SUNSTAR

"Women's Life and Health" is the interview series that features active professional women about their health, lifestyle and career.

Interview vol.3

Yoko Kishimoto, Essayist -Part2

Please read the Part1 in this series.

In this part of the interview, I would like to talk about cancer and health. I always had envisioned that cancer is devastating news. But in your book, you wrote in detail what you did specifically and what was on your mind when you had found out that you had cancer. Therefore, rather than treating cancer lightly, I felt that it was close to me-something that can possibly happen to me. Did contracting cancer change your previous view of health and the world?

I didn’t imagine that I would contract cancer, either. When I thought in my twenties and thirties about my future career or old age, I took it for granted that I would live that long. I realized for the first time that I was not completely justified thinking things like that.

Did your view of work also change?

Yes, it did. One change was that I must not continue to work applying the same yardstick as I did in my twenties and thirties. I might’ve happened to realize a little earlier what people do as they become old and find themselves growing weaker. On the other hand, when I happened to become ill while I was active, I also realized that working not only earned me money but was also a really irreplaceable experience for me. Of course, I had a dilemma finding a balance between being busy and having energy. I had to go to hospital though. I wanted to work on what I had been working on the previous day. If I discontinued a job, it usually took double the time in order to finish it on the following day. Without my interest in and concentration on working, as well as the sense of fulfillment brought by such concentration, the five years after I contracted cancer would’ve been quite different.

Did cancer lead you to such changes as reducing workload or choosing jobs based on their content?

I changed the amount of work I took on. Previously, I put jobs and appointments on my schedule one after another so that I had no free time, but I set aside one “spare day,” say, every seven to ten days to make adjustments if physical conditions or more hospital days prevented me from finishing jobs as planned. And I learned to say, “I cannot accept a job now.” I came to realize that saying that I can accept a job and being unable to finish it is much worse than saying that I cannot accept the job in the first place. Since I was hospitalized for nearly one month, I naturally turned down jobs I couldn’t finish earlier than scheduled. At that time, it was unbearable to be an inconvenience to others, but still newspapers and magazines were published normally without running my essays.

Did you feel that the world was continuing to turn normally?

Yes (laughs). I thought that there no one was being inconvenienced. Thinking something like “I have to do this right now” might have been an assumption, and although “I have a strong sense of responsibility” has a fine ring to it, I really felt that I might have made a huge mistake or I might have been arrogant.

Didn’t you become uneasy? For example, didn’t you feel that you would lose work?

Yes, I did feel that. Particularly, in one year, when I told my clients that I would announce publicly soon that I had cancer, my income was cut in half. But I figured that’s life (laughs)! Since I couldn’t keep having cancer a secret forever, I decided to go as far as I could.

Women face many difficulties when they are obliged to be absent from work for unavoidable reasons, such as giving birth to children. In times like this, they sometimes become uneasy, are actually blamed by others or end up exerting pressure on themselves.

That’s right. As expected, I felt uneasy being sick and actually lost some jobs. There were cases in which I felt that my relationships with certain people were not as deep as I thought. But while I lost something, I also gained something. It seemed that sticking to what I had gained up until that point didn’t mean not losing anything. That’s because people simply have to give up certain things but may gain something again later. One would probably have no other alternative in such a situation. The only way out of that situation would be to muster the courage to give up what one has to give up. But even in my situation, I still intended to continue communicating something. Immediately after I announced publicly that I had cancer, the media published articles that sounded like I would be dying soon.

I read it in your book. You went to a convenience store and the sales clerk was surprised, saying, “You’re alive!” (laughs).

The way some of the articles about me were organized made me think that I was going to die soon (laughs). Although I was not so spirited, I still did not want to make what I was writing sound like cancer meaning the end of my life. When I started to write, there was a considerable danger of having a relapse. Even if I might have died, I actually accepted certain responsibilities, performed some jobs, and led a social life. I thought that I wanted to actively show who I really was. Later, I paid a little more attention to the amount of work and balancing my workload so that I didn’t become a person who thought only of life and death after contracting cancer and wrote on that subject alone.

When I read your books, I felt uplifted even though they revolved around illness.

Up to now, few people have probably written stories of cancer patients going to a bargain sale even if, for example, they were still felt relatively healthy. Such stories might not have been written, though, because serious subjects appeal to readers. To put it in extreme terms, a doctor may say during an examination, “It appears that your cancer has metastasized. You don’t have much time left.” But I still want to write openly about something like going to a bargain sale the day before. I thought that if there was such an essay, a woman who went to a bargain sale to get her mind off things though she was troubled by caring for a loved one and marital issues might come to realize that people in various circumstances had also come to the sale, rather than think that all the people were well off and that she was the only person who was unhappy.

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