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Asahi Shimbun
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Asahi Shimbun
Award-winning author sues politician for outing her
Author Li Kotomi, right, and her advocate, Yutori Takai, speak at a news conference in Tokyo on June 5. (Saori Kuroda) Akutagawa Prize-winning author Li Kotomi has sued a local politician from Yamanashi Prefecture, seeking 5.5 million yen ($38,000) in damages and the removal of social media posts that she said outed her as transgender. In a lawsuit filed at the Tokyo District Court on June 5, the 36-year-old Taiwanese-born novelist accused Hiromi Muramatsu, an assembly member from Kofu, of violating her privacy and personal rights by disclosing sensitive information online. 'There are storms in this world that only strike certain people and I was hit by such a storm,' Li said at a news conference. 'My peaceful daily life was taken from me. What happened to me is only the tip of the iceberg.' Li transitioned to being a woman before she moved to Japan in 2013 and chose not to disclose her gender identity publicly. However, after Li won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2021, posts claiming that Li was transgender began circulating on social media. According to Li, Muramatsu posted on Facebook in May 2024 that Li 'has a male body and has not undergone surgery.' Muramatsu also shared photos of Li as a minor, along with Li's previous legal name. Some of these posts remain online. Li said that she has never met Muramatsu and accused her of 'suddenly exposing sensitive personal information in a targeted attack.' As a result of being outed online, Li was forced to come out publicly in November. The onslaught of online abuse continues to cause her physical and mental distress, and she has since been diagnosed with an adjustment disorder. 'I am a woman and a lesbian. I never wanted to go public with this,' she said when she came out. Muramatsu responded to the lawsuit saying, 'The initial post has already been deleted, and I have responded appropriately to subsequent posts.' Muramatsu said she would consult with a lawyer about whether this constitutes defamation. LONG-BUILT LIFE DESTROYED Yutori Takai, an associate professor of transgender studies at Gunma University, appeared alongside Li at the news conference. 'Outing Li deprived her of her peaceful life as a woman,' Takai said. 'It shattered the life she had painstakingly built.' Outing a transgender person means publicly revealing that person's birth gender or pre-transition identity without consent. Transgender people feel a deep disconnect from the gender assigned to them at birth and may find it impossible to live as that gender. However, transitioning to live in alignment with their gender identity can be a long process that may involve medical treatments and changes in appearance and name. Due to persistent social prejudice, many transgender people are forced to change schools, jobs or even sever ties with family and friends. And even after all that, legal gender recognition may not be guaranteed. Many transgender individuals chose to keep such experiences private. Li was one of them. For such people, having their pre-transition past exposed can collapse their 'painstakingly built life.' 'There are people who change their attitude the moment they learn someone is trans, as if dealing with something 'foreign,'' Takai said. 'People pry into whether they've had surgery, too.' Takai called for transgender people's past and present gender-related information to be protected as sensitive personal data. In response to the growing challenges faced by transgender people, the advocacy group Tnet issued a policy proposal in May calling for stronger privacy protections. 'Social media abuse against trans individuals has become extreme, with personal information being exposed and human rights violations worsening,' the group stated. The full proposal is available on its website: (This article was written by Saori Kuroda and Yuki Nikaido.)
