Mr. Yuichi Hamabe, the author of "The Lifesaving Center Conference Notes"
Yuichi Hamabe, the author of "Lifesaving Center Conference Notes," the latest in a popular series with a cumulative total of 1.18 million copies, is the current director of the Lifesaving Center at the Metropolitan Bokuto Hospital. His immersive depictions are excellent, and his second book won the Essayist Club Award. While it can be enjoyed as medical entertainment, the exchanges between the characters question the state of society, and it even has the aspect of a Zen question and answer. Mr. Hamabe, who will retire in March next year, talked about the current state of emergency medical care and the effects of the corona crisis, following the first article. ■It's a different world from what many people see――So what you've been writing up to this point has been the accumulation of wanting people to know about this and appealing to them? Hamabe: Actually, I don't really want to talk about the lifesaving center or how the emergency department works, but I'm talking to nurses about more basic or familiar things. It's like, so to speak, it was intended as a one-point lesson in life. You were so cocky when you were young (laughs). I was just in my thirties when I wrote the manuscript for my first book. ――Is that how you feel a sense of familiar sympathy? While the realism of the medical terminology makes your hands sweat, there are also parts where you can get a glimpse of the complicated feelings of the family and question the way you should be as a person. Hamabe: I hope it will be received in that way. I'm already bad at writing descriptions (laughs). Besides, since I'm a doctor and run an emergency center, I can't help but touch on medical matters, so I write too many difficult things. However, I don't have a methodology other than writing like this. That's why I feel like I've been given the Essayist Club Award for something like this. -- No, it's still powerful, and it clearly conveys that "the reality you're looking at is different". Hamabe: I'm sure I'm in a different world than most people see, so what I see is different. That's why I have to say what I thought and felt there, or rather I have to feel it. From the beginning, I knew that I had to convey what I felt and what I understood, rather than what was happening. ――The words and actions of a young doctor, such as whether or not to save lives even in a vegetative state or limb amputation, and how much medical intervention should be done, are worth reading as they make you think about the way medical care should be. Hamabe: Some of the things I wrote in the style of the anguish of a young doctor included my own worries, and I wanted young people to think the same way. Actually, there was talk of making it into a TV drama before, but they even wrote a script and brought it to me. Daytime melodic...... --(smile). Hamabe: No, it would be interesting to make it a TV drama, but that's not what I wanted to say.
