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Holding in both hands an open book three or four centimeters in thickness took a greater toll on my back than any other activity. Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its pages; being able to maintain a reading posture; being able to go to a bookshop to buy a book—I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded that its participants meet these five criteria of able-bodiedness. I loathed, too, the ignorant arrogance of all those self-professed book-lovers so oblivious to their privilege.
Irritation and contempt were, after all, not things one felt for people far removed from oneself.
Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book. Here I was, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that I read, while all those ebook-hating able-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.
What has the world of publishing ever done for the disabled community? In 1975, a group of authors launched a protest about a recorded-book service that one library had introduced for the visually impaired, resulting in its dissolution. Those are the kinds of things that the literary world makes a stand about. Just think of the stagnation caused to the reading situation for blind people because of that!
I loathed old things, whose flawless, polished form had been impeccably preserved. I hated things that endured without breaking, that accrued value through aging. The longer I lived, the more my body collapsed into an ever more aberrant shape. It wasn’t collapsing into death. Rather, it collapsed so as to live, collapsed as a testament to all the time I’d withstood.
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When I read a book my spine bends, crushing my lung, puncturing a hole in my throat; when I walk I bang my head—to live, my body breaks. What is the difference between taking life from a body like that, over a body that flourishes to exist?
