Really not sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, a really important and humanising story but also it was just so graphic.

"Without mud, the lotus could not survive."

Saou Ichikawa's novella is about Shaka Isawa, she has a severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is spent studying, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal.

I did not read the synopsis on this one and went in blind. The more I read on the more I was given an intimate view on the challenges Shaka faced and how she kept herself going through the work she put out there.The story does become quite dark very quickly, leaving the reader wonder how she will cope once what she thought was private becomes public knowledge.

Saou Ichikawa is the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award. With this story she provides a thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge.

Without further ado, this is a great book, read it.

At first glance, Hunchback is the by now typical slightly weird thin feminist Japanese novel lauded with prizes. And it is that, but also so much more. Although titled Hunchback, the novel follows a disabled woman with significantly more wide-ranging disabilities. Shaka Isawa, the protagonist, was born with a congenital muscle disorder. Now in her early 40s, she requires full-time care, and lives in a small private facility set up by her wealthy parents before their death. Money and class are at the heart of the novel - Shaka completely acknowledges that she would not be able to have the same life and lifestyle without her inheritance. Shaka spends her time writing erotic fiction and sensational sexual expose amateur journalism. She also attends university through distant learning, and is writing a dissertation on critical disability studies.

Modern Japanese fiction often excels at writing everyday routines, describing the functions and experiences of the most mundane things. Ichikawa follows that approach, but due to the disability of the protagonist, her everyday experiences are viscerally different from those of able-bodied people. The prose focuses on embodiment, showing the reader both the complexities of Shaka's physical interactions with the world around her, and her commentary on it. In a particularly memorable passage, she expresses her anger at the ableism of the book community, scorning the obsession with the smell of physical books, and the degree to which the enjoyment of the said smell becomes a symbol of a cultural system of exclusion of people who read differently (in her case, mostly scanned books).

Unlike some Japanese books I've read, there is nothing half-tone, or reserved, about Hunchback. The author and the narrator do not pull any punches, expressing Shaka's anger at the world around her. The narrative manages to be direct and frank without descending into shock value or disability safari. Ichikawa's focus is the sexuality of her protagonist, and a broader discussion of the disabled body as a sexed body. The main conflict of the story revolves around Shaka's attempt to have sex, only to enable her to have an abortion, something she sees as a worthwhile experience. Discussing disability theory and the conflict between some feminist thought and disability advocacy regarding abortion of disabled foetuses, Shaka presents her desire as a disabled person taking control of and flipping this narrative.

I loved the attention to detail and executive mastery of this novel. Nothing can be cut, nothing should be added. Various small detail bring forward different themes, and each of them could be the subject of its own review essay. For example, most of the people working at the facility have some sort of physical health issues which do not constitute disability. Through these characters Ichikawa touches upon the fact that that bodily ability is a spectrum, and that different bodies exist in the (capitalist) world around them differently due to age, health issues or a myriad other reasons. The intensity and complexity of the book's key interpersonal relationship, that of Shaka and a male employee who despises her wealth, has so many different shades to it. One of the interesting issues Ichikawa brings up is the relationship between sex work and any other work, especially when it involves the body. Labour more broadly is a key theme of the novel, ranging from the labour accessible to severely disabled people to the need for other people's labour to support disabled bodies.

I could go on and on. In short, what an interesting and multi-faceted novel.

Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, for the review copy.

A short book which will leave a lasting impression on me. At the end I felt quite confused and have had to take time to reflect on the story. It could have been much longer and I'd still have been glued to it. An insightful perspective on disabled life.

I'm unsure about this book. While I appreciate the perspective of disabled woman.. I feel like this book is not quite finished, somewhat lacking. Or maybe my expectations where higher. I was interested in the idea but was not impressed.

I’ve been wanting to read more translated fiction, and Saou Ichikawa’s debut Hunchback immediately intrigued me with its unique premise. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it’s also the first by a disabled author.

Shaka Isawa is a middle-aged disabled woman who lives in a care home, bound by severe spine curvature which requires her to have a ventilator to breathe and drain her lungs. She spends her time writing tweets of her seemingly unachievable salacious dreams, and writes articles an erotica website to pass her time. One day a new male carer joins the staff at the care home, and he reveals he’s read everything she has posted online.

While the blurb suggests the plot revolves around a bold offer Shaka makes the carer, this only surfaces late in the book and the interaction between the two characters is minimal and her offer is barely explored and we jump from 0-100 between them very quickly.

