While Her Body Struggles to Stay Alive, Her Brain Writes Porn

HUNCHBACK, by Saou Ichikawa; translated by Polly Barton

Shaka Izawa, the narrator of the Japanese author Saou Ichikawa’s slim and formidable debut novel, “Hunchback,” writes porn from her room in the group care facility where she has lived since she was 14. Like the author, she suffers from myotubular myopathy, a rare genetic disorder that causes grave muscular weakness; her lungs are compressed by the weight of a body she can’t hold up. Keeping her airways clear enough to breathe is a ceaseless battle requiring a suction device inserted through a tracheotomy hole.

It’s no exaggeration to say that survival is Shaka’s moment-to-moment concern; in that way, “Hunchback” is a thriller of the body. Yet Ichikawa describes these difficulties in plain, uncharged language, rendering them all the more shocking to a reader who may never have considered the limits of what a body like hers must cope with.

In one passage, the pursuit of a dropped grape becomes a potential crisis. Holding a book, turning the pages, staying upright, all are unattainable for Shaka, who calls out the “exclusionary machismo” of physical book culture for not taking readers like herself into account — as well as all of Japanese society for failing to provide accommodations for the disabled. She sympathizes with the feminist activist Tomoko Yonezu, who vandalized the Mona Lisa when it was on display at the Tokyo National Museum in 1974, to protest the institution’s lack of accessibility.

The miracle of this novel is the intellect and spirit of Shaka, who transcends her physical discomfort and confinement with wide-ranging scholarship and various writing projects that provide outlets for her appetites and scorn. Throughout Shaka produces a string of iconoclastic observations on everything from the writing of erotica for the “teens’ love” genre to Nietzschean ressentiment. She ponders the height-challenged Wagner’s self-hatred as revealed in the character of the dwarf Alberich in the “Ring” cycle, and plucks biblical quotes from the Book of Ezekiel. In an online course on disability and reproductive health (“university was the only aspect of my life that offered any kind of connection with society”), she notes that “none of the issues touched upon in the lecture had ever affected me.” Thanks to her condition and the fortune she inherited from her parents — which includes ownership of the entire facility she lives in — “neither my heart, nor my skin, nor my mucus membranes had ever experienced friction with others.”