1 week ago
10
In my local bookshop, many of the titles on the display table are by female Japanese writers, and can be divided into two categories: the transgressive and the cat-inflected cosy. Hunchback fits gloriously into the former. A debut novel, it won the Akutagawa prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, and has been longlisted for the International Booker; it is translated by Polly Barton, who also translated last year’s potboiler feminist hit, Butter by Asako Yuzuki.
It begins with a titillating story about a visit to a sex club, written by our narrator, Shaka, from her room in the care home set up by her parents. She has never been to a sex club. The care home is named, with some irony, Ingleside, after the house Anne of Green Gables lives in with her husband and children. Shaka has myotubular myopathy: her spine is S-shaped and therefore, she says, her life is too, unable to follow the conventions of Japanese society which “works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist”.
When not taking online university courses or writing sex journalism, she tweets things she believes no one will see – “I’d like to know what it’s like to have an abortion”, “In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute” and “I want to do the job in swingers’ clubs where you get to scatter condoms from the ceiling.” Most of her needs are taken care of; she donates the money she makes from sex writing, so that families can have “furikake to sprinkle on … rice so then it’d feel like a meal”. And the work is not entirely selfless. As Shaka notes, “I went to the toilet and changed my pantyliner, where writing the sex scene had left its trace in strings of see-through liquid.”
Everyone deserves a little sprinkling of furikake, of joy and flavour, is the novel’s easy-to-get-on-board-with philosophy; but when Shaka tries to apply this philosophy to her own needs, things go darkly awry. A male careworker, Tanaka, hints that he’s been reading her tweets and erotic stories. A “beta male”, he tells her of his own (financial) disadvantages. She offers him money to have sex with her. Both have power and are powerless, and, in different ways, hold each other in contempt. Is Shaka’s goal orgasm, an abortion or true annihilation? The sex act she chooses hints at the final option.
In Barton’s deft translation, a man who visits a brothel resembles “a lanky minion” and phlegm is “like green olive oil”. Faced with a real live penis, Shaka “had the urge to cut a long strip of flavoured nori to size and stick it on top, to serve as the censoring black bars that I was used to” from erotic manga. Sex for Shaka is mediated through pornography instead of emotion, as it is for many people now. This may be unpalatable for some readers, but the prevalence of porn is discussed with a mischievous and nihilistic humour.
There are rants against the fetishisation of bookshops and physical books, which are cumbersome and difficult to handle for someone with Shaka’s disability. There are asides on Wagner and his complexes about height, on David Lynch and the disability activist Tomoko Yonezu, who sprayed paint at the Mona Lisa when it was on loan in Tokyo to protest against the fact that people with disabilities had restricted access. The novel asks us which is more important: access to culture or to sexual expression? And, like all good fiction, it doesn’t provide a straight answer.
Ichikawa uses the vantage point of her disability for a particular insight into human nature, but we mustn’t condescend to call this novella autobiographical. Its structure – beginning and ending with a story, the latter possibly written by the narrator, possibly not – would tease us if we do.
