An extract from Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton

Hunchback is longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Read an extract from the book here

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal…

Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge.

Hunchback is published in the UK by Viking.

Written by Saou Ichikawa

Published February 25, 2025

‘One of the relatives of Mr Tokunaga on the ground floor brought us a great big bag of grapes,’ the care worker Suzaki informed me as she served me the tray with my dinner on it.

A small dish with three Kyoho and three Pione grapes had been appended to the tray as dessert. The main meal was mackerel cooked with miso, served with white rice, macaroni salad and miso soup. I had forgotten to bring the furikake from my room.

With the eyes suspended above my mask set to Smile Mode, I nodded my head at Suzaki, hoping with that simple gesture to convey something along the lines of: ‘Grapes! Wow, I guess autumn’s really on its way! Please pass on my thanks.’ I’d send a message on the residents’ group chat afterwards, conveying my gratitude.

If the opening of my trach was covered then I could speak, but it put a strain on my throat and increased the amount of mucus I produced, so mostly I didn’t. I only used verbal communication for things that couldn’t be conveyed with a nod or a shake of the head. When my sentences grew too long I’d run out of breath, so I conducted any complicated conversations by text.

Sitting diagonally three rows away from me, Yamanouchi, a quadriplegic man in his fifties, was eating his dinner with the aid of a care worker called Tanaka. Turning in their direction, I bobbed my head twice, slightly altering the angle of my head between bobs. Both nodded back. Yamanouchi, who had formerly been a gifted car salesman, loved to talk. Now, he was holding forth endlessly to Suzaki, who had been working in the home for a long time.

‘Still, I guess I’m lucky I was kicked out of working society before the rise of digitalization and so on. I was hopeless with computers, even when my arms still worked!’

A spoon loaded with macaroni salad had been hovering patiently in front of Mr Yamanouchi’s face for a while now, as he chattered away between his bouts of chewing.

‘Right, and nowadays the controls are all on a touchscreen! I borrow my son’s car and I’ve no idea how to use it! I can’t even turn the radio on.’

Suzaki, who always ended her sentences with a little chortling sound, was a master in the art of modulating the atmosphere to a major key.

‘That said, I’d like to give that VR thing a try. You can go wherever you want in the world with just a pair of glasses, they say?’

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Perhaps, when my growth curve had veered off from that of a normal person, it had begun to trace an S-shape like my spine

‘Oh yes, that sounds just great, doesn’t it! Do you use VR and all that sort of stuff, Shaka?’

I shook my head. I’d never kept up any game for very long, whether on a console or online, and the prospect of opening up the cardboard box for a VR headset and then disposing of it was a pain.

‘You’ve got all kinds of flashy new devices in your room, though, haven’t you? What was that one you bought recently – a book scanner? How’s the dissertation going, is it hard work?’

I nodded a nod designed to say, ‘Yeah, I’m finally getting close to picking a topic, but that’s as far as I’ve got.’

‘You need one of those machines too, Tanaka!’ said Suzaki. ‘You’re always reading manga on your iPhone.’

‘Oh, in the break room?’ chipped in Yamanouchi.

‘Let me have a read next time, Tanaka!

Is that Kaiji one still going?’

‘I don’t read it.’

It was unclear from Tanaka’s response whether he meant he wasn’t reading Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji, or that he didn’t read manga in the break room at all. I imagined that a man in his thirties like Tanaka wouldn’t be too concerned about owning manga for himself, and would likely be content with a manga-reading app – maybe one of the ones where you could read the manga for free if you waited for a while after it came out. Or the ones that allowed you to scroll through vertically.

Tanaka was wearing a mask, but the moment he said something at close range Yamanouchi instantly reproached him, saying, ‘Covid! Covid!’

Never mind that he himself was jabberingaway like anything as he chewed his food.

Saying nothing, Tanaka dipped the rice he’d scooped up in the spoon into the miso sauce, as Yamanouchi liked, then brought the spoon, together with the bowl, up to his mouth.

Helping the garrulous Yamanouchi with his meals took patience. There was also the ever-Present risk that his food might go down the wrong way and cause pneumonia. That said, this was a group home, which meant doing away with the type of oppressive control and inflexible rules characteristic of the institutions of bygone ages.

‘Although what I really miss, even more than manga, is pachinko.’

‘Ah, I wish I could take you along one day, even if you couldn’t play. Just to give you a taste of the atmosphere.’

‘The atmosphere!? That’s not gonna do it! Still, these days I can’t even flick my own balls, so I guess there’s not much hope for me …’

Here it was – the self-deprecating humour of the afflicted.

‘Stop it, Mr Yamanouchi! You’re in the company of a young lady, remember!’

‘Ach, sorry.’

I drank down a mouthful of miso soup with a serious expression, my head slightly cocked. I was born in 1979, which meant I was far beyond qualifying as ‘a young lady’. Yet it was true that, having got my first period at nineteen, I still didn’t look as if I were in my forties. Perhaps, when my growth curve had veered off from that of a normal person, it had begun to trace an S-shape like my spine.

Having pacified the atmosphere for us, Suzaki retreated into the kitchen to serve up dinner for those service users who didn’t come to eat in the canteen, then shuffled off down the corridor carrying a tray.

The atmosphere shifted to a minor key, and as I sat there in the now-hushed canteen I thought about whether the tweet that I’d put on ice before would stay at room temperature if I released it into the world, or if it would generate friction. For me, even this small canteen constituted a public space. It constituted society. Outbursts that ran counter to society’s rules disrupted its rhythm. They startled people, in the same way that my ungainly limp did.

Speaking about one’s desire to kill a foetus was of a different order of magnitude to the light-hearted dirty jokes of a 56-year-old man with a spinal cord injury.

Of course, the tweetings of a hunchbacked monster would be more twisted than those of someone with a perfectly erect spine.

With my eyes on the effortlessly straight spine of the young man pressing a peeled Kyoho grape into the mouth of the man who could only move from the head upwards, I snapped the backbone of the miso mackerel I’d just eaten cleanly in half with the tips of my chopsticks.