I think it can be Marie-Louise Patton from Penguin, I need to thank me for sending me a surprise copy of Hunchback By Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton. It is a pleasure to share my review of Hunchback today.
Hunchback It was published by Penguin Viking on March 6, 2025 and is available for purchase through the editor’s links here.
Hunchback
Longinglisthed for the Booker 2025 International Prize
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe curvature in the column and uses a wheelchair and an electric fan. Within the limits of your care home, your life is lived online: Study, tweet, publish scandalous stories on an erotic website. One day, a new male caregiver reveals that he has read everything: sex, provocation, earth. Your answer? An indecent proposal …
Written by the first disabled author to win the most prestigious literary prize in Japan and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century,
Hunchback It is an extraordinary and exciting vision of the desire and darkness of a woman placed on the edge of humanity.
My hunchback review
Shaka Isawa is very physically disabled.
Crikey! Hunchback It is quite a book. I will say from the beginning, that despite being a short novel, it has a great blow and certainly will not be the taste of all. Initially, when I read the first highly sexualized pages, I really didn’t think it would be a book for me. I made a mistake.
Hunchback It is less a terribly lucid and disturbing reading and vision of the world of a young woman with Shana disabilities. The book is shocking, stimulating and very disturbing because Saou Ichikawa challenges the balance of its readers, making them face not only disability, but also their deep and possibly unrealized attitudes. I thought it was a magnificent reading while Shaka Isawa struggles to find his place in a world where the narrative around disabilities is written by those who do not have them.
The structure of the book is really intelligent. Together with Shaka’s vivid descriptions of the practical aspects of his daily life and his desire to get pregnant, there is much about the inequality of books and reading in the narrative and, nevertheless, ironically, history reserves by two explicit sexual passages. Through this structure and character of Tanka, Hunchback explores the nature of desire, disability and the different types of power that we exercise, from physical, to financial to emotional. It is fascinating.
As Shaka describes her life in the first person, the effect is to experience her with her. I wasn’t sure I always wanted to, but I couldn’t start. I confess that some of the actions you have to perform to keep your lungs clear and stay alive were really difficult to read.
I can’t say that ‘I enjoyed’ Hunchback. However, it seemed challenging, disturbing and, in reality, an essential reading. My Clythe and my somewhat thick acceptance of those with disabilities have been discouraged by Hunchback. I have changed when reading it, and that change is not necessarily a comfortable experience. I can’t recommend with enough force to read Hunchback For yourself. I can guarantee that it will not leave you indifferent. So prepare for a strong reaction!
About saou ichikawa
Saou Ichikawa graduated from the School of Human Sciences, University of Waseda. His best -selling debut novel, Hunchback, won the Bungakukai prize for new writers, and is the first author with a physical disability to receive the Akutagowa award, one of Japan’s main literary awards. She has congenital myopathy and uses a fan and an electric wheelchair. Saou Ichikawa lives out of Tokyo.