The book’s vivid descriptions of Shaka’s disabilities feel authentic, reflecting the author’s own experiences - and take up the majority of the book. Though the dark humor and sharp commentary on ableism, particularly in Japanese culture, are compelling, the story felt too short. I wished it had been a full-length novel with more room to develop the plot and delve deeper into Shaka’s fascinating perspective.

A great novella about disability and ableism in Japan. I raced through this book in one sitting as the story flowed. The juxtaposition between the descriptions of disability and then erotica were interesting.

“my ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman.”

as someone who doesn’t typically enjoy reading books where the main focus is sex, this book gripped me from the first page and didn’t let go.

we follow the perspective of a disabled woman who spends her days freelance writing for explicit sites and tweeting her darkest thoughts anonymously from the group care home she lives in.

we quickly learn that one of shaka’s dreams is to ‘become pregnant and get an abortion, just like a normal woman’, a kind of wild statement on first reading but she goes on to explain that if she can’t carry and give birth to a child, she at least wants to experience an abortion and will go to lengths to make this happen…

strange, unrelenting, raw and gripping this book somehow manages to explore themes of education, accessibility, sexuality and the feeling of being de-sexualised as someone with a disability, privilege, autonomy, fantasy, pleasure and pain all within around 100 pages.

as someone with a disability, albeit very different from the MC’s, I also really resonated with her thoughts on the inaccessibility of reading because it is still an issue within publishing that alot of non-disabled people don’t think about.

5/5 stars, I feel like I need to reread it straight away to get my head round it😅👀

The author is quite open about being disabled herself, and this will certainly be a selling point of the book – since it doesn’t shy away from showing the desires and sex lives of someone living with a severe disability. This is not usually represented in literature or film, or if it is, it tends to be done in a voyeuristic, almost exploitative way. I’m not entirely sure this one succeeds in steering clear of sensationalism and prurience. Despite my admiration for Polly Barton’s translations in general, I was not won over by the author’s prose style either – there is little to distinguish the purple prose of the erotica Shaka writes (purple prose displayed for comedic purpose) and the actual main narrative.

"Outbursts that ran counter to society’s rules disrupted its rhythm. They startled people, in the same way that my ungainly limp did. Speaking about one’s desire to kill a foetus was of a different order of magnitude to the light- hearted dirty jokes of a 56- year- old man with a spinal cord injury. Of course, the tweetings of a hunchbacked monster would be more twisted than those of someone with a perfectly erect spine. With my eyes on the effortlessly straight spine of the young man pressing a peeled Kyoho grape into the mouth of the man who could only move from the head upwards, I snapped the backbone of the miso mackerel I’d just eaten cleanly in half with the tips of my chopstick."

Hunchback is Polly Barton's translation of the novella ハンチバック (a phonetic rendition of Hunchback) by 市川沙央 (Saou Ichikawa). The original won the 169th edition of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in January 2023, one of the judges saying (as translated by the media) that "she critically dismantled social norms and etiquette through the use of the protagonist's difficulties" and another that it "critically knocks down conventional wisdom and common sense centered on able-bodied people", and the author questioning why it had taken so long for a person with a disability to win the prize.

This is a compact but powerful and provocative work, which the author has said is 30% based on her own experiences, but primarily fictional.

The narrator, Shaka Izawa, is in her early 40s (born in 1979, the novel is set in the early post-pandemic period). She suffers from a severe congenital myopathy, with severe S-shaped spinal curvature that leaves her with difficulties breathing. From a wealthy family (and conscious of that element of privilege) she lives in a care home which her parents created and bequeathed to her, which also caters for other patients.

Largely confined to her room and the home, she occupies her spare time with online studies but also with writing erotic fiction and (fictionalised) reportage, although she donates the money earned, which she doesn't need, to charity, all done under various alises:

"These were the kinds of thoughts that pervaded my brain, whether or not it was experiencing an oxygen shortage. Yet in my daily life, I passed for the young, silent, serious disabled woman Shaka Izawa. That was why I kept on releasing into the world all those vulgar, immature, unreasonable thoughts via my Buddha and Śākya accounts. Those words were born from the slimy, gunky sludge of the swamp, the mud out of which the lotus flowers grew. Without mud, the lotus could not survive."

Two pieces of her writing, the first where she reports (as a man) on a visit to a swinger's club, bookend the story.

She also, under her own identity, sends provocative tweets, notably one which, after a thread discussing how she could conceive, even if she could not carry to term: "My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman."

