Review of Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa

Hunchback  Saou Ichikawa  Translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton

The following review was written collaboratively between a person bedbound with a physical disability and her full-time unpaid carer. The review contains spoilers. 

Because there is often much to be gained by engaging with other perspectives on a text, the first thing we did after finishing Hunchback was to read reviews—professional reviews, amateur reviews, and good old comments. A particular thought kept coming back: that the book was “confronting” or “disturbing”, not primarily for its themes of bodily autonomy, ableism, class, gender, and desire, but because it made the (one must assume) abled readers of the book “uncomfortable” or feel “like a voyeur” through its descriptions of disabled life. The main character, Shaka, has congenital myopathy. She is able to walk no more than a few steps, therefore using an electric wheelchair, and needs assistance with hygiene. She is in pain, all the time, to varying degrees, in a way that has a major impact on what she’s able to do. Her tasks, from walking to the bathroom to picking up a grape from the floor, take ages to complete—she lives on crip time. And the prospect of death by asphyxiation is always looming: she must at all times remain vigilant about the amount of mucus that builds up in her trachea, regularly suctioning it off by inserting catheters into her windpipe and plugging herself onto a ventilator. Shaka’s thoughts and activities are interspersed by descriptions of her attending to her own body. The recurrence of such descriptions probably makes salient to the abled reader that unlike her, they live in “the silence of organs”. But Shaka’s descriptions of her bodily life are perfectly dispassionate: she is, after all, simply reporting her life. How curious then that abled readers would feel so perturbed by these descriptions, approaching Shaka’s life not with a friendly and solidary curiosity but with morbid fascination and repulsion in equal measure. 

We find this very mix of compulsion and disgust in the gaze of Tanaka, an abled self-described beta male and one of Shaka’s paid carers. Shaka has inherited a vast fortune from her parents, and owns the facility in which she lives. She herself notes that her immense wealth allows her to avoid the abuse and neglect that disabled people frequently face from their carers, and she receives professional and competent care. Yet despite her awareness both of the privileges that her wealth affords her and of the significant material harms that disabled people incur, she shows no inclination towards putting her inheritance to collective use. She offers to buy a VR headset for the facility after a resident remarks in passing that he’d like to try one, but she shows no awareness of mutual aid, a common, anarchistic practice in disabled communities where people share funds so that everyone can afford meds, meals, and more. This reflects the fact that she is not embedded in disabled communities at all. 

She explains that she has never left the facility, nor received visitors. Although her wealth endows her with all the comfort a disabled person could want, her life remains “frictionless”: she does not have friends, lovers, or enemies—her entire social life consists in polite interactions with people who she employs to meet her physical needs. She correctly presents her extreme isolation from abled society as the result of ableism, but her isolation from other disabled people is neither commented on nor explained. It is easy enough to speculate about why she may not be close to other residents in her facility: she is their landlady, she doesn’t have much in common with the other resident we meet—a quinquagenarian who makes jokes about his inability to “flick his own balls”, and she is severely limited in how much she can speak because of her tracheostomy. But disabled people have created vast online networks, where we form a range of different relationships: there is much friction to be had from disabled life on the internet. We read Shaka’s failure to seek out these communities as indicative of her ableism. She values abled society enough to (rightfully) resent being excluded from it, and she cares about disabled people in theory. But in practice, she shows no interest in other disabled people: not in being friends with them, not in supporting them financially, not in protecting them from the abuse and neglect she herself notes they are subjected to. 

Instead, Shaka searches for friction by writing erotica for “dribbles” of money (which she donates, unlike the vast amounts she inherited) and posting provocative tweets into the void. Some of these tweets are gentle condemnations of the ableist society which has deprived her of most kinds of sociality:

I’d have liked to see what it was like to be a high-school student.

Some of them display a classist fetishisation of working class jobs, not unlike Marie-Antoinette’s fake peasant village in which she cosplayed poverty:

I’d have liked to try working at McDonald’s. 

But most of them express a more complex fantasy she has:

I’d like to know what it’s like to have an abortion. 

I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion. 

My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman. 

At first glance, these tweets about abortion might appear like pure provocation, and Shaka herself calls them “incendiary”. But the fantasy they express recurs, and turns out to be central to the plot of the book. Shaka is well-versed in recent movement history, including Tomoko Yonezu and Gorō Iwama’s spray painting of the Mona Lisa, in the 1970s, in protest for disabled women’s reproductive rights. As someone with clear feminist proclivities, it would make sense for her to associate the struggle for abortion with the assertion of bodily autonomy and the exertion of sexual agency against a social milieu which precludes these things. Could her quest for an abortion be a sublimation of her desire for a full and rich sex life, one conducted within a body over which only she would have power? Her disability places her body at the mercy of her carers: as she says of the person who has just showered her, “for a brief moment, shower head in hand, he had possessed absolute power over me”. And not only does her socially-imposed extreme isolation severely limit the sex she can have, but so does the socially-mediated disgust that her “hunchback monster” body inspires. Ableism, together with the vulnerabilities of disability, has redrawn the landscape within which she could exert her agency, and her possibilities for sexual agency have been socially thwarted. 

