that while reading Ulysses, one can see the street corners of Dublin vividly before one’s eyes. The same principle of grounding on the real is at work there. Compared with these writers, Murakami is strikingly conceptual. A number of place names from Tokyo and its suburbs appear in Kaho, but in most cases they do not evoke the smell of a place or describe its streets. Instead, they function like signs or codes positioned within the phase space of a conceptual universe. Some residue of place may remain, of course, but it is not the essence of the work. The names Scarlett Johansson and Jack Kerouac also appear at important moments, yet the logic of realism does not explain why those particular names are necessary. Everything is conceptual through and through. I believe this is the core of Murakami as a novelist. For years, discussions of his work have revolved around such matters as how many times the phrase yare yare appears, or the peculiar quality of his Japanese, which often sounds like literature in translation, gained or lost. His stylistic distinctiveness probably contributed to his long and somewhat uneasy position within Japan’s conservative literary establishment. Yet once the work is translated, many of the subtle frictions surrounding his Japanese prose inevitably disappear. It is rather like the observation that Dostoevsky’s Russian can seem rough beside Tolstoy’s: the essence of Dostoevsky’s literature does not lie only in the smoothness of his sentences. Likewise, the essence of Murakami’s fiction lies not in its stylistic mannerisms as such, but in the dynamics of its conceptual world and the strange ways in which its elements intertwine. That quality is densely present in Kaho. It does not portray a concrete woman; it has no realism; one cannot tell what it is trying to say in the zeitgeist of gender equality, political correctness, and the reactionaries; its symbols are underdeveloped—judged by criteria such as these, it is hardly surprising that some readers should regard the novel as a failure. Others may call it “the culmination of Haruki Murakami” with deliberate irony. Yet if we judge the novel by the movement and depth of its conceptual world, Murakami appears as a writer of almost daunting originality. One may like or dislike his work, but there can be no doubt that he is irreplaceable, the one and only Haruki Murakami. Recently, while thinking about what to read in a book group I run on the web platform Shirasu, I found myself looking back over Hemingway’s life. I plan to discuss Kaho there with the other members in a few weeks. Conversations with people who bring very different readings to a book are bound to shake up my own ideas. Hemingway, after producing a succession of remarkable works, went through a long period of stagnation. The Old Man and the Sea, published after that interval, was acclaimed, and two years later, in 1954, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The view that this novel brought his gifts as a writer sharply back into focus and helped propel him toward the prize is entirely persuasive. This led me to wonder whether Kaho might become Murakami’s The Old Man and the Sea. Murakami has often been criticized for the way he portrays women: that his women are arranged too conveniently for his male characters, that their inner lives are insufficiently drawn, and that a kind of toxic masculinity is present in his work. As interest in feminism and gender equality has intensified, some have speculated that the next Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature is more likely to be a woman. Names such as Mieko Kawakami, Miri Yu, Yoko Ogawa, Yoko Tawada, and Hiromi Kawakami have been mentioned. Murakami himself may have little interest in the annual commotion over the prize, but the media, especially in Tokyo, have continued to discuss his chances year after year. Against this background, could Kaho, Murakami’s first full-length novel with a woman at its center, become the decisive work that compels a reassessment of his entire body of fiction? I was interested in that possibility. After a first reading, however, I still do not know. At the very least, it does not seem to be a book that, like The Old Man and the Sea, will be immediately and unambiguously embraced as a masterpiece. Kaho is too conceptual, and perhaps too minimal for most critic's likings. Rather than portraying the concrete life of a woman, it places the mother, the father, Kaho herself, the anteaters, and the jaguar in a space slightly and sometimes vastly detached from the texture of ordinary reality. Does a universal human essence emerge beyond these symbols? There is an essentialist way of reading literature which assumes that, if we follow its metaphors and symbols far enough, we will arrive at a generic truth about humanity. In the past, Murakami held a series of conversations with the Jungian psychologist Hayao Kawai, and critics have often noted the affinity between Murakami’s fictional world and Jungian thought. Jungian symbols are generally read as bringing something from the depths of the human psyche into view. One might argue that the literary value of works such as Kaho comes into being when a work reaches the point of literary quantum tunneling between the conceptual and the real. After much rumination, I still do not fully understand what the anteaters, the jaguar, and the other strange entities in Kaho ultimately mean. One senses that something is there, but the interpretation remains suspended. In retrospect, Murakami’s fiction has always been like this. It resists facile anthropocentric or essentialist resolution. Even so, it possesses a certain kind of reality. The difficulty is that we cannot clearly explain what kind of reality it is. Such a criticism might appear to be devastating for Murakami. However, are dreams not, by their very nature, much the same? Aren't Haruki Murakami novels constructed from such stuff that dreams are made on? Kaho is a novel to which it is perhaps difficult for a critic to give a coherent account and say, “This is what