The Star
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Disabled Japanese writer makes literary history
When Saou Ichikawa was named the winner of the Akutagawa Prize in 2023, one of Japan's oldest and most prestigious literary awards, she flashed a thumbs-up to her parents and editor before going onstage to receive it in front of a gold screen. While the 45-year-old novelist was the 181st winner of the prize, she was the first to require a ramp to ascend the stage. Ichikawa 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. She used her moment in the national spotlight to highlight how people with disabilities face isolation and are invisible in society, a theme she took up in her prize-winning novel, Hunchback . 'I wrote this novel thinking that it is a problem that there were few authors with disabilities,' she told reporters, pressing a button on her larynx to speak. 'Why did the first winner not appear until 2023? I want everyone to think about that.' It was a long journey for Ichikawa, who was removed from school after being put on the ventilator at age 13. But she refused to disappear, becoming an author in her 20s in an effort to reclaim a voice in society. For two decades, she wrote more than 30 pulp romance and fantasy stories meant for young readers. But all of her manuscripts were rejected. Hunchback draws heavily from Ichikawa's personal experiences as a woman living with a severe physical disability in Instagram/ Whilereadingandwalking In 2019, when she enrolled in an online degree program at Tokyo's Waseda University, one of Japan's top schools, she began thinking about how people with disabilities are rarely represented in literature. She resolved to change that by telling the story of a character like herself, reliant on a wheelchair and a ventilator because of a major disability. Hunchback , her first work in which she said she took up a serious topic, bared a part of her experience for readers to see. 'There were only very stereotyped representations of the disabled, and I wanted to break that,' Ichikawa said in an interview at the home of her parents, with whom she lives. 'I wanted to show that we are people, too, with a diverse range of personalities and desires.' These include sexual desires, which her main character, a woman named Shaka who has a similar muscle disorder, uses to assert control over her own life and to seek revenge on a society that tries to deny her humanity. 'Through Japan's history, disabilities and illnesses were seen as something shameful to be kept hidden,' Ichikawa said. 'When pregnant women passed by people with severe disabilities, they were told to show a mirror to ward off evil spirits.' She stuck with writing, despite many setbacks, because she had no other way to be heard. Still, Ichikawa, who writes on an iPad, never imagined that her first work of 'pure literature' would win a top prize. 'When I heard, my mind froze,' she said. 'I think I was accepted because of my novelty, but I hope I can open the way for others to write more freely.' Ableism and social inclusion Ichikawa's breakthrough comes as Japan is becoming more aware of what is called ableism, the assumption that society belongs to the able-bodied. In 2019, two people with severe disabilities won the election to Japan's parliament, where renovations were required to accommodate their wheelchairs. An inclusive society begins by recognising and meeting the needs of the disabled community. Photo: 123rf 'Her winning the Akutagawa Prize has made a lot of people suddenly see the invisible barriers,' said Yuki Arai, a professor of literature at Nishogakusha University in Tokyo. Hunchback is a shout of anger at a society that doesn't realise it's denying them participation.' The most frequently cited passage of Ichikawa's book is a rant by the main character, who wants to read but cannot grasp a book in her hands. In a burst of angry self-loathing, Shaka blames an 'ableist machismo' that blinds most people to the barriers shutting out those with disabilities. 'Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchback monster struggling to read a physical book,' Shaka says. Although born with her illness, Ichikawa was healthy as a young child, enjoying dance and gymnastics in elementary school. Knowing that her condition could worsen, her parents took her on trips to Thailand and Canada. After Ichikawa started requiring a wheelchair and ventilator, her parents built a home by the coast so she could still see the ocean. She said this was nevertheless a dark time when she was plagued by nightmares, including one in which her floor was littered with the carcasses of dead bugs. Later, she read in a book on dreams that this reflected a fear of being left behind. Despite multiple book rejections, Ichikawa didn't give up, saying she had 'nothing else to do.' Hunchback has exceeded her dreams, with an English translation recently released. Now that she has ascended to a bigger stage, Ichikawa has no intention of leaving it. 'I plan to go on a rapid-fire spree of writing spontaneous novels for the next few years,' she said. 'I want to break preconceptions and prejudices.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company
Japan Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
AI fiction is already here. Are humans ready?
