急に具合が悪くなる

I first learned about it through the film *All of a Sudden*, set in Paris and screened at the Cannes Film Festival. *Suddenly Feeling Unwell* is a collection of letters exchanged between Makiko Miyano, a philosopher diagnosed with cancer, and her friend, medical anthropologist Maho Isono. Being diagnosed with cancer is not simply a matter of “getting sick.” It means that a life you had taken for granted—one you assumed would continue indefinitely—suddenly transforms into a life where “you don’t know when it will end.” This book presents the ongoing reflections of these two women on topics such as medicine, decision-making, chance, trust, and communication between patients and non-patients—perspectives that become visible only when one finds oneself in that position. The content of their dialogue is briefly summarized below. Medicine attempts to explain the future through probability. However, an individual has only one life, and that future remains uncertain until the very end. Therefore, “choice” is not about eliminating uncertainty and then selecting the “correct” answer. Rather, choice is an act of accepting chance. And what a choice truly determines is not just “Treatment A or Treatment B” or “whether to take a trip or not”—such immediate matters. It determines the attitude with which one lives in a world that encompasses uncertainty and chance. We cannot fully control whether we fall ill, whether treatment will work or fail, or when we will die. However, how we accept that chance is closely tied to the way we live our lives. If we take Miyano’s words as our guiding principle, the self does not reside in a place where chance has been eliminated; rather, it is precisely in living while embracing chance that something worthy of being called the “self” emerges. In that sense, this book is not only a book about cancer but also a book that explores the question: “What does it mean to live one’s own life in a world full of things we cannot decide for ourselves?”