An interview with Saou Ichikawa about her explosive novella, Hunchback

With themes of sex, disability and power, Ichikawa's debut is up for the International Booker prize

Saou Ichikawa’s debut novella, Hunchback, tells the story of Shaka, an extremely wealthy erotic fiction writer with a congenital muscle disorder. As a chronically disabled Japanese woman living in a care facility, Shaka has always existed outside the realm of visibility. She does not consider that anyone would be reading her tweets about wanting to get pregnant, or the stories she writes about sex parties. Until her carer, Tanaka, reveals he has read it all. And Shaka decides to make him an offer…

A bestseller in its native Japan, Hunchback is the first novel written by a disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize. Recently, it was longlisted for The International Booker. Now, with translation by Polly Barton, it’s being published in the UK.

I read this 88 page novella in one sitting, last December. It’s unflinching and thrilling, with scalpel sharp writing—moving but merciless. I was desperate to know more, and I knew immediately who I wanted to commission to do the interview: Martha, who dedicates her monthly newsletter to translated fiction. Once the underdog in publishing, translated fiction is having a deserved and overdue moment—and Hunchback is riding high on the wave. Over to Martha and Saou (whose questions have been kindly translated by Polly Barton.)

Hi Saou! Congratulations on Hunchback. Pandora thought that I would be an interesting person to interview you, because of my own relationship with sickness. I have been chronically unwell for several years now, initially resulting in being bed bound for two years, unable to work and contribute to society. In that time, reading became a lifeline of escapism for me, because, as you can understand, it was all I could do. The scope of chronic illness and disability is a spectrum, and our lived experiences are vastly different. However, we share a perspective of what it is like to feel excluded from able-bodied society.

I understand that your motivation for Hunchback was to bring more representation of disability to literature. Why did you want this to be via a piece of fiction—and not, for example, a memoir, where the discussion of disability in literature so often resides?

There were several reasons behind that decision. First of all, there’s the fact that I’ve always aspired to be a novelist. Second, I didn’t have any personal connections in the non-fiction publishing world. Third, the 1998 book No One’s Perfect by Hirotada Ototake, who was born without arms or legs, was a huge bestseller in Japan, and the author’s cheerful, positive attitude did much to reform the image of disabled people in Japan. The book is honest and comprehensible, I found it charming and persuasive and have a lot of respect for it, but it would be hard for me to write something similar, and I didn’t think it would be possible to repeat the impact of a huge bestseller like that. The biggest reason, though, was that I’d started to see the scarcity of disabled protagonists in fiction as a real issue that needed addressing.

In Hunchback, you defy oversimplified generalisations and stereotypes about Shaka before the reader can even assign them: namely, that Shaka must be a virtuous victim, with no agency, because she is disabled. How important was it for you to write a disabled protagonist that was morally ambiguous?

The crucial thing for me was to write a disabled female character of the kind that hadn’t been written before. There should be all kinds of disabled characters in fiction, just as there are in reality. It should go without saying that there are all kinds of disabled people in the world: the fact of someone’s disability doesn’t represent them in their entirety. We need a range of stories to be written so that people can understand this better.

The most predominant theme throughout Hunchback is sex. Shaka earns a salary through writing erotic fiction and she is willing to spend money on sexual favours. Why was sex—and the currency of desire—the theme through which you wanted to explore disability?

The themes of sex and desire have been written about any number of times in literature—to the point that everyone’s sick of reading about them! For me, Hunchback represented the project to put a severely disabled protagonist right into the heart of literature. But I felt that if the writing was too tepid, literature would end up treating the disabled person as an object of consumption. That convinced me that Shaka needed to be a character powerful enough to tear literature open.

Last year, Japan’s top court ruled that a defunct eugenics law—which saw 16,500 disabled people, mostly women and girls, forcibly sterilised between the 1950s and 1990s—was unconstitutional. In your own words, Japan “[w]orks on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society”. Could you talk to me a little more about that?

The forced sterilisation of disabled people that took place under the Eugenic Protection Act is extraordinarily gruesome. It’s not just a matter of human rights and dignity, either; there are many who suffered psychological and physical suffering and health conditions owing to these invasive procedures. The state has finally, now, apologised, and issued compensation.