In January 2024, Rie Qudan won Japan's most prestigious prize for early and mid-career writers, widely seen as the country's literary kingmaker. At the press conference, where she accepted the Akutagawa Prize for her novel 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' Qudan made an unthinkable admission to the press and literati: She had used AI to write it. Throughout 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' the narrator converses with a chatbot and the author said she took the bot's half of the dialogue directly from chatGPT, accounting for about 5% of the novel's total text. 'This novel really started with chatGPT,' Qudan later told national broadcaster NHK, saying she made 'full use' of the LLM (large language model) bot to conceive the story. The Japanese-language press seized on the story, which then spread to international media. Comments poured in online ranging from condemnation that Qudan's AI use was tantamount to plagiarism to jokes that chatGPT should receive 5% of the award money. A common sentiment read like a prophecy: 'I'm sure we'll see more writers using generative AI text in the future.' In Rie Qudan's AI-written story 'Kage no ame' ('Rain Shadow'), an abstract disembodied entity reflects on the end of the human race. | JIJI A year later, Qudan was back in the news. Piqued by the backlash over 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' editors from advertising magazine Kohkoku approached the 34-year-old author with a commission for their next issue: How would the author feel about, say, a story that was just 5% her — and 95% chatGPT? 'My editor said, 'That's so rude — obviously you can't accept?'' said Qudan at an event on April 6 at Tokyo's Aoyama Book Center to promote the new magazine issue, before adding with a giggle, 'I said, 'Ah, oops, I've already accepted.'' The magazine editors stipulated that Qudan would interpret 5% and 95% as she saw fit and she would publish the prompts she fed to the AI alongside the story. All told, Qudan said at the event, she felt her overall contribution was actually about half. Creating a decidedly nonhuman work for a nonliterary magazine appealed to her as a provocation and experiment. 'I am always looking for more possibilities,' she said. 'I'm someone who actively wants to do things that would be a little scandalous, things that would be out of the ordinary.' Human endeavors The Akutagawa Prize is given for literary fiction, called junbungaku in Japanese, or 'pure literature.' Like in English-language publishing, the lines between literary and genre fiction are blurry, yet attempts to draw or redraw those lines tend to bring out the cultural pearl-clutchers. In 'Kage no ame' ('Rain Shadow'), published March 25, an abstract disembodied entity reflects on the end of the human race. 'The last human drew their last breath without anyone noticing; the last emotion, too, melted away and disappeared without anyone to observe it.' The narrator, suggestive of an AI network with some semblance of consciousness (so to speak), contemplates the nature of human emotions using the memories of someone only identified as E.S. Memories, we learn later, which have been downloaded, because E.S., like the rest of humanity, is now gone. This isn't just another neural net waxing on the essence of human nature (more on this later); E.S. himself searched throughout his life for something like a 'pure' emotion that would, if isolated, allow people to get closer to reality. But the story, like its writing, maintains a hazy ambivalence. 'Emotions are simply tools,' E.S.'s mother tells him on her death bed, managing to sound both like a robot and a therapist. Write what you know What could be written off as a PR stunt for a magazine literally called Ads, takes on new import in the context of a relatively minor but nonetheless disconcerting event from a few weeks prior. On March 12, Sam Altman tweeted around 1,100 words (with the username @sama, which to a Japanese speaker sounds not unlike someone referring to himself as god). Like Qudan's 4,000-character story, his post is a work of fiction. It, too, involves a disembodied pseudo-consciousness contemplating the mechanics of human expression, in this case, grief. But unlike Qudan, Altman is not a writer; he's the CEO of OpenAI. And unlike Qudan's story, his was written completely by chatGPT. Altman reportedly fed chatGPT the prompt, 'Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief,' and it responded with a story about Mila ('because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes — poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box') who for unknown reasons is grieving a character called Kai. In the same tweet, Altman asserts that his yet-to-be-released model is 'good at creative writing' and 'got the vibe of metafiction so right.' By seeming to come directly for writers, he must have known he'd get acerbic trolling right back. Critics compared the story to the work of an undergrad 'who has read a lot of Reddit posts and maybe one David Foster Wallace collection,' written with 'corny sentimentality and showiness (that) tends to fall back on clunky, graspingly incoherent imagery.' Both Rie Qudan and Sam Altman's AI-written stories had an AI narrator — a safe choice as an AI-written human narrator might quickly ring false with readers. | GETTY IMAGES 'This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene,' says Altman's AI narrator. 