Review: １リットルの涙

I finally got the guts and read my first whole book in Japanese. Not a comic, not a newspaper article, not bits of textbooks for classes – a book. Not only have I stepped up to the mini-challenge I set myself, but I also fulfilled the first of my New Year’s goals.

“Ichi rittoru no namida” (“１リットルの涙”, eng. “A Litre of Tears”) is a diary by Aya Kitō who was diagnosed with spinocerebellar ataxia when she was 15. To put it simply, with time Aya became unable to perform any movement – walking, sitting, writing, even eating – or to speak, until finally she was bedridden, fed intravenously and communicated through (and with intense effort) by pointing to letters on a board.

Yes, “Ichi rittoru no namida” cannot be said to be an optimistic read, even if it does have a few motivating bits, so why did I pick that as my first book to read in Japanese? Well, there were two reasons.

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Firstly, the book was made into a TV drama (Japanese ドラマ, dorama, means a TV series), which I’ve seen last year. When I was watching it, almost as the title warned, I shed a litre of tears myself while watching, and the moment I learned that it’s based on a true story and on Aya’s diary, I decided that when in Japan I’ll buy and read this.

Secondly, because the book is a diary, a teenager’s diary at that (it starts with 15-year-old Aya’s entry, and ends with 21-year-old Aya), I figured that language-wise this book must be right on my level. And I wasn’t wrong. If anybody’s learning Japanese and feels that they’re ready to read their first book in this language, then “Ichi rittoru no namida” will be just right for intermediates (and better, of course). Aya describes everything without using fancy words or characters, and if difficult characters do appear, they tend to have furigana (reading on top of the kanji), which makes them easier to look up in a dictionary. Every now and then there’s a little bit of Nagoya dialect, but nothing that’d be impossible to read or understand, and once you get used to it – and there are plenty of places to do that – it doesn’t make it any more difficult to read. Moreover, since Aya’s focusing on her daily life and her feelings or thoughts related to the disease, the whole thing’s even easier to understand – and even more touching.

I very quickly noticed that in the whole diary the name of disease is not mentioned even once – it’s only when you get to the afterword by Aya’s doctor, Hiroko Yamamoto, that you’re told that Aya was suffering from spinocerebellar ataxia; Aya herself was most often referring to it as “(this) disease”. Which is both understandable, after all she wasn’t expecting her diaries to get published when she was writing them, and makes it even more touching because the reader gets to know the disease step by step through its symptoms, Aya’s health getting worse and her thoughts about it. Saying “spinocerebellar ataxia” is just a fancy word for most of us, but when you read again and again about “this disease which makes me unable to walk” (and many other things, but Aya tends to mention walking the most) really hits you in the feels, to put it colloquially.

Because I first saw the drama and then read the book, there were bound to be plenty of comparisons. And before you ask: I don’t think it makes that big a difference which one you do first. The differences between the two are based on the differences between the two types of media – a book vs a TV show – and in the case of this story the most important things are feelings and showing the progress of the disease, which are shown in the same way in both the book and the drama.

(WARNING! There may be spoilers!) The biggest difference is that there are a couple more characters and tiny episodes in the drama that aren’t in the diary. Specifically, the drama includes two boys who are Aya’s love interests, who weren’t in the life of real Aya (or at least they’re not mentioned in her diary). Is that a big deal? Hm, technically yes, but the drama, as the name suggests, has to be a bit more dramatic and if all episodes focused only on Aya’s illness, her family and school lives putting aside, the show could end up being less interesting. So to me introducing two boys that Aya fancied added a bit to the whole thing, reminded everyone that teenagers do fall in love and that it’s part of being a teenagers. It was a nice touch, let’s put it that way.

But I took more notice of the difference in how Aya was portrayed. The TV-Aya, though you can’t call her unrealistic or unbelievable, sometimes had moments of being slightly too much into motivating speeches or generally into the stereotypical TV/film type of talking and acting. Aya was simply tuned up a bit to match the expectations of the drama’s format. Whereas the diary-Aya seems truer to a real teenager (especially through the lack of getting a bit too dramatical at times) and it’s a lot easier to understand how she felt because she’s describing all the stuff that her illness influenced. So we’re not shown just the problems with walking, writing or talking (which had an extra dimension in the drama thanks to giving Aya a love for playing basketball), but more descriptions of confronting strangers (kids making fun of her, looks full of pity from strangers, unpleasant remarks not even said to her, but ones she overheard) or prosaic activities (using the toilet, bathing, spending hours just to eat one meal).

On top of that I like the diary-Aya even more because she was… well, I’m not saying that in a bad way, but she was a cry baby. She even describes herself this way, that she’s a cry baby and she cries for no reason at all, but that is so human. TV-Aya seemed to cry only when there really was a reason for it, even though the producers tried to allude to the diary-Aya-a-cry-baby, but without adequate actions to support that. I myself am a proof that one can cry over almost anything and not be able to help that, so if there is a reason, especially such a serious one as an incurable disease, the fact that Aya does cry, like you’d expect from a teenager in her position, makes her even closer to the reader’s heart.

At the end of the day it is a very sad book. Aya had a few moments of being in a fighting mood, when she decided to not give up and wrote about making the most of now and fighting back, but the closer it got to the end, the less of these moments she described. And so the reader starts to feel overwhelmed with how many everyday things we take for granted, while for others they are unattainable dreams. Nevertheless, I really do recommend “Ichi rittory no namida” to anyone, who gets a chance to read it. The book was translated into English, and I’m sure there’s a way of getting a hold of it, but if you do, I do advise you to prepare yourself mentally that this is not going to be a naïvely optimistic story with a happy end.