Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
Japanese fiction
Orignal title – ハンチバック
Translator Polly Barton
Source – Personal copy
This was another book from the longlist i was vaguely aware of , I remember reading when the writer had won the Akutagawa prize a couple of years ago as she was the first disabled writer to win such a big prize in Japan; in fact, in any big book prize worldwide, let’s face it there are not many disabled voices out there in the books we read. So I had this on my radar to read; given the nature of my job, anything that deals with disability and is written from that point of view captured my attention as a reader. As I feel it is a world underrepresented by readers. In some ways, this book is a thinly veiled tale of the writer’s own life, but maybe in HD, can I get away with saying that this is her world turned up to fully steamy!!
Meanwhile, S was leaning up against the tinted glass while the trader sucked on her E-cup tits. The black turtleneck hoisted up around her mouth muffled her moans so they sounded super horny. Her enormous white breasts were glistening and bouncy like ripe Japanese pears. You had to hand it to 2I-year-old college students! Huge but still pert, they really were a flawless set of tits.
No wonder 26-year-old Y was hanging her head, her cheeks reddened by the humiliation of defeat. Although, if I’m being totally honest, I’m not that into big-breasted women. Y’s regular-sized, slightly saggy tits were actually way more up my alley. Yeah, she was really turning me on. I stuck a hand into her panties to find she was already dripping wet. ‘Can 1 fuck you?’ I groaned into her ear. ‘Sure &’! she replied. I grabbed one of the condom packets that had come pirouetting down from the ceiling at just the right moment, and so began
The tale of hers that opens the book
The book opens with our narrator writing one of the erotic stories that she has been publishing under a pseudonym on erotic websites. In her stories, she explores the experiences of sex as a disabled woman and reflects on how it would feel. She lives in a nursing home, a place her parents chose for her, where she tweets and writes. One day, her new male carer suggests that he knows about her secret life as a writer. This revelation adds a twist to the narrative as the fantasy worlds she creates spill into reality. Because of her circumstances, she finds she can prompt this man to act out some of the scenarios she wishes to explore. Her own sexual journey with this young man. It is a tale of power in a way being switched to the way this may happen otherwise.It also shows a subject until recent times, a taboo, and that is the desire of people like our narrator and the writer herself. Trapped in their own way, seeking freedom of their desires!
In American universities, in accordance with the stipulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, not only are digital educational teaching resources the norm, but it’s also compulsory for textbooks to be accessible to the visually impaired through a reader. Japan, on the other hand, works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations made. Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book. Here was 1, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that 1 read, while all those e-book-hating able-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.
A remindee of her own personal challenges and how society deals with them!
The story addresses the theme of feeling trapped in your body; how can she be free while confined to a chair and reliant on oxygen? It delves into the desire to be seen as something other than society’s perception. It highlights the unspoken desires of disabled people, a subject that is only just beginning to gain attention in our society. Something people are only just starting to talk about, so a book like this with is cader and frankness and a straightforward way of dealing with other erotic desires is eye-opening and also refreshing. I think the writer of this book must have a wickedly playful mind if this book is a reflection of her as a person. One of the books that has so far raised its head above the others, and also like some of the other book,s this is the sort of book I hope to see on lists like this books that open up new dimensions for us as readers but also give voice to underrepresented writers as well.
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