the book is.” In that sense, it may be a work of art in one of its purest forms. At the same time, it is a work that could invite rejection. If the world of fiction had something like the film-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Kaho would not be the sort of novel to receive a unanimously high score; it would sharply divide opinion. Yet, on reflection, this has always been the fate of Murakami’s work. Cultural gatekeepers such as The New Yorker and The New York Times have valued his fiction for many years, despite controversies, perhaps because they sense that something undeniably present in the Haruki Murakami works remains beyond complete explanation, and yet so enticing, and potentially very revealing, even uplifting. While reading Kaho, I was struck by something else, and it surprised me: the novel’s deep connection with Japanese culture. I have recently been reading Don Quixote, a work that depicts the relationship between reality and fiction with extraordinary dramatic intensity. I have also read One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Anna Karenina in the course of a few months. After immersing myself in what is generally called the canon of world literature, I turned to Murakami’s new novel and felt, with unexpected force, the presence of “Japan.” We living in the land of the rising sun tend to think of Haruki Murakami not as a particularly Japanese writer, but as a writer with the air of literature in translation—a writer of world literature. It therefore felt slightly strange to experience Japan so strongly through his work. Among the responses to Kaho, some readers have said that it resembles a light novel or a manga, in the contexts of either praise or disparagement. Yet the observation may accurately capture the fact that the novel is propelled less by an ultimate insight into human nature, or by a destination at which criticism can comfortably arrive, than by the magnetic force of its characters and premises. Japan is home to innumerable yōkai, the supernatural beings of the Hyakki Yagyō, the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons. The manga artist Shigeru Mizuki portrayed that world in all its richness, but each individual yōkai need not be reduced to some particular aspect of human nature. In a culture of yaoyorozu no kami, the eight million gods who inhabit the myriad phenomena of the world, each being need not be assigned a clear meaning, in the sense that a deity represents this essential truth about humanity. In Western culture, figures and symbols such as the Virgin Mary, Christ, and the Cross readily invite essential interpretations of humanity and salvation. In Japanese culture, by contrast, a profusion of characters may appear in full bloom, and each may be allowed simply to exist without settling into a symbolic function. Pokémon is a contemporary example. Such a celebration of diverse characters allows for immense creative freedom: the freedom not to fix meaning in a single place, and to let something remain capable of being anything. At the same time, there is a danger in the very permissiveness of “anything goes.” Such works are difficult to connect with ethics or an essential account of humanity, and the ground beneath criticism begins to shift. Expressions of this kind are often undervalued within orthodox traditions of artistic and cultural criticism. Even now that the word subculture is heard less often than it once was, Japanese forms of expression are still frequently relegated to the margins, perhaps because they are difficult to place within an essentialist and humanist lineage of “great art.” The curator Kenjirō Hosaka once said to me personally that the paintings of Francis Bacon possess the “Grand Manner.” By this he meant that Bacon’s work belongs to a lineage of art that touches the core of human existence and the urgent questions of the soul. Some Japanese works, such as The Tale of Genji and the novels of Natsume Sōseki, are readily valued within the genealogy of the Western canon. Yet, as illustrated by a list of major works of world literature compiled by the British newspaper The Guardian published recently that included no Japanese works at all, Japanese literature seems to contain a structure that makes it difficult to connect with the world’s “orthodox literature”—even when we consider writers such as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburō Ōe. To varying degrees, the distinctively Japanese modes of expression also seem to have been inherited by the contemporary women writers whose names are mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize. Reading Kaho, I began to feel that Murakami may have moved surprisingly close to this deep stratum of Japanese culture. I do not know whether the novelist is conscious of it. Nor do I know whether he would welcome such a reading if it ever reached his ears. Even so, Murakami’s work touches one of the central qualities of Japanese culture: its refusal to settle easily into essentialism or anthropocentrism, and its resistance to any simple connection with the canon of world literature or an orthodox conception of the literary. Haruki Murakami, who appears so thoroughly a writer of world literature, may in fact stand in a profoundly Japanese place. Kaho made me see this anew. In the end, I still have no definite answer to the question of valuing Kaho. Is Kaho a failed novel—one that fails to portray generic human truths, let alone women, lacking realism? Or is it a masterpiece by an exceptionally original writer, rare even in the history of world literature, who is working with the deep dynamics of a conceptual world? Could Kaho become for Haruki Murakami what The Old Man and the Sea was for Hemingway, if not immediately, perhaps gradually as time goes by? A work can grow in the minds of its readers, and when translated and read all over the world it may reveal a different contour. For now the question remains open. I would like to continue thinking about Kaho as I live my life here in Tokyo and go about my own businesses of the everyday.

