Sunday, November 14, 2010

21 august 2008 - 1 litre of tears

the other side of suffering
"when my existence seems to disapper,i will look for the place where i can do the best i can. i won't be impatient. i won't be greedy. i won't give up, because everyone takes things steps by steps"






"no matter how little the matter is, i want to become a useful person to others"

"if we can beat the pain, on the other side, a rainbow of happiness awaits us. taht willdefinitely become a treasure"

"you'll gain a lot of knowledge and meet a lot of new people. from now on, you'll continue to live on"

"reality is too cruel,too brutal. i don't even have the right to dream,as i think 'bout the future, the tears will come out again"

"i'm not the only one in pain, not having other people understand, not understanding others. both of those are awful"

Aya is a very typical girl just entering high school. Her family runs a tofu shop owned by her father (played by Jinnai Takanori). She has a younger sister (played by Narumi Riko - "Ruri" from Ruri no shima) who is kind of a downer, and seems to be always overshadowed by the achievements of her older sister. And her mother is a nurse. She has a brother and a very young sister, but they aren't very important characters.
She also has a kindling romance, of sorts, with a guy named Haruto (played by Nishikido Ryou) who has a very negative outlook on life. His father is an important doctor at a famous hospital, and he feels like his life is proceeding forward out of his control. Aya and Haruto are chosen as the leaders of their class, so they have to work together to decide what the class will sing for the choir competition and such. Haruto and the rest of the class want to leave all the work to Aya, but Aya wants to get everyone involved and does her best to rally everyone together, with little effect at first...
Aya has been experiencing many incidents lately in which she accidentally drops objects, has trouble picking things up with chopsticks, has sudden dizziness, or trips and falls sometimes. One day she has a terrible fall on the street and doesn't even throw her arms out to cushion her fall. She badly scrapes her chin and her mother takes her to a hospital.
The injuries from her fall are not serious, but her mother decides to have her examined for her other recent problems as long as they are there. She is examined by Dr. Mizuno (Fujiki Naohito) who tests her reflexes and does a CATscan on her head. You can probably already guess that the results Dr. Mizuno has to tell them are not good. He calls Aya's mother and asks her and Aya's father to come see him together. Aya's mother knows that this is not a good sign, and believes that her husband is not ready to listen to what Dr. Mizuno has to say, so she goes alone.
Aya has a rare disease called Ataxia or Cerebellar/Spinocerebellar Degeneration which will cause her brain to gradually deteriorate. The initial symptoms are dizziness, stumbling, having trouble picking things up, and trouble sensing the distance to objects. Later, she will become unable to write, walk, and talk. Eventually, she will be bed-bound and unable to do almost anything. No cure for the disease is known. Some of Aya's later stages of the disease were already shown briefly at the beginning of the drama, so we can already see how bad things will become later.
What really makes this drama especially profound is how Aya is made out to be so normal in the beginning, but we know that her physical and mental capabilities will gradually deteriorate as the drama goes on. In this sense, it reminds me a bit of sekai no chuushin de ai o sakebu, but I think the decline is even more dramatic in this drama because here it is even more steady and pronounced. It's a very serious drama, and perhaps even more so than "sekai no chuushin de ai o sakebu".
To make matters even more serious, this drama was also loosely based on a true story, and photos of the actual girl who Aya's character is based on are shown along with the end credits.
Since the initial symptoms of the illness are things that everyone experiences sometimes, I'm a little worried that people will watch this drama and start thinking that maybe they have Spinocerebellar Degeneration too. Building awareness of the disease is good, but it's not really good for people to start believing they have a deadly illness when they probably just have a much less serious problem. If you are a person who drops things and falls over every now and then, you should probably just write it off as fatigue or general clumsiness as Aya did earlier in the drama. It looks like Fuji TV was also wary of this problem, because they put a message at the end of the drama that basically says, "The symptoms of Spinocerebellar Degeneration vary between individuals." That's probably not enough to stop all the psychosomatics out there, but hopefully it will help.
There is not much I can say in reaction to this drama, other than that it is extremely sad and serious. Perhaps it is one of the saddest dramas I have ever seen. However, the theme of making the most of the time given to you is also heavily stressed, and this will certainly change the attitudes of Haruto and Aya's class before the drama is over. Perhaps even the viewer will have a different outlook on life after watching this drama. If this drama interests you and you'd like to see it, then I'd recommend it; but if you can't handle sad and serious stories you will definitely want to avoid this one.

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