Ichikawa Saou 市川沙央. Hanchibakku ハンチバック. Bungei Shunjū, 2023.
The 169th Akutagawa Prize, for early 2023, went to Ichikawa Saou (standard romaji would render her name Saō, but the book cover specifies the romanization “Saou”). The title can’t really be rendered any other way but “Hunchback,” since it borrows the English word; it’s a self-conscious use of an offensive term for someone with the condition the author and her protagonist share, myotubular myopathy, a severe congenital muscular condition that can cause spinal curvature severe enough to result in breathing difficulties. Ichikawa was born in 1979, and this seems to be her first published fiction; it appeared in Bungakkai in May 2023.
The novel is autobiographical to some extent, then. The author uses a wheelchair and a ventilator; so does her protagonist. And certainly the novel is being received in Japan as a representation, if fictionalized, of the author’s own experiences as someone with myotubular myopathy. In interviews, however, she’s stressing that only about 30% of the details in the story come from her own life.
The protagonist is named Izawa Shaka, a slight variation on the author’s own name (looks closer in kanji than in romaji), the significance of which we’ll get to. She lives in a group home that, we ultimately learn, she owns – her parents were extremely wealthy, and when her condition worsened to the point where she needed constant care, they built her a group home. They’re dead now, but they left her enough money to run the place indefinitely. The fact that she’s financially independent is key to the story, because as she notes, she’s able to control her own life and surroundings in a way most in her position can’t. And yet she still needs professional care, and her relationships with her caregivers – who are also her employees – is a key part of the storyline.
She writes professionally for a variety of online publications, always under a pseudonym – largely because what she writes is pornography of a particularly transgressive variety. The money she makes from her writing she donates to charities. She also tweets regularly, although she has few followers; her posts are mostly caustic or sardonic references to her condition. But she doesn’t stop at blowing off steam; she likes to shock – and while she tries to divert her most inflammatory tweets, she ends up posting them anyway. The one that gets her into trouble is one in which she wishes she could become pregnant, so she could have an abortion.
That’s it, as they say: that’s the tweet. What the reader realizes is that she’s getting at a number of things with this. One is a kind of general in-your-faceness about her myopathy: she objects to how people like her are rendered invisible in society, and wants to force society to acknowledge them. Her focus on sexual matters (in her online writing as well as in her would-be-notorious tweet) is an effort to reclaim an autonomy, particularly a reproductive autonomy, that has often been denied people like her. And she views abortion, not as something that liberates women, but as something that facilitates eugenics – that prevents people like her from being born. She wants to conceive a (healthy) baby only so she can abort it, as a way of striking back.
Realizing all this, the reader is inclined to take the tweet as basically another poke in the eye of bourgeois society. But then the protagonist is doxxed. Not publically, but one of the employees in her group home connects her with her tweets and with her pornography. So she decides to try to make her wish come true. At this point the narrative, which is already calculated to make most readers uncomfortable, becomes discomfiting on a whole new level. Essentially she promises this caregiver the rest of her fortune if he’ll impregnate her. He agrees, more or less. But first she insists on performing fellatio on him. This involves disconnecting her respirator, which is already dangerous to her. And when he ejaculates, the seminal fluid nearly chokes her – she has to be hospitalized for days. In the end he quits without cashing the check. And the reader isn’t quite sure what has happened, or how consensual any of this has been. Did we just witness a nearly lethal act of patient sexual abuse by a caregiver? Or a twisted instance of sexual harrassment by an employer? How much agency did either have? The narrative is ambiguous, to say the least (and having the episode take place during the Covid, when everybody’s frustrated in every way and medical facilities are under particular siege, is a nice touch).
The narrator’s name, Shaka, is homophonous with the Japanese pronunciation of Sakya, as in Sakyamuni, as in the Buddha. She’s conscious of this, and refers to herself in various contexts as either Sakya or, using the English, Buddha. She says this is an allusion to her condition – her spinal curvature is so great that she’s mostly only comfortable lying on her side in a position she compares to that in which the Buddha is usually depicted in nirvana scenes. Any expectations this might raise of a sweet, saintly narrator waiting to pass her wisdom on to readers are gleefully dashed from the outset, though. The novel opens with a raunchy sex scene that we only later realize is from one of her online stories, and we find that Buddha is one of the names she writes under. It closes with another fantasy sex scene, this time one that incorporates some of her recent sexual trauma/power harassment in playful ways.
The novel does achieve a kind of transcendance, but not one that comes from meekly rising above afflictions. Rather, Ichikawa gives us a Buddha who alternates caustic denunciations of mainstream society with transgressive sexual fantasies. This Sakyamuni is rooted in bodily experience, the mud from which the lotus blooms – mud is, in fact, a repeated image in the book, a term with which she describes the phlegm that accumulates near her artificial breathing tube, and that threatens her life if she doesn’t suction it out in time. (That’s why the addition of another viscous substance proves to be so dangerous.) If we take the metaphor seriously, then she generates the conditions of her own enlightenment, but her yearnings are all either political (centering the rights of the disabled) or sexual. Her Buddha is confrontational rather than comforting, in other words, and utterly material, rather than spiritual.
An important novel, to say the least.
(Go here for an explanation of my Akutagawa Prize project, if you’re curious.)