J-Lit Review #6: Hunchback

A review of a forthcoming Japanese novel about a disabled woman.

Hunchback is a forthcoming novel by Saou Ichikawa. (Pre-order it here.) In the original Japanese, it won the Akutagawa Prize and also the Bungakukai Prize for New Writers, and it is also a bestseller. Needless to say, I was excited to read it.

The book starts with a poorly written sex scene and at first I thought this was going to be a terrible book… but soon the narrative switches focus and we realise that the sex part is being written by a disabled woman, Shaka Izawa. She will be the book’s protagonist. She was born to wealthy parents but is severely disabled and confined to a care home that she more or less owns. She writes various things, including these sex scenes, and then donates the money to charity.

Shaka is a fairly interesting character. Disabled since her teens, she naturally feels frustrated by her physical limitations. She is a perpetual student because studying online allows her to socialise, something she cannot otherwise do. She is a virgin but writes erotica. She has seemingly anonymous social media accounts that she uses to tweet provocative messages, such as, “In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute.”

This is an extremely short book (it is a novella, really, even though the English title is Hunchback: A Novel) and the quite limited plot is that Shaka tweets about wanting to “get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman.” One of the male carers at her facility sees this and she offers him an obscenely large amount of money to have sex with her.

Obviously I will not give any spoilers but that is about the whole plot of the book. There are some quite unexpected results but it all ends rather quickly and one is left feeling a bit unsatisfied. Maybe that is the point… The author is herself a disabled woman and perhaps wants the reader to not only see Shaka’s character but to feel her frustrations.

In terms of plot, the book was limited and actually quite similar to the 2020 Netflix film 37 Seconds, which I enjoyed far more than this book. The writing I felt was weak in places and the story never really went anywhere. Thus, the book has merit mostly for two things, which are admittedly important:

1. The character of Shaka is well-drawn and interesting.

2. It explores the inner life of a disabled person in Japan.

I do not know the extent to which the story was autobiographical but certainly this was a disabled woman writing about a disabled woman character and she succeeded in creating a very interesting protagonist. I like complex, hard-to-define characters who do and say things that are difficult to justify or comprehend, and Shaka fell very much into that category. In a sense, then, this book was more of a portrait than a story.

There aren’t many other characters and that’s because of Shaka’s isolation. The only other person we really get to see is Tanaka, a male carer. He identifies as “a beta male,” which sounds a bit strange to me. Do people really speak that way? He sees himself as essentially disabled because he is a bit short and pathetic, and Shaka sees him as a fellow “disadvantaged” person. He comes across as the sort of lazy feminist trope at times… but I suppose there must be individuals like him in this world.

What most interested me was the depictions of life as a disabled person. As an able-bodied white man, it was fascinating to see the world from the perspective of a disabled Asian woman, even if only for the hour it took to read this short book. Ichikawa puts across the frustrations and obsessions and pains quite well. Shaka hates her body in some ways, feeling betrayed by her genes, which she repeatedly calls her faulty “blueprints.” She also repeatedly uses the phrase “hunchbacked monster” to describe herself, which at times is painful to read. Her outrageous desire to have an abortion just to “be normal” is also intriguing. Interestingly, Shaka hates books, libraries, museums, and old buildings—probably the very things that this book’s readers most like. She hates them because her disability prevents her from enjoying them.

The woman’s name is Shaka but online she is Sakya (a reference to Sakyamuni?) or Buddha. This seems a not-so-subtle way of saying that online she has transcended her physical limitations. Online she can do the things she cannot in the real world. She can be a man and go to a swinger’s party to screw lots of women. She can have sex whenever she wants however she wants. She can become a student and hang out with other students, something that was denied her when she became badly disabled in high school and had to drop out before graduating. For Shaka, the virtual world is the real world and it means freedom.

The book sounds grim from my descriptions but there was some dark humour throughout it. Or at least that was my interpretation. The author seems to mock academia at points. She says that her unhinged tweets, for example, could quite easily be inserted into essays in Gender and Queer Studies programs if she made the language slightly more formal, which I found amusing. Elsewhere, she laughs at the obsession with adding “-ism” to every disadvantage. I like to think she is making fun of the Oppression Olympics problem we currently have in the West wherein we have commodified victimhood.

As you might guess, then, this is not one of those inspirational stories about a heroic disabled person who refuses to feel disadvantaged… No, it is more realistic. But at the same time it does not wallow in tragedy. Shaka is a person like every other person with her quirks and weaknesses and talents. And that seems to have been the main point and what the author most wants her readers to understand:

Japan, on the other hand, works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations made.

I was born in the West but have lived in Asia for half my life and I get frustrated when I see people in the West complaining about certain things, not realising that they have it better than almost anyone else. Issues such as this one are infinitely worse outside of places like Europe and North America. It is never going to be easy to have a severe disability, but in a society where there are laws to protect you and at least some people try their best to see and respect and include you, it is very different from the rest of the world, where you are invisible at best.

Altogether, although this was not the best book I’ve read, it adds to a growing collection of fiction written by Japanese women that explores the idea of alienation in contemporary Japanese society. I love the work of Sayaka Murata and Mieko Kawakami. There are many others, too, who do a great job of portraying the absurdities of modern life in that traditional society, where those who think differently (or in this case are physically different) are essentially considered aliens and shunned by the wider world.

You can pre-order the novella on Amazon. It comes out March 18.

Note: This book was translated into English by Polly Barton, who seems to be churning out a vast number of works in recent years. She translated two other books I’ve reviewed on this blog: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura and Butter by Asako Yuzuki. She also translated three contributions to the latest edition of Monkey.