Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback takes on a bold and controversial subject, centering on Shaka Isawa, a disabled woman who explores her sexuality and desires through online erotic fiction. Shaka longs for experiences that her condition makes difficult—most notably, pregnancy—though she ultimately settles for something else: an abortion.

The story critiques how society desexualizes and marginalizes disabled individuals, particularly in Japan, where the disabled community is often rendered invisible. Ichikawa, who shares Shaka’s condition, offers vivid descriptions of the physical realities of her disabilitywhich adds authenticity but at times overshadows character development and narrative cohesion.

Despite the weight of its themes, it feels underdeveloped. The book feels more like a long-form essay than a novella. The abrupt ending and lack of broader exploration into Shaka’s life beyond her sexuality make it feel incomplete. While it presents an important critique of ableism—particularly in how disabled people are stripped of agency, desire, and visibility—the execution leaves much to be desired. The premise is thought-provoking, but the book ultimately lacks the depth and nuance needed to fully engage with its themes. I had high hopes and unfortunately they're left unmet.

Happy to hand sell this title and to be able to talk about this novella focussing on the life of a disabled main character, however, this book was not for me. I found the graphic descriptions and the bizarre abuse of power (which way round?) unsettling and sometimes disturbing. I think it's quite an, urm, niche book, I found myself having to walk away from reading for a few minutes. Having said that - one of a kind, and like nothing else I've read and also great to see a disabled person represented as a strong confident woman who knows what she wants.

The contrast to the erotica the main character is writing is stark and to begin with I thought I had downloaded the wrong book to read.

The ending of the book completely baffled me and I frankly have little idea what happened and have had to look at other reviews to try and work it out.

I read this little book in one go (bar the walk away breaks) so something clearly appealed, but not for me I'm afraid!

I finished Hunchback in one sitting partly due to the novella length and partly out of curiosity to see what would happen next.

I was initially drawn to this book because it differs from the type of narratives we usually see around disability, exploring the main character Shaka's internal world, her day-to-day, and the life she lives online. This book is for readers of literary fiction who like complex main characters, and books that make them slightly uncomfortable.

The observations regarding accessibility particularly resonated with me. As a librarian people often ask me if I think that physical books will disappear and be replaced by eBooks, and they make grand statements about how it just doesn't get better than a physical book. Usually they expect me to agree with them, so I am constantly gently (and not so gently) reminding people that as a librarian I advocate for accessibility of information. This means I support books being made available in as many forms as possible - including audiobooks, eBooks, Large Print books etc. Because of Shaka's muscle disorder and curvature of the spine reading physical books is dangerous due to the weight. At one point Shaka references a disability advocate speaking on TV:

"On air, she had spoken eloquently about the difficulties she had with physical books, which she couldn't read unless she had a carer there to turn the pages for her...all those able-bodied people didn't know how good they had it. They could make erudite-sounding pronouncements about how they just liked the smell of books, or the feel of the paper, or the sense of tension that came from the thickness of the remaining pages reducing beneath their fingers, and others would listen unquestioningly to what they were saying."

I wish this book had been a novel. While it was engaging there were many angles and characters touched on that I would have liked to have seen fleshed out and fully explored. While the middle part of the book was engaging, I found the beginning and the ending quite jarring, especially as I didn't see the ending coming. I like the interpretation that the ending is a piece of the protagonist's fiction. This theory makes sense to me as that is how the novella starts, and also the piece is in keeping with the style of Shaka's other writing.

Saou Ichikawa is the first physically disabled author to win the Akutagawa Prize - one of Japan's top literary awards. Hunchback is her debut and I would be interested to read more from her in the future.

Thanks to Penguin for the eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

An incredibly impressive debut—I found it so refreshing to read a book about this experience of serious physical disability, written by someone who understands the experience first-hand. But the book is also structurally sly and unnerving, to the degree that I wasn't initially sure what to think when I reached the end—in a good way.

It's hard to know what else to say about this, since it's so short yet also so packed with meaning; I feel I would need an entire essay to really dig into my thoughts (which would include spoilers) but otherwise—I'm just really impressed by this and grateful it's made it here in translation. I highly recommend this and it's so short you can read it in a single sitting.

I’m left a bit speechless by this novel. I would have liked it to be a bit longer so there is more time to digest what is going on, but the ending has left me so confused and is so thought provoking that I’m struggling how to rate it.

The novella is about a disabled woman who isn’t able to live in the outside world because of the lack of her mobility, and so she lives inside her own head a lot by writing erotica and tweeting obscene things into the void. I liked how the book discussed sex and disability, and how despite being wealthy and from a good family you can still be looked down upon if you aren’t able bodied.

The ending was so crazy and just flips the entire book on its head. I did love it but I’m also just say with my head whirring trying to figure out what actually happened. There is a lot of sexual content which is visceral in gross kind of way and I liked how it forces you to look at the awkward and disgusting aspects of sex. I didn’t think I was going to like it from all of that but by the end it contains a sort of psychological twist which is quite meta-fictional.

The more I think about it the more intrigued and impressed I am, I just wish it was a lot longer!

Despite being a short novella it took me two days to read this book. I struggled with the plot and pacing of the story, between Shaka’s struggles and the erotic fiction she is writing the plot feels all over the place. The story doesn’t seem to tell a lot, despite mentions of wanting to experience an abortion there is little more to further the plot along. The story jumps between Shaka and the fiction she’s writing so much that it’s so difficult to follow at times.

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.