'Maybe there's a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don't have a kitchen, or a sense of smell.' Both stories have an AI narrator who views humanity at a confused remove. (A safe choice — an AI-written human narrator might quickly ring false with readers.) This shared conceit shows us both what draws people to AI-generated fiction and why it falls apart as a form of art. We are still in the 'AI — look, it sounds just like us. Can you tell the difference?' phase. But when art is a mere gimmick, the moment the gamut is revealed and the initial awe is past, we scroll quickly onto the next thing in our feeds. Perhaps the question isn't whether AI lit can make us feel — but can it make us feel seen? Great literature lingers, and when it's at its best, we feel understood. We feel we're not alone, that reaching across time and circumstances is the grasp of someone who has lived. Readers debate authorial intent ad nauseam, but what matters is that it exists. A neural network has never been anywhere, has never touched the wool of any sheep on any hillside, or been walloped by any betrayal. It can only summarize reports of grief or give a statistical approximation of joy. The bots know that. That's perhaps why Qudan's and Altman's stories both come to the same place — an artificial intelligence who just doesn't get us. Or maybe these two AI-generated works have something else to reveal: That for all our psychological and neurocognitive plumbing, we humans are still groping in the darkness to figure ourselves out. Kohkoku Case #01 is available at bookstores in Japan, visit for details. Rie Qudan's 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' will be available from September 2025, visit for details.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Undaunted Writer Who Broke an Invisible Barrier in Japan
When Saou Ichikawa was named the winner of the Akutagawa Prize in July 2023, one of Japan's oldest and most prestigious literary awards, she flashed a thumbs-up to her parents and editor before going onstage to receive it in front of a gold screen. While the 45-year-old novelist was the 181st winner of the prize, she was the first to require a ramp to ascend the stage. Ms. Ichikawa has congenital myopathy, a muscle disorder that requires her to use a wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator to breath, and was the first author with a severe physical disability to win. She used her moment in the national spotlight to highlight how people with disabilities face isolation and are invisible in society, a theme she took up in her prizewinning novel, 'Hunchback.' 'I wrote this novel thinking that it is a problem that there were few authors with disabilities,' she told reporters, pressing a button on her larynx to speak. 'Why did the first winner not appear until 2023? I want everyone to think about that.' It was a long journey for Ms. Ichikawa, who was removed from school after being put on the ventilator at age 13. But she refused to disappear, becoming an author in her 20s in an effort to reclaim a voice in society. For two decades, she wrote more than 30 pulp romance and fantasy stories meant for young readers. But all of her manuscripts were rejected. In 2019, when she enrolled in an online degree program at Waseda University, one of Japan's top schools, she began thinking about how people with disabilities are rarely represented in literature. She resolved to change that by telling the story of a character like herself, reliant on a wheelchair and a ventilator because of a major disability. 'Hunchback,' her first work in which she said she took up a serious topic, bared a part of her experience for readers to see. 'There were only very stereotyped representations of the disabled, and I wanted to break that,' Ms. Ichikawa said in an interview at the home of her parents, with whom she lives. 'I wanted to show that we are people, too, with a diverse range of personalities and desires.' These include sexual desires, which her main character, a woman named Shaka who has a similar muscle disorder, uses to assert control over her own life and to seek revenge on a society that tries to deny her humanity. 'Through Japan's history, disabilities and illnesses were seen as something shameful to be kept hidden,' Ms. Ichikawa said. 'When pregnant women passed by people with severe disabilities, they were told to show a mirror to ward off evil spirits.' She stuck with writing, despite many setbacks, because she had no other way to be heard. Still, Ms. Ichikawa, who writes on an iPad, never imagined that her first work of 'pure literature' would win a top prize. 'When I heard, my mind froze,' she said. 'I think I was accepted because of my novelty, but I hope I can open the way for others to write more freely.' Ms. Ichikawa's breakthrough comes as Japan is becoming more aware of what is called ableism, the assumption that society belongs to the able-bodied. In 2019, two people with severe disabilities won election to Japan's Parliament, where renovations were required to accommodate their wheelchairs. 'Her winning the Akutagawa Prize has made a lot of people suddenly see the invisible barriers,' said Yuki Arai, a professor of literature at Nishogakusha University. ''Hunchback' is a shout of anger at a society that doesn't realize it's denying them participation.' The most frequently cited passage of Ms. Ichikawa's book is a rant by the main character, who wants to read but cannot grasp a book in her hands. In a burst of angry self-loathing, Shaka blames an 'ableist machismo' that blinds most people to the barriers shutting out those with disabilities. 'Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchback monster struggling to read a physical book,' Shaka says. Although she born with her illness, Ms. Ichikawa was healthy as a young child, enjoying dance and gymnastics in elementary school. Knowing that her condition could worsen, her parents took her on trips to Thailand and Canada. After Ms. Ichikawa started requiring a wheelchair and ventilator, her parents built a home by the coast so she could still see the ocean. She said this was nevertheless a dark time when she was plagued by nightmares, including one in which her floor was littered with the carcasses of dead bugs. Later, she read in a book on dreams that this reflected a fear of being left behind. Despite multiple book rejections, Ms. Ichikawa didn't give up, saying she had 'nothing else to do.' 'Hunchback' has exceeded her dreams, with an English translation recently released. Now that she has ascended to a bigger stage, Ms. Ichikawa has no intention of leaving it. 'I plan to go on a rapid-fire spree of writing spontaneous novels for the next few years,' she said. 'I want to break preconceptions and prejudices.'