She sees this as reversing both the issues handicapped people in Japan have had getting reproductive rights, and recognising the activists, such as Tomoko Yonezu and Yūho Asaka who fought for it, but also the casualness with which people abort foetuses seen as abnormal:

"What emerged from this was the foundation of the reproductive rights of disabled women, and Yūho Asaka’s Cairo speech, where she proclaimed that the state was robbing disabled people of their right to have children. In 1996, the law was finally amended to acknowledge that disabled people could also reproduce, but the developments in reproductive technology and its commodification have seen the killing of disabled children become a relatively casual undertaking for most couples. In time, it will doubtless become even cheaper, even less of an event. Given that, it wouldn’t matter if a disabled person tried to get pregnant specifically to have an abortion, right? Wouldn’t that finally balance the scales?"

Another topic about which the narrator (and the author) is passionate, is ableism in the literary world, even in the very act of reading, where for her the very act of reading a physical book is literally suffocating:

"Holding in both hands an open book three or four centimetres in thickness took a greater toll on my back than any other activity. Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its pages; being able to maintain a reading posture; being able to go to a bookshop to buy a book – I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded that its participants meet these five criteria of able- bodiedness. I loathed, too, the ignorant arrogance of all those self- professed book-lovers so oblivious to their privilege.
[...]
The publishing industry is rife with ableist machismo. The world of sports, which all those literary types who play up their physical weakness display so much vitriol for, has in fact done far better at affording a space in its corner for those with disabilities."

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Many of us will be, rightly, skewered in our obliviouness; the narrator describes the mechanical processes and struggles simply to stay alive matter-of-factly but unsparingly, such as the constant need to suck out phlegm from her respiratory system; and the novel is sexually explicit, the last two coming together in one memorable scene.

But it's a book that needs to be read.

Shaka Isawa was born with a severe spine curvature and has to use a wheelchair and ventilator. She tweets all her innermost thoughts online and also writes stories on an erotica website. Then one day a male nurse starts at the care facility where she lives and she makes an indecent proposal.

I feel I can't really accurately describe this novel or even rate it. It was always unputdownable (possibly in a car crash way) but often times very uncomfortable read. This was a startling entirely new experience and I have never read anything like this before.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

Reading this was a deeply challenging and eye-opening experience for me, and I'm glad to have got to it so early in the year (I selected it as part of my new year's resolution to read more fiction in translation). The novella explores sexual and financial dynamics, and Ichikawa keeps the lines between abuser and abused deliberately blurred. It forced me to confront my own assumptions and the stereotypes I might unconsciously hold - I definitely felt 'called out' on many occasions, so it was unsettling, but in a positive way. Shaka is complex, messy, and I didn't agree with some of her provocative Tweets that are included - but in a way that's the point, Ichikawa doesn’t sugarcoat Shaka’s lived experience or try to make her life palatable for the reader. I think this is going to stay with me throughout 2025.

This was quite an uncomfortable read which I think was a deliberate choice by the author. It’s a good book, but not plot driven, with a lot of the 100-ish pages taken up with descriptions of the protagonist’s day to day struggles as part of her disability. Some of the descriptions were quite visceral and off-putting to me, and I felt like it stopped just as it started. I did enjoy the writing style and the book challenges ableism, especially in academia and in the literary community, very well.

This very slender novella, more of an extended short story, packs a lot of punch. Exploring hierarchies of oppression and how they are disrupted, alongside the rarely discussed sexual agency of people with disabilities, creates a deeply unsettling meta story. By using her wealth and cunning, our protagonist is able to coerce and sexually assault (?) someone with far greater physical strength and societal privilege (or is that true?) Considering class, gender, disability and how we present ourselves online, this very disturbing read was great.

I had been told it would be very graphic, and it is in its minute descriptions of disability and in the erotica that the narrator writes and publishes online.

The female narrator is a 40-something woman, who is disabled due to a degenerative condition, uses a ventilator and a suction catheter to drain mucus from her windpipe, can speak but rarely does so after a tracheostomy when she was 14, and relies on text to communicate with her carers. She is fabulously wealthy ("a woman whose money has distanced her from friction") and owns the care home in which she lives. She earns addtional income she donates to good causes through writing, mostly erotic stories.

It's very short but very detailed which I rarely see in books, especially with a disabled heroine. She thinks about her body a lot, because she has to, and resents not being able to comfortably read, not having a sexual life, and not being able to experience what other women experience. She dreams of "getting pregnant and having an abortion, like a normal woman". She resents the ableism of Japan; incredibly she mentions France and the US as being more progressive in that regard.

It's a good book, although it is so short that the plot takes very little space. A lot of space is given to the experience of being disabled - I understand this is based on the author's own lived experience - as we follow her through meals, getting up, trying to be comfortable, receiving care. I found it really easy to get interested in, uncomfortable but engrossing.

Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback is a groundbreaking novella that defies convention and challenges societal perceptions, offering a bold and unflinching portrait of desire, identity, and humanity. Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award, this extraordinary work provides a unique and provocative perspective rarely explored in contemporary fiction.

The story follows Shaka Isawa, a middle-aged woman born with a congenital muscle disorder that severely curtails her physical mobility. Living in a care home, Shaka navigates life with an electric wheelchair and a ventilator. Yet, her life is anything but confined. Through her studies, irreverent tweets, and salacious posts on an erotica website, Shaka refuses to be defined solely by her disabilities. Her sharp wit, unfiltered thoughts, and unapologetic exploration of her sexuality reveal a character as complex and multifaceted as any other.

The narrative takes an unexpected turn when a new male carer admits to having read Shaka’s erotic stories. What ensues is an audacious and provocative proposal that forces both characters—and readers—to confront their assumptions about power, autonomy, and the intersection of vulnerability and desire.

Ichikawa’s writing is fearless, diving into the grotesque and the titillating to present Shaka not as a figure of pity but as a fully realised individual capable of difficult, uncomfortable, and deeply human thoughts and actions. By doing so, the author dismantles stereotypes about disability, pushing readers to see beyond the physical and confront their own biases.

The novella’s brevity enhances its impact, packing a powerful emotional punch in a succinct narrative. Ichikawa’s ability to weave complex themes—identity, desire, and societal marginalisation—into an engaging and thought-provoking story is remarkable.

Hunchback is not merely a tale of disability; it is a profound exploration of what it means to exist on the margins of society, and how one can assert their humanity in a world that often looks away. Shaka’s story is both unsettling and liberating, a testament to Ichikawa’s willingness to challenge boundaries and provoke thought.

This is an essential read for those interested in bold, unconventional narratives that illuminate perspectives often left unexplored. With its daring subject matter and deeply human themes, Hunchback secures its place as one of the most significant Japanese novels of the 21st century.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

Hunchback is a provocative novella that is destined to be a conversation starter for all those who read it. Ichikawa completely disarms the reader by beginning with a lurid sex scene that is then revealed to be a story written by Shaka Isawa, the main character and narrator, from her home. Shaka has a congenital muscle disorder and juggles life in her luxury care home with university studies and anonymous erotica.

There are so many questions raised, explored, and turned on their heads over the course of this tiny novella: from class privilege to care, desire to autonomy. Shaka's greatest wish for normality is to become pregnant so that she might be able to choose to abort it - a wish that itself provokes a thousand other issues. The author's humour is deadly irony, and Ichikawa carefully prods several sleeping lions to see what happens when they all stare each other in the eyes.

Ricocheting between interiority and the imagined outside world, or gaze of others outside of Shaka's disabled body, Hunchback will no doubt be outside the comfort zone of many readers. Clever, unrelenting, electrifying, Ichikawa's debut is well-deserving of its literary acclaim and will leave you thinking about it well after finishing.

Hunchback is a debut, following a young disabled woman in Japan. I felt it was intriguing but pigeonholed itself. There was a distance between the words and the reader. I wanted it to go a bit deeper and darker than it managed.

A powerful novella criticising ableist attitudes and showing an honest experience of a middle-aged disabled woman in a care facility, as she writes erotic fiction and tweets about her desires. Hunchback is full of dark humour and visceral descriptions, with a fiery main character who is tired of the stereotypical expectations people have of those with disabilities.

I loved how this interrogated the hateful and harmful attitudes prevalent in society, with our narrator, Shaka, bringing this ableism into question through her candid and often brutal tweets. It’s a short book, but one that makes a real impact, showing an honest experience of life with a congenital muscle disorder, criticising the expectations of sexual desire, and exploring questions around financial power.

There’s a lot to think about and it’s one I’ll definitely be coming back to again!

Thank you to Penguin and Viking Books for the chance to read this early.

*I was gifted an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*

Hunchback is a short novel which focuses on disability, sexuality and the art of storytelling. Shaka Izawa, our protagonist, has congenital muscle disorder and spine curvature. She lives in a care home, spending most of her day studying and writing. Ichikawa mixes different genres and motives, taking inspiration from common tropes present in Japanese modern literature. I really enjoyed reading Shaka's thoughts and feelings, especially her critiques against our ableist society. Even though the book is quite short, it's very engaging. At times the experience can be uncomfortable (because of the in-depth descriptions of sex scenes), but overall it's a thought-provoking read. Consider checking this out!