Shizuka Oishi's "Tetsuko's Room" broadcast on July 17th: What was found in her late husband's wallet

Screenwriter Shizuka Oishi appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) broadcast on July 17th. She talked about her husband, eight years her senior, who passed away at the end of 2022 at the age of 79. She talked about the things she found in his wallet when sorting through his belongings.

At the age of 25, she married her 33-year-old husband, who was a stage director. Around the fall of 2022, around the time she finished writing the second episode of the NHK Taiga drama "To Dear Radiance (Hikaru Kimi e)" (2024), her husband was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctor's diagnosis was that surgery and chemotherapy would be difficult. "I couldn't write the Taiga drama while taking care of a dying person, so (writing) stopped there," she said. "I thought that if I couldn't return to the Taiga drama by December, I would have to let go of this job," she recalled. "It was as if he had conveyed his feelings to me, and he passed away in December. I think he thought that he shouldn't get in my way," she recalled.

She was unable to write a single line for the last three months of her life, devoting herself to caring for her husband. "At the end, I felt like I had done everything, and I couldn't even cry," she said. After he passed away, just seeing the sofa where her husband always sat and his belongings in the living room made her heart swell. "I decided to clean everything up. I threw away all of his clothes and all of his belongings from what used to be his room. I told him, 'I'll clean up, Dad,' and asked a specialist in sorting his belongings, and we cleaned up in no time."

The estate organizer showed me photos of Oishi in her 20s and 30s, saying, "I found this in my husband's wallet." "We weren't that close, and we just stayed together because we didn't want to bother with the idea of getting divorced. Until I got sick," she said, but "he always had photos of me when I was younger."

He put two photos from his 20s and 30s back to back together and pouched them together, "putting them in my wallet like a lucky charm." When he saw it, he said, "I was a little surprised. But I didn't cry. I felt like I had done everything I could. I just laughed and said, 'Oh my, Dad, you had this?'"