Abstract

“The 8-Year Bride: A Miraculous True Story” was made into a live-action movie and premiered December 2017. Viewers exceeded 2 million, and box office sales grossed at 2.8 billion yen (approx. 26 million dollars).

A tale of true love, of the bride Mai, the miracle as she finally learns to walk on her own again, and of the loyal groom, Hisashi, as he stays by her side and never loses faith that she’ll recover.

■Mai first experienced symptoms of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis in 2006. She suffered from memory loss and delirium. Sever days after admittance to a psychiatric ward, her heart beat stopped.
She maintained breathing, but stayed unconscious. Although suspected of brain death, she experienced incessant spasms. * ‘Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis’: Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness（a NY Times Best Seller and now set to be a Hollywood Film）Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis gained immediate national attention. It is a disease in which antibodies that normally protect the body from viruses instead attack the brain.

Even in this condition, Hisashi visited Mai every day in the hospital.
“I wish that at least the spasms would stop”
“Wouldn’t it be great if the spasms slowed?”
He apparently thought such things as he visited her in the hospital.

4 months had passed from losing consciousness when they figured out the disease, “anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.” An antibody toward an ovarian tumor had formed and was believed to be attacking the brain. Mai was operated on to remove the tumor.

After the surgery the spasms decreased in frequency, however she did not regain consciousness. Hisashi and her family massaged and talked to Mai as they watched over her.
Little by little the spasms subsided, and she opened her eyes. Mai had the conscious level of an infant. She started to move her hands and got to be able to write. Mai slowly continued to recover over the following 6 years.

Finally, 8 years after the fact, the couple was married at the same place they had planned all those years ago.

Author’s Information

Disaster strikes a young couple in Okayama Japan. With their marriage only 3 months away, the bride-to-be is taken with disease of unknown origin. Her heart and lungs fail, and she falls into a coma. After 6 years of slowly regaining consciousness, she does not recognize the man in front of her that she was supposedly engaged to.