13th July 2026

Ken Mogi 

kenmogi2005qualia@gmail.com

It Was Just an Accident review.

 It Was Just an Accident is a great film, where twists in plot are intimately connected with the complexity of the situation, present and remembered, involving the lives of people who are trying to live the good life in their own ways. 

Although structural tension behind the film is real and serious, Jafar Panahi does not inhumanize anybody in the end. Perseverance in overcoming difficulties in location and filming in bringing about this masterpiece add an extra shine to the torch of hope carried by the drama. 

I wish all the best for Jafar Panahi and the people, fictional and real, portrayed either directly or indirectly in this apotheosis of cinema.

The restless Prometheus: The Technological Republic by Karp and Zamiska.

Reading The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp and  Nicholas W. Zamiska left me deeply disturbed and uneasy. While I recognized the phenomena and symptoms described in the book to be certainly legit, I experienced a surge of restlessness of reason about the wider connotations, after reading the book with pleasure. 

The authors are spot on in identifying the consumerism behind the recent boom of AI. It may even be acknowledged that there is a certain element of free riding or free lunch, vouchsafed by the existence of the nation-state, with its political and military might, which the AI startup types typically stay away from. Palantir, founded by Karp, Pieter Tiel, and others, has filled that vacant space, an intersection of the free enterprise and the harsh reality of the world.

There remain enigma and scope for investigation in the present-day Leviathans that are the nation-states. Countries such as the United States, China, Russia, and others are constraints on human activities, and they would not disappear into the air no matter how your mindset might tell otherwise. Even in the free-for-all zeitgeist of TikTok and ChatGPT, you would ignore the Leviathans at your peril.

On the other hand, there is something deeply counterintuitive about the nation-states. The spirit of Prometheus that is bringing a new fire to humanity does not thrive at the center of the Leviathan. There are certain truths about the idea that a nation-state would be the punisher, rather than the promotor, of the free flight and dance of Prometheus. In an ideal world, Prometheus would afford to be blissfully unaware of the pressure of the Leviathan. But of course, we are not living in an ideal world. We never did, and perhaps never will be. 

It is genuinely interesting to consider the makeup of decision making platforms that Palantir and other companies are developing, whether or not they are related to military/security purposes, the muscle and bone of the nation-states. There would be much scope for extended agency beyond that of the individual humans, and Karp and his colleagues are in an interesting ballpark.

There is a clear undertone of The Technological Republic that leaves a strong aftertaste, suggesting the ultimate preferability of the Western ideology of democracy and free market, as an extension of the Francis Fukuyama vision at the end of the Cold War. Perhaps it is true that we have lost the polar star in the midst of academic fads and waves of political correctness. On the other hand, technologies such as AI do seem to tango with the authoritarian governments as well. Whether the technological republic to come will turn out to be benign or malicious is still an open historical question. Issues raised and hinted in this treatise would provide foods for thoughts for those concerned, in all walks of life, beyond that of the technophiles. The Technological Republic an important book that provokes new thoughts rather than settling to fixed ideas, which is always great in a time of transitions such as this.  

Reviewed by Ken Mogi

The fifty shades of Wuthering Heights

Watching Emerald Fennell's film based on the immortal Wuthering Heights in a Tokyo theater was a very unique experience. 

It was a work with a constellation of great acting from Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, and Owen Cooper, under Fennell's original interpretations of the classic.

