The protagonist of the novella has great riches, but limited muscular strength such that she requires machine aids and human aides to live. As a freelance writer, she specializes in describing sex clubs she’s never been to and sexual acts she’s never done. She wants more out of life than what she currently has, but to speak her desires would be taboo.
As a portrait of the life of a woman with a profound physical disability, the novella Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa, succeeds. It also succeeds as a dramatic story about a woman with an unusual and unseemly wish; the monetary resources to pull it off; and oodles of spunk.
Ichikawa, like her protagonist, lives in Japan and has congenital myopathy. Like many works of Japanese fiction that I’ve read, Hunchback uses simple sentences to express profound ideas. Here’s a short excerpt from the novella:
“I went to the bathroom, made an instant coffee, and returned to the desk. I waited for my oxygen saturation to reach ninety-seven, then picked up my iPhone.”
Earlier in the novella, we had learned that personal actions like going to the bathroom and making coffee are difficult ordeals for the protagonist. This passage is written as a series of seemingly simple activities. But the reader knows that each one of them, except for the last, is a real challenge that must be carefully attended to.
The last, in contrast, is difficult emotionally, because the character is in the process of considering whether to send a Tweet into cyberspace.
Hunchback is translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton. The novella won two literary awards and was longlisted in 2025 for the International Booker Prize. It’s short—you can read it in no time!
What human experiences has life thus far prevented you from having?
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