Photo/Illutration Sao Ichikawa, the winner of the Akutagawa Prize, speaks at a news conference in Tokyo on July 19. (Takuya Isayama)

Author Sao Ichikawa rode to the podium on an electric-powered wheelchair to receive the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature.

“I am extremely happy that I can stand here,” the 43-year-old told a news conference on July 19. “I feel like heaven has blessed me.”

The prize is awarded for a work of pure literature by an up-and-coming author. Ichikawa won for her novel “Hanchibakku” (The hunchback).

Ichikawa was diagnosed at an early age with congenital myopathy, an intractable disease characterized by muscular weakness. She has difficulties walking and has relied on a respirator since the age of 14.

At the news conference, Ichikawa spoke haltingly as she used her thumb to regulate a stoma, a hole in the trachea, created to assist her breathing.

The protagonist of Ichikawa’s novel is a profoundly disabled woman like herself, who lives in a shared home and is on a ventilator.

The woman’s back is stooped. She derides herself as a “hunchbacked monster.”

With irony and humor, the novel portrays the protagonist’s life with its many difficulties and also reveals her resentment at able-bodied people.

Novelist Keiichiro Hirano, a representative of the Akutagawa Prize selection committee, hailed the novel as a good piece of literature that challenges readers’ assumptions.

“It critically knocks down conventional wisdom and common sense centered on able-bodied people,” he said.

Hirano added that the novel is highly personal in its portrayal of difficulties that the author herself encountered.

As she grew up, Ichikawa was always a huge reader. She said she had “nothing to do other than reading” because she was spending most of her time at home.

She dreamed about having her own job after turning 20. She started writing a work of pure literature, something that she had long admired, but gave up.

She then turned to light novels, a popular Japanese genre of young adult entertainment books, and applied for literary new faces awards for more than 20 years.

“Hanchibakku” is her first work of pure literature. It was carried in the May issue of the Bungakukai literary magazine and received the magazine’s newcomer award.

Ichikawa said she returned to pure literature because she gave in to despair last year when the light novel that she was most confident in missed a prize.

In March this year, she finished a correspondence course at Waseda University’s School of Human Sciences. She studied how people with disabilities are represented in literature.

“Examples were so scarce that (I decided) I should add to them myself,” she said.

In her July 19 comments to reporters, Ichikawa urged people to consider why there was no disabled Akutagawa Prize laureate until now.

“I wrote this novel thinking that it is a problem that there were few authors with disabilities,” she said. “I want everyone to think about why the first winner did not appear until 2023.”

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On July 19, the Society for the Promotion of the Japanese Literature awarded the Naoki Prize, which is given for a work of popular literature by a rising author, to Ryosuke Kakine, 57, for his novel “Gokuraku Seiitaishogun” and to Sayako Nagai, 46, for her work “Kobikicho no Adauchi.”

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