IRIS TRUONG examines sex, autonomy and pity in Saou Ichikawa’s novella.
When I read the brief of Hunchback, I never thought I’d be reading hardcore gangbang smut. But barely a page in, I was reading about four people in a swingers club swapping partners and having sex before voyeuristic eyes.
This story, as we later learn, is a kotatsu article—a low-effort journalistic article written entirely from home, without first hand reporting—by Shaka Izawa, our protagonist.
Shaka is first and foremost a writer. She is educated, sharp, currently buried in thesis titles such as “Anti-Semitism in the Depiction of Alberich in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Cycle” or “The Literature of Tomoko Yonezu and Goro Iwama Through a Feminist Disability Lens.” In her free time, those academic papers are replaced with smut and teen fiction, whose proceeds she gives to charity. This structure results in a lot of narrative swervings; on one page we read about systemic discrimination and on the next we are recounted stories of random, farcical sexual rendezvous.
The book’s core theme and driving force is Shaka’s disability. She is diagnosed with myotubular myopathy, and with that a curved spine, restricted breathing, and severely underdeveloped muscles. What is interesting is that the novel also revolves around the hush-hush S-word: sex.
In an ableist worldview, we often neglect to think about the sex lives of disabled people. An instinctive reaction to seeing a disabled person is often pity—an impulse that infantilizes and objectifies, framing their existence as a foil to our own privilege. I am somewhat a victim of this instinct: I squirmed, feeling a sticky sense of shame, like I had seen something I wasn’t meant to. I believe this reaction comes from being conditioned to pity disabled bodies—to place them in a glass box of purity that strips them of their humanity, their desires, their right to normal sexual needs and fantasies.
Perhaps we put disabled bodies into a state of childlike purity because we presume their inability to desire, to transgress, to act upon urges that make the rest of us uncomfortably human. It’s not just about sexual desire,it is about the full range of human flaws: selfishness, jealousy, deviance, and mistakes. We tiptoe around conversations about disabled bodies because we assume that they are incapable of these ‘imperfect’ traits, incapable of desire, sex, or companionship. In doing so, we don’t just deny them agency—we deny them the right to imperfection itself.
Pity is an inherently selfish emotion. In Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig calls it “the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness.” We often pity others because we think they are less fortunate, and we pity to relieve our guilt rather than acting on genuine compassion. After an uncomfortable interaction with her male carer, Shaka realizes that “the appropriate distance between us was one that allowed him to pity me.” In a way, this applies to all her relationships—once the veil of pity is lifted and people see Shaka as a person, they cease to know what to do with her.
What is striking about this novel is Shaka’s self-awareness. She fully understands her disadvantages, but also her privileges. Her financial wealth weighs on her, filling her with guilt when she reads about the sexual harassment that disabled women experience on public transport or in care homes. Yet, even as money grants her safety, it deepens her shame—because for a brief moment, she wished for her body to be used, to be desired. “In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute,” she wrote on her secret Twitter account.
Shaka’s desire also reflects a truth about what it means to be a woman, that to possess a woman’s body is to possess the ability to capitalize on it. The 2025 Oscars Best Picture was Anora, a movie about a Brooklyn stripper marrying into oligarch-level wealth, only to face the brutal reality of how sex, class, and power intersect. Ani, like Shaka, understands that financial security alone does not grant true agency; rather, it is the ability to be desired, to be seen as physically valuable, that dictates a woman’s tenuous place in the hierarchy.
Her hypersexuality feels like a reaction to deprivation—an overcompensation for a lack of intimacy, a way of grasping at something perpetually out of reach. And yet, by the end, I had detected in myself a sense of bittersweet pity. It deeply saddened me because this clearly goes against the novel’s intentions, but the conflict lingers—pitying her feels like societal regression, but not pitying her feels like a lie.
Shaka’s war between her mind and body is the primary narrative tension. She is educated, articulate and caring, yet her physical inabilities prevent people from seeing this side of her. She does not feel “woman” enough because of her inability to get pregnant; she clung onto university courses because she could not do a normal job like working at McDonald’s (or even becoming a prostitute). Because of this inner conflict, Shaka continuously struggles with an identity crisis: is she the body that others perceive, or her mind that only she can truly know? The narrative marks a realization: once you’re categorized by society as a disabled person, you are forever just that. It is not only due to your limited physical capabilities; sometimes society cannot comprehend a disabled person being anything other than just disabled.
And if you were to decide to do anything, then everything you do has to revolve around your disability. Towards the end, Shaka reflected on her encounter with her male carer: “The guy who only sees me as a way to make money, I see him as the same. Society’s like that, I guess.” This sentiment extends beyond Shaka—it mirrors the author’s own reality. In publishing, or art, or the world at large, being a minority (disabled, a person of color, queer, etc.) comes with an unspoken expectation: your art must speak to that identity. Like Thu-Huong Ha wrote in her review for Japan Times, it seems to be a mutual understanding that the relationship between Shaka and her male carer—and, by extension, between the readers and the author—is a mutually exploitative one.
The expectation of modern art that their artists should mine their own identities for meaning can be both exploitative and limiting. What began as a push for representation and visibility has slowly become a mechanism for extracting more from marginalized communities without enacting real systemic change. As we read on, the writer continues to mine her own suffering: “I couldn’t become the Mona Lisa. I was, after all, a hunchback monster,” says Shaka.
Hunchback is available through Penguin Books