Hunchback

Hunchback is the Akutagawa Prize–winning debut of Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton. Its narrator, Shaka Izawa, lives in a group care home outside Tokyo. Born with congenital myotubular myopathy, she depends on a ventilator and an electric wheelchair, her spine curving further as her muscles weaken. Left wealthy by an inheritance, she spends her nights writing lurid erotica for websites and firing off provocations online — including a wish to experience pregnancy and abortion "like an ordinary woman."

When a male care worker reveals that he has read what she writes, an unsettling, transactional proposition passes between them, and the novel presses on the gap between how the nondisabled world imagines disabled lives and what Shaka actually wants. Sharp, funny, and deliberately confrontational, it skewers the sentimentality and ableism built into everyday institutions — down to the physical design of the printed book itself.

At barely a hundred pages, Hunchback became a bestseller in Japan, made Ichikawa the first author with a severe physical disability to win the Akutagawa Prize, and was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. It is a slim, bracing work about desire, autonomy, and the body.