You don't have to be able-bodied to write porn

 “I wrote this novel [Hunchback] thinking that it is a problem that there were few authors with disabilities,” says Saou Ichikawa the author. “Why did the first winner not appear until 2023? I want everyone to think about that.”

Ichikawa, 45, was the 181st winner of the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s oldest and most prestigious literary awards. She has congenital myopathy, a muscle disorder that requires her to use a wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator to breathe, and was the first author with a severe physical disability to win.

According to a NY Times article, she was removed from school after being put on the ventilator at age 13. She became an author in her twenties and in 20 years wrote more than 30 pulp romance and fantasy stories for young readers. But publishers rejected all of her manuscripts.

She enrolled in an online degree program at Waseda University, one of Japan’s top schools, in 2019 and began thinking about how people with disabilities are rarely represented in literature, and in my experience, mostly hidden in Japan. She decided to tell the story of a character like herself. The result is the slim novel Hunchback, wonderfully translated by Polly Barton, one of my favorite translators.

Shaka Isawa, who is severely disabled, tells her story which is by turns erotic, funny, horrifying, and poignant. She makes a living writing soft- and (apparently) hard-core porn for an erotic website. One day—as I copy shamelessly from the flap copy—a new male carer reveals that he has read it all: the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Isawa's response? An indecent proposal.

As I said, the book is short, a novella rather than a novel. You can read it in an evening. Nevertheless it is powerful and engaging, a convincing portrait of an original woman, the first-hand evocation of a life most of us—thankfully—have not personally experienced. Which is, of course, a good reason to read it.