Saou Ichikawa

Ichikawa was born September 27, 1979.^[1][2] She has congenital myopathy and uses a wheelchair and a respirator, the latter of which she has used since the age of 13.^[3][4] She has an older sister, who also has congenital myopathy.^[5] She decided to become a novelist when she was 20 years old, as she felt her career options were limited due to her disability.^[6] She first began to write light novels, but grew discouraged after a light novel she wrote failed to win a prize, and decided to instead write serious fiction.^[3] She graduated from Waseda University.^[7] She grew up reading the Paddington Bear books by Michael Bond and the St. Clare's books by Enid Blyton; she named Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha as having influenced her.^[8]

At university, she began to research the representation of disabled people in literature, which inspired the writing of her novel Hunchback,^[3] about a profoundly disabled woman, Izawa, who pays her male caretaker to have sex with her.^[9] Hunchback was published in 2023. The novel was well-received: it sold 230,000 copies;^[1] The Japan Times described it as "dark and funny".^[10] She is the first disabled writer to win the Akutagawa Prize.^[9] Novelist Keiichiro Hirano, who was on the jury for the Akutagawa Prize for that year, stated that the book "knocks down conventional wisdom and common sense centered on able-bodied people".^[3] Viking Press acquired the English rights to the novel,^[7] and a translation by Polly Barton was released in 2025. The translation received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, both of which praised the social commentary of the novel.^[11][12] The English translation was longlisted for the International Booker Prize; the judges praised Hunchback for its criticism of ableism and sexism.^[13]