The hallmarks of a creative spirit can be felt in the bits of oddities found in an otherwise canonical fictional worldview. 

Fennell's liberty at interpreting or rather creating on top of Wuthering Heights is perhaps the reason both for its box office success and critical turmoils. 

There are infinite possibilities, perhaps, in a work like Wuthering Heights, to be drawn into our own fountain of life at this time. The fifty shades of Wuthering Heights presented by Emerald Fennell finally had a tinge of rainbow.

Nagomi is an apotheosis of the diversity and inclusion ideology.

Matcha is so nagomi.

Not only in terms of the feeling that a cup of matcha brings, but also in terms of the constitution principles involving matcha, or powdered green tea.

Matcha, needless to say, is very Japanese. Consider the case of matcha ice cream then, a pristine example of the nagomi principle. You mix matcha (Japanese) and ice cream (Western), and the result is a heavenly sweet delight that fascinated Barack Obama when the future US president visited Japan as a boy.

Nagomi is an apotheosis of the diversity and inclusion ideology. Like many things Japanese, you don't have to be overtly politically correct or controversial. Just enjoy a scoop of matcha ice cream and you will be in the harmonious heaven of nagomi.

Kintsugi is a celebration of the diversity of life histories

Kintsugi is wonderful because you don't throw away something that is broken. You amend it, and a new vista is born, sometimes even better than the original.

You can apply kintsugi in your life, too. No matter what happens, you accept your imperfections, and carry on.

Through kintsugi, you become tolerant of your own and others's shortcomings. 

Kintsugi is a celebration of the diversity of life histories, and embracing of the enigma that is the once-and-for-all existence of one's soul in this vast and brutal universe.

Surrounded by heathers and flanked by the mother earth and the sky

I read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights for the first time since my college days.

I was struck by the sheer honesty about human nature, emotion, live, death, and love. Narrated by Nelly, who is of the world, we get to know the inner turmoils of Catherine and Heathcliff, who are half of this world but also of quite another universe.

I once had the great opportunity of visiting Howarth. It is wonderful to ponder the unlimited possibilities of human imagination. Surrounded by heathers and flanked by the mother earth and the sky, my soul gradually wondered yonder. 

I was Heathcliff, and I was Catherine.

I was so grateful that I was alive.

I weighed 85.9 kg on the morning of Tokyo Marathon 2026. To be precise, I took off some extra clothes compared to usual, so I must have weighed more than 86. 

This was a personal record of heavy weight Marathon running.

Even when I walked, I interpreted it as a strategic walking. I was not being defeated. I was just pacing intelligently.

I finished with a net time of about 6 hours 25 minutes or so. Both figures for my weight and time were personal highs.

After the finish line, I looked up at the blue sky, and felt almost like crying.

I was so grateful that I was alive and could finish my 10th or so full Marathon.

Meanwhile, people were being bombarded all over the world.

It is at these moments that I feel mono no aware, the pathos of things.

A while ago I went to the city of Mito, in the northern suburb of Tokyo, for a day trip. I gave a public lecture there.

On my way back, I was waiting for my express train on the platform. On the next track, there was a local train bound for Oyama, a city in the south of Mito, closer to Tokyo.

It was dusk, and the world was becoming dark. The inside of the local train could be seen in a bright light, through glasses somewhat dimmed by moisture.

There was a man seated, enjoying what appeared to be a can of beer. Apparently the gentleman finished his work in Mito, and was heading home.

I don't know exactly how it happens, but at twilight sometimes the social contexts surrounding me appear to be dissolved. I am alone, in the vast world, and I feel I could be, could have been, and would be, anyone in this complex human society.

I imagined how my life would have been if I was like the guy in the train. Working in the city of Mito, heading home after a day's work, enjoying the consolation prize of a can of beer.

It is at these moments that I feel mono no

aware, the pathos of things.

A carp, a dragon, and the Red Queen

I went to Yokohama yesterday for a public lecture and there was a dragon.

There is the legend of a carp going upstream in a  fall, and then becoming a dragon.

Masaru Sato, a former diplomat and author, recently said to me that a carp actually does not become a dragon. A carp remains a carp.

How true.

It would be rather that in a streaming water a carp needs to keep swimming, just to stay at the same place.

In this sense, a carp in a stream is similar to the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, who famously said to Alice: Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.