I’ve been reading a lot of fiction recently, and translated fiction at that. Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated, with remarkable poise and control, by Polly Barton, is not something I’d normally pick up, but it has blown me away.
It begins, perversely, with straight-up porn. A journalist, Mikio, boastful, sleazy, and full of himself, files copy from a Tokyo swingers’ club, all E-cups and “horny moans”, a fantasy of perfectly pert breasts and public blowjobs. It’s so over-the-top it reads like satire. And then the punch lands: the voice wasn’t his at all. The narrator is Shaka, a disabled woman living in a care home, flat on her back, writing freelance smut and SEO fluff between bouts of suctioning her tracheostomy tube. The porn was her job, the persona a mask. And everything, everything, tilts.
“To live, my body breaks.”
What follows is one of the most radical and confrontational novels I’ve ever read: about care, class, sex, writing, money, and the total exclusion of disabled people from literary life. Shaka’s body is hunched, twisted, breaking under the weight of time and gravity, a spine crushed into an S-curve that slowly suffocates her. But her voice is blisteringly precise, even as the world refuses her space to speak. This isn’t inspiration porn. It’s not tragedy either. It’s rage: lucid, funny, filthy, and unbearably smart.
“Each time I read a physical book, I could feel my backbone bending a little bit farther.”
There are no metaphors here, no spiritual uplift, no symbolic curves. This is the daily material reality of being profoundly disabled in a society that wants you invisible. Shaka writes porn because it’s one of the few jobs she can do. She also tweets, furiously and anonymously, about abortion, prostitution, longing, and revenge. She studies media and queer theory through a distance-learning programme, knowing full well she’ll never be part of the workforce her classmates are being prepared for. Her flat, its whole sixteen square metres, is both her prison and her stage. The only men who see her naked are the care workers she pays. And then one of them, Tanaka, finds her Twitter account.
What happens next is shocking, but not in the way one might expect. This isn’t a melodrama. It’s a transaction. Shaka offers him 155 million yen to impregnate her—one million yen per centimetre of his height. Not because she wants the child. She wants the abortion. Not out of trauma, but as an assertion of personhood: “My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman.”
“Even if I couldn’t give birth, I wanted to get as far as aborting.”
This is radical literature, writing that unsettles, refuses, strips bare the pieties of liberal inclusion. Ichikawa doesn’t ask for sympathy. She doesn’t offer dignity. She writes instead from the raw edge of powerlessness: what it means to live in a body so marginalised it becomes illegible, unless rendered useful to others, sexually, economically, emotionally. The sex scene with Tanaka—agreed upon, paid for, endured—is the culmination of a capitalist relation made flesh. If he sees her as a bank account with a body, she sees him as a sperm donor with contempt in his eyes.
“Disabled people are not sexual beings—I had assented to the definition that society had created.”
And yet Shaka’s entire practice, her tweets, her porn writing, her fantasy of abortion-as-autonomy, is sexual. Not in a performative sense, but in the raw, affective register of desire unmet. There’s nothing redemptive here, no hopeful arc, no therapeutic climax. Just the slow, crushing knowledge that even her most intimate fantasies, about bodies, about sex, about death, can be commodified, surveilled, and thrown back in her face.
The novel is also a brutal indictment of literary culture. Shaka loathes physical books. Not ideologically, but physically, because they hurt her to hold. “The publishing industry is rife with ableist machismo,” she writes on one of her forums. And it’s true. The world of print, with its smug nostalgia for paper and spines, excludes bodies like hers. Ebooks are a necessity, not a choice. Bookshops and libraries are hostile terrain. And reading itself becomes an act of bodily violence.
“I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded that its participants meet these five criteria of able-bodiedness.”
Ichikawa is doing something astonishing here, not just exposing the hypocrisies of the literary world, but dragging the body back into it. The whole novel reads like a fight against gravity: not just the physical pressure on Shaka’s spine, but the weight of everything literature and society refuse to acknowledge. Her erotic novels are ghostwritten under a pseudonym. Her academic writing is buried in Moodle forums. Her tweets vanish unread into the void. And yet Hunchback exists: raw, relentless, dripping with fury and intelligence. It demands to be read. It dares you to look away.
I wouldn’t normally pick something like this up. But I couldn’t put it down. It was also one of the hardest books I’ve read and reviewed. Not because of its style, which is assured and often bitingly funny, but because of what it asked of me. I found it uncomfortable, and that discomfort was revealing. It exposed things in me I’d rather not look at: assumptions, blind spots, squeamishness about sex, about care, about bodies that don’t behave. And maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s exactly what Ichikawa wants: to make us sit with the shame, the pity, the voyeurism, the disgust—and see what survives it. Hunchback doesn’t flatter the reader. It confronts us with the limits of our empathy and the structural violence of our indifference. It asks what kind of world we’ve built if a woman has to pay someone to get her pregnant just so she can feel like a woman.
A brutal, brilliant novel. I won’t forget it.
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