HUNCHBACK

A disabled woman confronts her sexual desires in this debut novel.

Japanese author Ichikawa starts off with a bang, as it were, with the heading that opens the book: “My Steamy Threesome With Super-Sexy Students in One of Tokyo’s Most Sought-After Swingers’ Clubs (Part I).” That’s the title of an article written by Shaka Izawa, a self-described “more or less bedbound woman with a serious disability.” Shaka lives in a group home that she has inherited from her parents; she lives with a rare genetic disease called myotubular myopathy, which, she explains, means that “the blueprint for my muscle tissue was flawed. There might have been no dramatic degeneration, but that didn’t alter the fact that my muscles were incapable of growing, maintaining themselves, or aging in the same way as those of someone without the condition.” Shaka fills her days with distance-learning at a university, freelance writing, and posting provocative things into the online void—or so she thinks. A care worker named Tanaka discovers her posts, including one in which she writes that she “might as well start investigating sexual services for women” and one in which she says she wants “to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman.” When she offers to pay him for sex, the encounter goes wrong. Ichikawa has crafted an unforgettable character in Shaka, who is mordantly funny and disarmingly blunt, and who critiques ableism sharply: “Japan…works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations made. Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book.” The novel delivers with a fever-dream ending that Ichikawa pulls off beautifully. Some readers might be shocked by this brave novel; others might find themselves interrogating their own ableism. This is an absolutely stunning debut.

Audacious, insightful, bold, and—with its critique of ableism—necessary.