Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

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. Pain shot through my heavy hand, which my bent neck could only just about support. With the forward incline of this reading posture my lower back, arced so as to crush my internal organs, lost its tug-of-war contest with the earth. Each time I read a physical book, I could feel my backbone bending a little further.

Hunchback is a gloriously transgressive, angry, funny, filthy novella. It packs an incredible amount into its slim 97 pages, following the story of Shaka Isawa, a young Japanese woman with severe spine curvature, who is confined to living in a wheelchair as a resident in a care home owned by her late parents, spending most of her life attached to a ventilator via tracheostomy as she lacks the muscle strength to breathe for herself.

Shaka has all of her needs seen to by the care team at the home, and spends most of her time online, or writing fictional reviews of massage parlours and brothels.

On the site I work for, the most successful combination among male users is first-hand accounts of various adult entertainment venues or lists of top-twenty pick-up spots, together with dating and hook-up apps, while among women, it’s lists of the top-twenty shrines to pray at for rekindling romance, together with adverts for psychic hotlines.

Shaka is paid about 30,000 yen for each article, and combined with a series of erotic novels she has authored under the pen name Sakya, Shaka makes a reasonable income which she donates almost entirely to foodbanks or to anonymously pay for student's university education. Her later parents bought the care home she lives in, so Shaka wants for nothing, other than fantasies of living a normal life, most of all to have sex. Shaka finds out that one of her carers, Tanaka, may be interested for a price.

I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion

I can’t imagine a foetus growing properly inside this crooked body of mine.

I guess I couldn’t withstand labour either.

And of course, taking care of a baby would be out of the question for me.

But I could get pregnant and have an abortion like anybody else. There’s no issue with my reproductive functions.

So I’d like to experience what that’s like.

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

This passage is really the essence of Hunchback - Shaka wants to have a normal life and experience all of the privileges that most able-bodied people take for granted. It’s beautiful in its straightforward approach to shattering taboos. It’s important to say clearly that for all the offence that some people may choose to hold, the novel is not poking fun, or utilizing shock for the sake of it. The anger drips off the pages, and it forces the reader to reflect on how society treats disabled communities. In a sense it reminded me of The Sellout by Paul Beatty in its ability to be both hilarious and rage-inducing at the same time.

Hunchback is Saou Ichikawa’s first novel and won major book awards in Japan. Ichikawa has congenital myopathy and uses a ventilator and an electric wheelchair, and was the first author with a physical disability to win the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s premier literary award. It’s also been longlisted for the International Booker Prize, which is how it came on my radar. It has been translated into English by Polly Barton, who some might recognize as the person behind the translation of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter.

Much of the anger and body horror in the pages of Hunchback clearly comes from lived experience. This is not a novel which pokes fun at the disabled, if anything it lays bare the disenfranchisement of disabled people in modern society. At times the novel could just as easily read as a long-form essay, but this is not intended as a critique on my part. There are really important messages within Hunchback, delightfully mixed in with some absolute filth.

I picked up my copy of Hunchback from Foyles, and read the whole book in one sitting while sat in an Emergency Department waiting room vomiting blood after a curly fry got stuck in my gullet. Felt like an appropriate book to enjoy under the circumstances.