What terrifies me, though, is that the criminality of this forced sterilisation isn’t very well understood by people in society. Not just that—discourse justifying it is on the rise. The proponents of these arguments see disabled people as those who deserve to be kept at a distance, who aren’t in possession of equal rights. I feel a sense of peril at the proliferation of the idea that a disabled life is a bad one, ‘a life unworthy of life’, and so on. At the same time, I understand this isn’t an issue unique to Japan…

One of my favourite lines in the novel is this:

“What a funny old ecosystem” she thinks, “where these meaningless sounds transliterated by an old, severely disabled virgin generate income by setting people’s honeypots aquiver”.

From generating an income (that she doesn’t need) from her erotic fiction, to Shaka’s extensive philanthropy, Hunchback is heavily characterised by money. Why was it important to you to discuss the intersection between class and disability through money?

Disabled people are forever haunted by the narrative of not being useful to society, of being socially unproductive. In reality, there are all kinds of disabled people out there, and those with disabilities exist within all strata of society. Disability is simply a certain attribute, and, as a physical state of the body, is mutable. For the ignorant majority with little imagination, though, this attribute which represents just one aspect of a person becomes their entirety.

Such people see disabled people as a unified group and deem them weak, unproductive, and a burden on society. In certain periods of history, disabled people have had their lives taken from them because of this very prejudice, and I constantly feel a very real fear towards it. Saying that, within fiction, the prejudices that exist within society also represent a chance to bring unexpected elements and new perspectives to the narrative, to the reader.

Despite Shaka’s financial privilege, Hunchback still communicates the insecurity she feels about her position in society:

“University was the only aspect of my life that offered any kind of connection with society. The other labels that granted one instant recognition - the kinds of occupations displayed in a list of options [...] were inaccessible to me. This was why, even past the page of forty, I forked out large sums of money so that I could continue to cling to that seven-letter word: ‘student’.”

I have also clung to the label of ‘student’ because there is so much shame attached, to not being able to work. Is this passage influenced by your own experience? And why do you think being a student offers so many disabled people recognition?

I have an experience similar to Shaka’s with that list of options displayed in a pull-down menu. Funnily enough, the issue persists for me even today, because I now realise that “novelist” isn’t one of the professions listed, either…

With a severe disability, one is often unable to experience those changes seen to mark a change in one’s stage of life. Especially in Japan, the course run by the the typical life and the tickboxes along the way tend to be pretty set in stone, there’s not much flexibility, so for those outside of that, the sense of ostracisation can be intense.

When you’re a student or you work in a company, it’s very quick and easy to introduce yourself at small gatherings or to people online. It’s much harder when you have to say, “I actually have this condition, which means I can’t work…” and so on. Japan is a country where people don’t speak about serious things in casual everyday settings, so the person saying that kind of stuff ends up feeling guilty for spoiling the mood.

I loved your commentary of the privilege on able-bodied individuals, with lines like, “to live, my body breaks” and “each time I read a physical book, I could feel my backbone bending a little further”. Shaka’s movement is frequently referred to as a ‘puzzle’, which speaks to the literal act of having to move in a certain way, but also how disability is viewed as something to ‘fix’. How did you approach striking the balance between incorporating medical details to give matter-of-fact insight into Shaka’s lived experience, while not alienating the reader?

Although it now feels forever ago, when COVID-19 first began spreading, the news was suddenly filled with words like ‘respirator’, ‘pre-existing conditions’, and ‘oxygen saturation measurements’. Maybe without that development, I’d have written this story differently—maybe it would have ended up as a different kind of narrative. In that sense, I do think of it as a work very much of its age.

Leaving that aside though, in regards to Shaka’s experience and the medical details in the novel, my sense is that even experts in the medical field don’t really know the details of what Shaka is experiencing physically. Doctors can interpret all kinds of figures, but they have no way of emulating the physical symptoms of a patient. Hunchback was my attempt to write about those unique sensations. I felt that there was a meaning in creating a record of that. It is such a unique body of sensations that I worried about whether I could do it justice. That said, I felt that the most important thing was getting readers interested, so I strove for a form of expression that people could enjoy, as a novel.

