Hunchback

A young woman with a congenital muscle disorder is living in a care home. She never goes out but has quite a 'normal' life online. She studies, tweets, works, and writes sex stories and publishes them online. The main themes in the novel are disability and desire and how these two go together.

Saou Ichikawa, the author of this novel, has a congenital myopathy and uses a ventilator and an electric wheelchair, similar to the main character, Shaka. She is the first disabled author to receive the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.

This novel is an obvious critique of the attitude towards disability in Japan. Be warned, Hunchback could make you uncomfortable and could be too explicit for some readers. Brief but gut-punch of a novel.

 

Goodreads

Quote

Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its page; 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.

Excerpt from the Book:

I owned the group home outright, and I was also paid income from rent by the management companies of several other apartment buildings that were in my name. The money that I’d inherited from my parents still lay untouched: several hundred-million lumps distributed across various banks. There was nobody to inherit from me, so after my death, the money would all go to the state. I often heard of cases where parents had worked hard to leave plenty behind to provide for their disabled children, but because those children had died without ever having kids of their own, it all went to the treasury. If those who were so aggrieved by disabled people not contributing to society and gobbling up everyone’s benefit money knew about this, would it assuage their concerns a little?

Details:

• author: Saou Ichikawa
• full title: Hunchback
• genre: literary fiction
  
• format/type: bookfiction
• country: Japan
• topics: #disability, #desire
• publisher: Hogarth
  
• publish date: March 18, 2025
• pages: 112

Literary Awards:

• Akutagawa Prize 芥川龍之介賞 (2023), 
• International Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2025)

My Rating of the Book:

• content: 💙💙💙💙

About the Author:  

Saou Ichikawa graduated from the School of Human Sciences, Waseda University. Her bestselling debut novel, Hunchback, won the Bungakukai Prize for New Writers, and she is the first author with a physical disability to receive the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s top literary awards. She has congenital myopathy and uses a ventilator and an electric wheelchair. Ichikawa lives outside Tokyo.