But actual sexual agency is relationally constructed, as we discover and construct with our lovers a sense of our sexual selves. In a “frictionless” life, this is impossible for Shaka, and although she spends most of her time writing erotica, there is a vacuity and distinct lack of agency in her stories. She writes what she imagines others want to read. For instance, despite the fact that she doesn’t find it “very dignified” to represent women’s moaning with hearts (“Aaah♡ Mm♡”) she does it anyway, alongside other tricks to “boost the word count”. There is something deeply unerotic both about her explicit content and her relation to it. It is not borne out of an authentically experienced sexuality, nor is it mere provocation. Rather, she wants to be a sexual being, but she doesn’t know how to tap into her own underdeveloped sexuality, and therefore reverts to clichés and tropes. The only desire that shines through the text is that of being desired, desired so much that people are willing to go to great lengths to enjoy sex with her. At any rate, this is how we read her—thoroughly depoliticised—fantasies of being a sex worker. 

Notwithstanding these fantasies, it is not a sex worker that she becomes, but a john. This is not something she seeks out exactly. Tanaka, one of the carers at her facility, reveals to her that he has tracked her down on the internet, by searching “group home” and the name of her books, found her aliases, and read everything she has posted online, going back at least several months. (This egregious violation of privacy is described on the cover of the book in the following way: “One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt.”) He mentions one of her tweets:

Now my parents are gone, I might as well start investigating sexual services for women. Call it therapy …

and suggestively points out that such services won’t agree to getting her pregnant. He tells her he’d like “the kind of money [she’s] got”, and that “with that kind of money, [she] might be able to twist the therapist’s arm”.  He then leaves the room. Shaka, throughout most of this exchange, is unable to breathe because of the accumulation of mucus in her windpipe, and moves expertly through an oxygen shortage, connecting a catheter to the section unit and pumping it in and out of her trach tube. Tanaka does not comment on her choking, let alone do anything to help. 

Shaka reads Tanaka’s comments as malicious, as betraying a heretofore hidden animosity. This animosity seems fuelled primarily by class resentment, an envy-fuelled hatred of the rich sans class consciousness. According to Shaka, it is having bathed her which released his inhibitions: “he must have felt as though he were polishing a pile of gold coins”. But Shaka’s own consciousness of her class position is shaky at best, and she can render herself oblivious to the power that, as his employer, she holds over him. This way, she can convince herself of a false symmetry (“if he saw me purely in terms of my money, I would regard him the same way”), and offer him money in exchange for sex. She asks how much he wants, and he replies ¥100M, or roughly €600k. She humiliates him (“a cute figure”) and offers the higher sum of ¥155M, or “one million yen for every centimeter”, in reference to his short height. This is a pointed comment, since Tanaka sees himself as a “beta male”, or as Shaka puts it, an “incel”, a group of men notorious for their obsessive and misguided focus on their own height. 

The sexual act itself begins with a countermove from Tanaka. “You hate it when men say ‘Come over here, baby’, right?”, he asks, smirking, in reference to one of the tweets he had creepily sought out. He then whispers it in her ear: “Come over here, baby”, and Shaka thinks to herself, “At least if it was his child, I’d be able to abort it without remorse.” Tanaka’s misogynistic contempt for Shaka, and her feminist contempt for him, are on full display. Still, they both proceed. Shaka states that she wishes to “drink … first”, and as she sucks him, wonders whether his obvious enjoyment of it constitutes a source of humiliation for him. “It was like I was sucking on his ressentiment [that most incellian of affects], and it felt — good.” Were it not for this libidinal spark, the act would have been entirely devoid of pleasure for Shaka, who spends most of the blowjob thinking about how much Tanaka must have paid for his circumcision. But when Tanaka ejaculates, his cum gets aspirated into Shaka’s lungs, and she begins to choke. She becomes wholly unable to breathe, and while trying to connect herself to her ventilator (on which her survival depends), he turns around and leaves the room. 

