Summary

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention ("In another life, I'd like to work as a high-class prostitute"). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To Shaka's surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world.

Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body and its unrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it's a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't always grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potential of our lives, regardless of the limitations we experience.

Beyond the Book:
Tomoko Yonezu: The Activist at the Intersection of Women's Liberation and Disability Rights in Japan

In Hunchback, protagonist Shaka considers writing her dissertation on Tomoko Yonezu, a women's liberation and disability rights activist. Yonezu may be most known for attempting to spray paint the Mona Lisa when it came to Tokyo in 1974, as a protest against the museum refusing access to disabled people who needed assistance. But she's also particularly interesting because she represents the intersection of two different, and sometimes contentious, social movements of the time—the Women's Liberation movement (ūman ribu), and the disability rights movement—an intersection that influenced decades of advocacy for bodily autonomy and against eugenics in Japan.

The story of this intersection starts in 1972, when the government attempted to revise the Eugenic Protection Law (EPL) and limit access to legal abortions in Japan after pro-life lobbying, writes Anna-Viktoria Vittinghoff in her dissertation on Yonezu. The proposed changes were to eliminate the "economic reasons clause," which allowed people to get abortions for financial reasons (the most common reason for abortions up to that point), and to add in a "selective abortion clause" or "foetal clause," which allowed abortions based on fetal abnormalities.

The Women's Liberation movement protested against the proposed removal of the economic clause: they were fighting for a woman's right to choose and rejecting the state's intervention into women's bodies and reproduction. However, they didn't have a stance on the fetal clause—a clause that disability activist groups saw as an attack on their right to live (or the right to be born). Vittinghoff writes that ribu's fight against the proposed EPL "from the perspective of women's rights and bodily autonomy [only], was understood by the disability movement...as reaffirmation of eugenics and the continuous discrimination of disabled people in Japan."

But Yonezu, who was then a ribu member and was disabled herself, spearheaded workshops and discussions with disability activists, which gradually made ribu rethink their position. In an interview with Vittinghoff, Yonezu explained that many disabled women felt anger toward abled women because of the way they thought about abortion:

"Disabled women, in particular, did not have much sympathy for a woman without a disability saying that she should decide for herself whether or not to have a child either. Given that as disabled women they are told not to have a baby, they are forced to have sterilisations, they are told to have an abortion and so they have. They don't have agency over their own bodies...In the end, the same way that disabled people are killed or excluded or told not to have children, women are told not to have children or to only have healthy children. The root cause for it is the same, isn't it? Namely the Eugenic Protection Law."

In other words, Yonezu recognized that the state's control of women's bodies as a method of population control was both a violation of the rights of disabled people and a violation of the rights of women to self-determination: the two causes were inseparable. Yonezu was therefore crucial in ribu's subsequent alliance with disabled activist groups, an alliance "to challenge the ideology behind the EPL that takes away the agency of women, able bodied or disabled alike, rather than fighting each other," as Vittinghoff explains. The alliance was not total or without conflict, but the two movements cooperated, learned from each other, and continued to do so even after the government abandoned the attempt to revise the EPL.

Summary

Seven years ago, Maeve Abenthy lost everything: her world, her father, even her name. Desperate to escape the stain of her father's crimes, she lives under a fake name, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots.

Then she receives a mysterious letter with four impossible words: Your father was innocent.

To uncover the truth, she poses as an apprentice for the Otherwhere Post, where she'll be trained in the art of scriptomancy—the dangerous magic that allows couriers to enchant letters and deliver them to other worlds. But looking into her father's past draws more attention than she'd planned.

Her secretive, infuriatingly handsome mentor knows she's lying about her identity, and time is running out to convince him to trust her. Worse, she begins to receive threatening letters, warning her to drop her investigation—or else. For Maeve to unravel the mystery of what happened seven years ago, she may have to forfeit her life.

Beyond the Book:
Emily J. Taylor's Inspirations

Emily J. Taylor's sophomore novel, The Otherwhere Post, is an academic young adult fantasy filled with haunting secrets, a fascinating magic system, and a sweet slow-burn romance. Taylor has shared that the idea for the story struck in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Between quarantining and the sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn, Taylor says she felt like she was living on a planet apart from all her loved ones. A banal trip to the mailbox, however, sparked an idea: a magical post office that delivered letters to other worlds. But how do you make a story about a postal service, even a magical one, interesting?

You pair it with an intriguing lead. "An image formed in my mind," says Taylor, "of a lovely young woman clutching a letter that would ultimately change the course of her life." That young woman became Maeve Abenthy, the heroine of Post. Maeve is broken and lonely and afraid, but a mysterious letter from an anonymous sender does indeed change the course of her life. As Maeve hunts down the letter's sender, she meets Tristan, a courier for the Otherwhere Post (the aforementioned magical postal service), and while romance is not the main focus of the story, the relationship between Maeve and Tristan does develop into a slow-burn romance. This was part of the goal from the start; Taylor says she adores writing complicated relationships and knew she wanted part of Maeve's character growth to involve romance. So she created the "messy, nerdy, tortured Tristan" to be Maeve's foil.