Hunchback includes commentary on the gendered experience of medical care. Shaka says she is “surrounded by middle-aged men plying her naked body”. Is medical misogyny inherent in a life like Shaka’s?

Preserving physical privacy is difficult within medical contexts. Unlike with people for whom going to the hospital is an unusual event, when you are deeply embedded in the medical world, as those with disabilities or chronic health conditions are, your sense of physical privacy becomes dulled, along with your sense of self-respect. One also ends up internalising the lack of sensitivity that exists in the medical world.

Yet in Japan, the reality is that claims about infringements of their privacy made by able-bodied women who are part of the majority attract sympathy, while those made by disabled women are met with great opposition and antipathy. It seems fair to say that severely disabled women like Shaka exist under a two-pronged form of oppression: the curtailment of their privacy that comes from requiring life-saving medical treatment, and the oppression that comes at the hands of the ableism of society.

There is extensive ambiguity as to who, if anyone, has the upper hand in Shaka’s burgeoning relationship with her carer (who describes himself as a “disadvantaged beta male”.) How meaningful was it to be able to write about a disabled person in a position of power, specifically in a dynamic with an able-bodied person? Was it cathartic?

I think of the reversal of the relationship between advantaged and disadvantaged, of the shaking up of that binary, as one of the central themes of Hunchback. You can’t really speak about a person when you’re just talking about just a single aspect of them. I believe that reality, which is what lies beyond prejudice, to be something that opens up communication between two opposing parties. If I’m honest, I did find it cathartic to write about—but that’s the catharsis that comes from having written a good scene!

Hunchback has been described as a political novel. But disabled people’s lives are often politicised just by virtue of existing. Do you agree that it’s a political novel, or do you think such a descriptor has been applied to your book because a disabled person expressing (any) desire is still considered radically political?

I agree that it’s a political novel. But then I believe that all novels are political. All this time, the majority has been enforcing majority politics, which consists in creating a society that suits the majority. I would feel bad if I wrote novels that weren’t enjoyable, but I feel like it’s within my remit as an author to have my works termed political novels. I’m aware that, as well as being political, Hunchback also contains some explicitly provocative elements

I have seen a few reviewers mentioning that the sex scenes made them uncomfortable. How do these reactions make you feel?

Naturally, there are people who like reading sex scenes and people who don’t. It’s the same in Japan. Moreover, all the sex scenes in Hunchback have abandoned any form of romanticism. The novel’s protagonist makes a bit of cash penning Teens’ Love novels, which are written to satisfy female romantic desires. In Teens’ Love novels, there are several kinds of sexual acts which don’t win the support of the female readers. When writing the novels, Shaka faithfully follows those rules, so as to garner popularity among her readers. Yet in her real life, out of a sense of rebellion, she asks [her carer] Tanaka to do the very thing that’s least favoured among those women. So that scene also functions on a meta-level as a criticism of TL fiction.

I wondered what you thought might have been gained and/or lost in the translation. Does the book take on a new meaning, in translation?

I’ve always been an avid reader of novels in translation. My life has been enriched by translations of all kinds: classics, literary masterpieces, fantasy and science fiction novels and contemporary fiction. Speaking generally, there is of course all kinds of discourse around the practice of translation, and I like to read people exchanging opinions about it, as I go about deepening my knowledge of the possibilities around translating languages and cultures. Again, speaking generally, I’ve always really enjoyed the experience of reading the English translation of something whose ambiguities I skimmed over in Japanese, and finding its meaning becoming clearer in the English translation. I don’t necessarily mean that Japanese is a vague language and English is a clearer one, in any simplistic sense—it may well have a lot to do with English not being my native language, and so reading more carefully.

In terms of Hunchback, I’ve found reading the reviews from overseas that they cohere more closely with the reaction to the book in Japan than I had imagined they would. I believe that this is the result of the work - its essence, its details, and also its humour - having been translated very well.