In Saou Ichikawa’s debut story Hunchback, a pendulum swings between desire and survival, told through the voice of a disabled woman in a group home. Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, the novella has been long-listed for the International Booker Prize, and in Japan, it won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize upon release. Hilarious and provocative, Hunchback flashes between scenes from the group home and her scandalous tweets, between university assignments and swinger club erotica.
Shaka Izawa, the protagonist of the novella, is a woman in her forties with a penchant for dark humour and reading and writing steamy stories. Confined to a care home because of myotubular myopathy and left with an exorbitant inheritance from her parents, she studies, thinks about sex, and works odd jobs, donating the salary to charities. Shaka’s condition leaves her bedridden—with limited wheelchair use—and heavily reliant on the ventilator as her already weak muscles continue to deteriorate. Incurable and rare, Shaka’s myotubular myopathy is a background hum on lucky days, and a fight for what she calls “survival” the rest of the time. Like Shaka, the novella’s author, Ichikawa, also has myopathy. After years of research around the representation of literary characters with disabilities, she grew frustrated at the lack of sexual pleasure and lust in fiction about those characters. And so, she created Shaka.
The only moments when Shaka isn’t thinking about desire—or writing sex scenes—are when the logistics of her body occupy her: suctioning mucus out of her tracheostomy tube, being bathed, and contorting her legs in different angles to reduce the painful pressure of a collapsing spine.
When Shaka isn’t reading erotica, she’s writing it. Her extensive use of Twitter, in particular, is a highlight of the story: “In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute” and “I want to do the job in swingers’ clubs where you get to scatter condoms from the ceiling.” Meanwhile, in her serialised fiction, she thinks of the different ways to write the sound of a female orgasm before finally settling on,, “Ah, aah, mmm!” Yet the tweet that shifts the course of her life comes in the form of a recurring thought that had, until now, been stored in her notes app: “I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion.”
Hunchback destabilises the notions of what a disabled body can and cannot do, both socially and for herself. Shaka fleshes the idea out with context from her remote study program, where she learns of the disabled activist Tomoko Yunezu, who had attempted to spray paint the Mona Lisa. In Yunezu’s time, women’s liberation groups in Japan were fighting over disabled abortion rights. Some championed the right to abort disabled fetuses while others thought the act was akin to killing a child solely for disability. The fight ballooned and more voices joined the conversation—garnering significant media attention along the way—and culminated in changes to Japanese legislation on selective abortion. Shaka’s declaration of abortion is squarely in conversation with this history, with an additional revolt against the conventionally held belief that “disabled people were not sexual beings.”
Shaka eventually builds a connection with Tanaka, one of the male nurses in the group home. When he asks about her tweets, Shaka can finally vocalise what she has only been typing. Their relationship is amorphous, undeniably challenging and tense, yet filled with strange empathy. With Tanaka, Shaka can get pregnant and experience the sexual acts she writes about. And from Shaka, Tanaka receives money. But the power play between able and disabled bodies, and between the wealthy and the working class limit the forms of their entanglement, muddy their water.
Hunchback floats between tears of joy, laughter, and anguish. Ichikawa’s novella is moving and visceral when Shaka says,
When I read a book my spine would bend, crushing my lung, puncturing a hole in my throat; when I walked I banged my head—to live, my body breaks.
Yet these moments are so delicately balanced between pleasure and lust that they effortlessly merge with the rest of the novella to create a richer story with darkly comic and compelling characters. Ichikawa—presumably from her own experience—doesn’t preach; she simply reveals the remarkable Shaka, and the result is profoundly moving and addictive.