There's also a dark academia thread woven into the novel. Taylor plays upon the subgenre's elements of mystery and love of knowledge by setting the story in the gloomy city of Gloam. Maeve describes the city as one of "…blackened stone university buildings tangled between steep roads that ran together like an ink spill." The description of Gloam was inspired by Taylor's trip to Edinburgh, where the cobblestones and tight alleyways gave the feel of a city out of time, and the dark sediment staining the gothic buildings reminded Taylor of ink stains. The feel of the city further inspired Taylor's idea for a magic system built upon the inherent magic of letters, which can seem like a piece of magic when we're isolated or separated from others. "I knew that I wanted these letters to be enchanted, and have the story be grounded in letters—what they mean to us and how they connect people." Taylor says she started by writing down all the magical plot points for the story and then building the rules from there, finally deciding the best way was "to create [a] magic system around the actual act of writing."

Taylor's development of Post's magic system is similar to her overall writing style in its ground-up approach. "I'm a layerer," Taylor admits. "My first drafts are pretty bare bones and…then I go through and ask, 'why?' quite a bit." The questioning continues through revisions until the world is fully developed, often aided by mood boards that help create the feel of the story. This makes sense based on Taylor's background in art direction and her need to visualize things to help get them done. Her work as an art director also pushed her to pursue her love of writing so that she could share her own stories rather than those dictated by her clients. Like other authors, Taylor has created her own rituals that help her with writing. Aside from mood boards, Post required a little cuckoo clock to time writing sprints, Moleskine unlined soft-cover notebooks, Post-its, Chopin's Nocturne No. 20, and gallons of iced coffee. These "little rituals…quite literally got me through revisions on The Otherwhere Post," Taylor shared on her social media. "They could all have easily been listed in my acknowledgements."

Taylor says that what makes a book an Emily J. Taylor book is "lush worldbuilding, intricate magic, second-world fantasy, and romance," and Post includes all these elements and more. The magic, mystery, and romance of The Otherwhere Post will pull readers in and make them forget that they're reading about a fictional postal system.

Summary

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

Beyond the Book:
"Pre-Crime" in The Dream Hotel and Real Life

Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel takes place in a dystopian future in which government surveillance extends to dreams, and people can be arrested for being deemed a risk to society based on their supposed likelihood of committing a crime. The concept of "pre-crime," or the idea that crimes can be anticipated before they occur, was also famously explored in Philip K. Dick's "The Minority Report."

But while both of these stories are set in a fictional dystopia, Lalami points out in an interview that pre-crime is and has been part of our society for a long time: "When I tell people that I wrote a novel in which algorithmic prediction of crimes plays a central part, they immediately respond, oh, so you're writing a dystopia. But pre-crime isn't fictional, and it's not even in our future, but part of our present and our past. We just don't think of it because it's called something else."

One modern example Lalami gives is "stop and frisk" policies — she specifically mentions the NYPD's policy under Mayor Bloomberg (2002-2013). Stop and frisk refers broadly to police officers stopping and patting down anyone they suspect of a crime, regardless of whether they have "probable cause." Since the landmark 1968 Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio, where stop and frisk due to "reasonable suspicion" was ruled constitutional, the extent to which it is used has varied from place to place and at times been challenged. The practice is often vehemently criticized on the grounds that it leads to systemic racial profiling and abuses of power. According to Vox, Bloomberg's expansion of stop and frisk in New York did "little to nothing to prevent crime" and during this time over 80% of those stopped — and sometimes subjected to violence — were people of color ("typically young black or Latin men"). This period is known as one of routine abuse and harassment that had lasting harmful effects on minority communities. Some have compared mask bans to stop and frisk laws, as they allow police to stop people at their discretion without a warrant, and to decide if a crime has been committed or if a medical exemption applies.

Another of Lalami's examples of pre-crime is the No Fly List, maintained by the American government's Terrorist Screening Database, which can block people from air travel if the government labels them a terrorist threat. The list has been criticized for racism, unconstitutionality, lack of transparency, and incompetence — a seven-month-old baby once ended up on the No Fly List, and there have been other cases of very young children prevented from boarding planes with their parents. These criticisms converge with recent concerns about United States residents dealing with sudden deportations or detainments while traveling under the Trump administration's expansion of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) purview.

While The Dream Hotel focuses on a dream-monitoring implant as the tool of a surveillance state, Lalami says that writing the book helped rid her of some of her fears about technology: "I started to see more clearly the connections between current forms of surveillance and historical ones, and the continued failure of these systems to dim our need for creation and liberation."