Hunchback, Saou Ichikawa’s provocative debut novel about a woman with a severe disability navigating desire, dignity, and autonomy, arrives in English through Polly Barton’s nuanced translation. As the first author with a physical disability to win Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, Ichikawa brings a perspective that feels both revolutionary and necessary to contemporary literature. While this slim novel certainly deserves the acclaim it has received, it also presents challenges that may divide readers.
The Protagonist: Beyond Conventional Representation
At the center of Hunchback is Shaka Izawa, a 40-something woman with myotubular myopathy living in a care facility called Ingleside. With a severely curved spine that crushes her internal organs, limited mobility, and dependence on a ventilator and tracheostomy tube, Shaka’s physical reality is presented with unflinching detail. Yet what makes this novel remarkable is how Ichikawa refuses to cast Shaka as either an object of pity or inspiration.
Instead, Shaka emerges as complex, contradictory, and deeply human:
She’s fiercely intelligent, pursuing multiple university degrees via distance learning
She works as a freelance writer, creating risqué content about swingers’ clubs and erotic stories
She maintains multiple online personas (Buddha, Śākya) through which she expresses thoughts deemed inappropriate for a disabled woman
She’s cynical, sometimes cruel, and unafraid to voice her most taboo desires
Shaka’s raw voice provides the novel’s greatest strength. Her most controversial desire—to get pregnant solely to have an abortion “like a normal woman”—challenges readers to confront their own assumptions about disability, womanhood, and reproductive rights.
Narrative Structure: Stories Within Stories
Ichikawa employs a fascinating structure that mirrors Shaka’s fragmented existence. The novel alternates between Shaka’s immediate reality and fictional narratives she creates online:
Shaka’s daily life in Ingleside, managing her medical needs while navigating relationships with care workers
The erotic content she creates, including explicit stories about swingers’ clubs and “Teens’ Love” fiction
Her unsent tweets and reflections on disability politics, reproductive rights, and her position in society
This layering creates a deliberate disorientation. As readers, we’re never entirely sure where reality ends and Shaka’s imaginative life begins—particularly in the novel’s final section, where the boundaries between Shaka’s multiple narratives collapse entirely. This ambiguity serves the novel’s themes, showing how storytelling becomes both prison and liberation for someone whose physical mobility is severely limited.
Provocative Themes: Body, Desire, and Power
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa confronts several provocative themes that will make some readers uncomfortable:
The Disabled Body as Sexual
Perhaps most transgressively, Ichikawa insists on portraying Shaka as a sexual being with desires. The novel’s central conflict emerges when Shaka offers her male caregiver, Tanaka, an enormous sum to impregnate her. The subsequent sexual encounter, described with clinical detailing rather than eroticism, results in aspiration pneumonia that lands Shaka in the hospital.
This scene serves multiple purposes:
It challenges the desexualization of disabled people
It explores the complex power dynamics between caregiver and care recipient
It literalizes Shaka’s desire to experience a “normal” woman’s bodily autonomy through sex, pregnancy, and abortion
Class and Privilege
Interestingly, Ichikawa doesn’t simplify Shaka’s position. While disabled, Shaka also holds immense privilege through her inherited wealth. She acknowledges this contradiction:
“Bequeathed all this money by my parents, I had no need to allow my broken body to be ground down so as to enter society.”
This financial freedom allows her to maintain distance and avoid certain frictions with society. The tension between her marginalized status as a disabled woman and her privileged position as a wealthy person creates a fascinating complexity that defies easy categorization.
Reproductive Autonomy and Disability
The novel directly engages with Japan’s history of eugenic policies and abortion of disabled fetuses. When Shaka expresses her desire to terminate a pregnancy, she’s not just seeking a “normal” experience—she’s directly commenting on a society that routinely eliminates people with disabilities before birth:
“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?”
This provocative perspective forces readers to confront uncomfortable questions about bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and the value assigned to disabled lives.
Stylistic Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Ichikawa’s prose (beautifully translated by Barton) excels in several areas:
Bodily description: The physical experience of disability is rendered with precise, unflinching detail
Psychological complexity: Shaka’s inner life is portrayed with nuance and contradiction
Dark humor: The novel employs a biting wit that undercuts potential sentimentality
Literary references: Allusions to literature, from Anne of Green Gables to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, add depth
Weaknesses
Despite its innovations, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa occasionally struggles with:
Pacing issues: The middle section feels somewhat repetitive
Character development: Beyond Shaka, other characters (particularly Tanaka) remain thinly sketched
Structural clarity: The shifting between reality and fiction can sometimes feel disorienting rather than purposeful
Resolution: The novel’s ambiguous ending may frustrate readers seeking closure
Cultural Context and Translation
Polly Barton deserves significant credit for her translation, which captures the distinct voice of a character who alternates between academic analysis, vulgar tweets, and erotic fiction. The translation maintains the original’s provocative edge while making cultural references accessible to English-language readers.
The novel feels deeply rooted in Japanese social structures and historical context, particularly regarding disability care, reproductive politics, and social hierarchies. References to specific Japanese brands, places, and cultural touchstones retain their specificity rather than being flattened for Western readers.
Comparable Works
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa joins a growing body of literature addressing disability from non-medicalized perspectives. Readers might connect it with:
Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman – Another unconventional Japanese protagonist who defies social expectations
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work – Essays exploring disability justice
Porochista Khakpour’s Sick – A memoir examining chronic illness and medical skepticism
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian – For its exploration of bodily autonomy and refusal
Final Assessment: Bold but Uneven
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa succeeds brilliantly in its primary aim: forcing readers to confront a perspective seldom represented in literature. Through Shaka’s defiant voice, Ichikawa demolishes stereotypes about disability, sexuality, and autonomy. The novel refuses to provide easy answers or comfortable resolutions.
At just under 200 pages, this is a relatively brief read that nevertheless leaves a lasting impression. While it occasionally stumbles in execution, its ambition and unique viewpoint make it an important addition to contemporary Japanese literature in translation.
For readers willing to engage with challenging material that complicates conventional narratives around disability, Hunchback offers rich rewards. Those seeking a more structured plot or conventional character development may find Ichikawa’s experimental approach frustrating. Either way, her distinctive voice marks her as an author to watch in the coming years.
Saou Ichikawa graduated from the School of Human Sciences, Waseda University. Hunchback is her debut novel, which won both the Bungakukai Prize for New Writers and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. She is the first author with a physical disability to receive this honor. Ichikawa lives outside Tokyo and, like her protagonist, has congenital myopathy and uses a ventilator and electric wheelchair.