By Ai Yoshida

Yu Miri continued to pray over and over again: "May two years of my life be given to Yutaka Higashi. I shall have no regrets even if two years of my life are taken away from me, if they are for him. The only hope in my mind is to live for two years with my child and Yutaka Higashi." He also promised her time and time again that he devoutly hoped to live until her baby grew old enough to speak his name. Regrettably, their words did not carry to Heaven.

In 1999, Yu realized that she had become pregnant by a man with whom she was having an extramarital relationship. Her pregnancy caused her great suffering and she asked Higashi, who was her former boyfriend, for advice and whether or not she should give birth to the baby, as well as whether or not she should part from the man.

Yu Miri, a writer who was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for her novel Kazokushinema (Family Cinema), and Yutaka Higashi, a stage director, first met 18 years ago. At that time, Yu was 16 years old and Higashi was 39 years old. Their relationship began as one between an actress and a director. Over the course of time an intimate relationship grew between them. They looked, depending on others' perspectives, like lovers, a father and daughter, a brother and sister, or good friends. After they had lived together for ten years, Yu and Higashi began to live separately, but they often met after that. They could not cut off their relationship.

Yu worried about the life of the fetus in her body. At the same time, she had to face a shocking problem of another life: Higashi was suffering from cancer of the esophagus, and his doctor diagnosed that he had only eight months to live. Together, they got to learn of the existence of the two lives: "the life to be born" and "the life destined to pass away," and began to live together again. Yu and Higashi, who had experienced a similar disintegration and dispersion of their respective families, tried to make a true family by the bonding of their lives.

When Higashi, who had no kindred of his own, held Takeharu in his arms for the first time at the hospital, a nurse asked Yu, "Is he your husband?" "No, he isn't," said Yu. "He is . . . just my family."

With their friends' support, Yu and Higashi tried many treatments to cure his cancer, but in vain. As time passed, Higashi was getting worse and began to suffer from delusions. Yu had to nurse an incapacitated man and for this reason was obliged to live apart from Takeharu, her two month-old baby. She was dogged by misfortune: after she began to live alone, she was almost raped by an intruder.

"I would rather die with Higashi than continue living, but I cannot leave Takeharu by himself," Yu muttered to herself in her mental and physical anguish. Some weeks after that, while trying to bear his severe pain but having a great wish to live, Higashi asked, "If I should die, you would prefer to die? Can't you and Takeharu live without me?" The bond of their lives had grown to one heart and one mind.

When Takeharu was about three months old, Higashiﾕs death put an end to his suffering. Before he died, Higashi managed to write a picture book to show that he was bound to Yu and Takeharu by the ties of their lives. The book, titled Kentaro on the Moon, had many illustrations by Yu. He left a message to Takeharu, as he faced and fought against his deathﾑ"This is a story in which Takeharu will meet me in six years time."

Everything that happened to Yu Miri was not fiction but fact, as I have retold them. "I have lived, relying only on Yutaka Higashi," she wrote in Voice, which is her latest book. But now, although he has passed away, she has been expressing her mind clearly in her books. They are imbued with her strong decision to live her life with Takeharu.

Present day society is troubled by a social phenomenon called domestic discord. The result is that people in the family are reluctant to face and talk with one another. On the other hand, in marked contrast to this, there are people who have a strong bond with their family even if they live apart. Yu, Higashi, and Takeharu are bound to one another by their own spirits, and for this reason, their bond did not break, even after Higashiﾕs death. By reading her four books titled Life, Spirit, Alive and Voice, we can understand the strong bond between Yu Miri and Yutaka Higashi. At the same time, we can realize that a 'family' means a deep relationship in and for itself. I do hope that people in today's society realize the meaning of what truly constitutes a 'family.'