Saou Ichikawa

Saou Ichikawa is a Japanese novelist born in 1979. She is a significant voice in contemporary Japanese fiction, known for work that engages with disability, the body, and social exclusion with directness and compassion. Hunchback (Seppuku), which won the Akutagawa Prize in the first half of 2023, is a short, powerful novel narrated by a woman with severe scoliosis who lives in a care home. The narrator is angry, sexual, intellectually voracious, and determined to live on her own terms despite her physical condition and the social assumptions that surround her. The novel was praised for its refusal of sentimentality and its challenge to assumptions about disability, desire, and literary representation. It was celebrated as one of the most distinctive and challenging novels in recent Japanese fiction. Ichikawa represents the continued vitality of Japanese literary fiction in its willingness to engage with subjects — disability, non-normative bodies, institutional care — that literature has often avoided.