Saou Ichikawa Is Coming to English: Why Ophelia No. 23 Already Has Me Obsessed

Do you know Saou Ichikawa? If you don't — and most of the English-language reading world doesn't yet — write the name down. Because in two years you're going to be telling everyone you know about her books.

This week, Hogarth Press announced the acquisition of North American rights to two novels by Japanese writer Saou Ichikawa: Ophelia No. 23, described as “a provocative and formally daring study of misogyny, art, and performance in the age of AI,” and A Girl's Spine, a novel about two sisters with the same disability and the fraught relationship between them. Both will be translated by Polly Barton — whose work with contemporary Japanese writers is one of the great gifts Anglophone literature has received in the last decade — and published in 2027 and 2028 respectively.

Ophelia No. 23. Just the title already does something to the brain.

Ophelia as a figure is one of the most cited, represented, instrumentalized, and victimized in the entire Western literary tradition. She is the floating body. She is the madness nobody took seriously. She is the woman who became image before she could be person. That Ichikawa uses her as an anchor to explore misogyny in the contemporary art world, all within the context of AI — which also reproduces and amplifies existing violence — strikes me as a narratively intelligent choice of considerable daring.

And then there's A Girl's Spine. Two sisters. The same body, in a sense. A relationship already loaded, from the start, with all the intimacy and friction that sisters carry as inheritance. Barton has spoken in interviews about how Ichikawa works with form so that meaning emerges from the structure of the sentence itself, not just from what the plot says. That is exactly the kind of writing I care about: the kind that cannot be separated from how it is made.

Ichikawa was longlisted for the National Book Award in a previous edition — remarkable for any author, and especially for a Japanese writer published in translation in a literary field that still doesn't dedicate enough space to translated Asian fiction.

Write the name: Saou Ichikawa. The pleasure of knowing someone before the whole world catches up is one of the smallest and most genuine privileges of being a reader.