She succeeds at breathing again, but her lungs become infected, and she gets hospitalised with aspiration pneumonia. Several days later, he is tasked with bringing her wheelchair to the hospital, and he asks her whether “it” was “worth risking [her] life for”. She refuses to answer, and instructs him to think only about the money. But she has still “not given up on the idea that Tanaka would do his bit to help [her] kill [her] foetus in exchange for money”. When she gets back to the facility, Tanaka has resigned. This is a serious problem for some of the other residents, since the facility is now short a carer, but Shaka declines blame: “I bore no responsibility for any of this. With my reduced muscular strength, I couldn’t afford to bear any.” She instrumentalises her own disability so as to avoid engaging in self-reflection about the role that her power over him, though by no means unilateral, may have played in his departure. She discovers that Tanaka has left the cheque behind, and comments: “Right, yes. The appropriate distance between us was one that allowed him to pity me. … I was, after all, a hunchback monster”. 

Why didn’t Tanaka take the money? An obvious answer could have been that he didn’t want to be accused of abuse of power over a vulnerable person—though it would be very surprising, given what we know about Shaka, if she had let that be said about this interaction. But Shaka’s class-unconscious analysis does not consider that Tanaka is himself vulnerable: to accusations, and potentially to state violence and incarceration. Nor does she consider (and indeed, he has just abandoned her to life-threatening asphyxiation) that he has done this out of any form of kindness. Rather, she imagines that it is Tanaka’s ego which prevented him from taking the cheque. By not letting himself be paid for his service, she thinks that he is retaining the possibility of looking down on her. But it is not clear to us that this makes any sense at all. 

There is a sudden break in the novel, and the last few pages are told from the perspective of another protagonist. She is an abled sex worker with no inherited wealth, who gets “a kick from having gross things said or done to [her] by gross people”. She uses the name Shaka at work, and like the Shaka of the novel’s main body, seems to particularly enjoy being an object of desire. She reveals to one of her johns that her brother is in prison for having killed a resident at the facility at which he worked as a carer: “he wrung her neck until she told him where her bank book and seal were, then ran off with them.” The novel ends with this mysterious narrator hoping that the condomless sex she has just had with her john results in a pregnancy, “conceiv[ing] the child that Shaka wanted to kill so she might become a person.” 

Just like us, online commenters and reviewers were confused and shocked by this ending. What does it mean? Who is this second narrator? It’s unlikely for things to be as they seem—for this narrator to be Tanaka’s sister, earning money through sex work and telling the story of Shaka’s murder—since it makes little sense that Tanaka, who after all, left without the cheque, would have returned to the facility to murder Shaka for it. No, the narrator is too close to Shaka (not just in name, but in the shape of her desires) for them to be separate people. It seems likely instead that Shaka is writing one of her fantasies, imagining herself at once working class, able-bodied, an object of untamed sexual desire, not only getting creampied but also getting paid for it by repulsive men whose attention provides a certain kind of erotic satisfaction to her; and at the same time, a victim of murder. While it makes little sense that Tanaka would have murdered her for money (again, she had already written him a hefty cheque), Shaka’s association between Tanaka and wilful killing makes sense. He has left her entirely unable to breathe and on the brink of death. He has also, if Shaka’s perception is correct, felt revulsion and shame at his own pleasure in Shaka’s hands (or mouth), and Shaka is well-aware that this kind of shame can, in the hands of an incel, turn murderous. 

Might it also be the case that, by writing her own death, Shaka asserts some form of agency over it? Throughout the book, she is perpetually on the brink of death: one mucus suction gone wrong and she asphyxiates. And although this proximity to death is rather mundane to her—it does not, unlike the thought of becoming bedbound, provoke outward anxiety—it is hard to imagine that this extreme vulnerability to death is easy to handle. Perhaps, in imagining getting murdered by Tanaka, she sublimates her fears of a perfectly unagential death, one over which she has no control. Even though Shaka cannot imagine an agential death, let alone survival for herself, even though she must imagine that she will die soon, in ways outside of her control, it is not her disability which has killed her in her imaginative projections, but the ableist class resentment of an incel. The lethal potency of physical impairment pales in comparison to that of a violent society. 

We feel we have barely scratched the surface of this sophisticated and learned novel. We have left references to cultural subjects as varied as David Lynch, the Mona Lisa, and the Bible unanalysed; and many themes and scenes which generate layer after layer of complex insight into our world did not make it to this review. Hunchback is what humanists like to call a rich text: a wide net of interconnected passages, each of which constituting a hyperfertile ground for discussion, both alone and in connection to others. The more the two of us have discussed the book, the more fruitful it has seemed to us, and we have enough material for several analyses of this length. We hope to have contributed, with this review, to an ongoing conversation based on this novel, to which we very much would like to continue participating. Reading is, after all, a kind of conversation between readers.