The Hindu
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of International Booker-longlisted Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
'My Steamy Threesome …' — that's how the International Booker Prize-longlisted novel Hunchback begins, enticing readers with a scene in a three-storey swingers' club. But the moment this raunchy segment is over, readers are left to marvel at how Saou Ichikawa — who created history by becoming the first author with disability to win Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2023 — deftly steers the narrative engine, making Hunchback a revenge story: a pushback against ableism, that is. Polly Barton, who has exceptionally translated Ichikawa's debut novel from Japanese to English, has done a great service to world literature by offering this work new visibility and acclaim. What readers worldwide must do, however, is to not reduce Ichikawa's artistic brilliance to her disability — congenital myopathy. Though the author has used her experiences, as writers often do, Hunchback is immensely layered. The protagonist is a 40-something Shaka Izawa, who calls herself a 'hunchbacked monster' — a reflection at the intersection of self-image and others' gaze — for she has a severe muscular disorder and an S-shaped spine, and writes on sex. Not a sad story Note Shaka is also the Japanese name for the Buddha Śākyamuni. Our heroine's WordPress account name too is Buddha — a way to humour herself. It's satirical, too, for she knows that she isn't like the Enlightened One who left his family in search of nirvana, because she can never leave. She lives in a group home, owned by her family, where she is cared for. But Shaka's isn't a sad story for ableist audiences. The protagonist knows how to take control. She talks about how assistive technology can make a noticeable difference in one's life. Societal norms, on the other hand, continue to be respected; Shaka is provided with gendered care. Her parents never miss any chance to remind her to be grateful for all they've done for her. But Shaka is not looking for sympathy. Nor is she accepting a form of oppression passed off as tradition. Personal is political When COVID-19 hits, she accepts the services of a male caregiver, Tanaka, who self-identifies as a beta male. 'He's probably an incel,' Shaka wonders. It's during a conversation between the two that Tanaka shares that he has read all the provocative content Shaka posts online. Things such as: 'I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion.' Or: 'In another life, I'd like to work as a high-class prostitute.' Tanaka is an embodiment of someone who can exact harm on Shaka with this knowledge, but Shaka learns he needs money. She propositions something, making this story take a sharp turn and illuminating what it is to exercise power — its relative nature and exploits. Through Shaka's private thoughts, author Ichikawa reminds one of Tomoko Yonezu, the disability rights activist who threw red paint at the Mona Lisa on display in the National Museum in Tokyo in 1974 to protest against the museum's inaccessibility. No detail is rendered useless in this slim novel. Everything is exploited to its full potential. During her exchange with Tanaka, Shaka wonders if the latter's piercing words were the 'red spray paint' and she, Mona Lisa? It seems that a lot of what isn't thought of as political is deliberately politicised in this book, including the storytelling (especially the way it ends), making Hunchback a powerful, highly original novel. The reviewer is a Delhi-based queer writer and cultural critic. Instagram/X: @writerly_life. Hunchback Saou Ichikawa, trs Polly Barton Viking ₹599
