I've wanted to become a doctor ever since I was little.

Doctors make a lot of money.

People look up to doctors.

I think those are the kind of reasons I had.

So when I played with my friends, I always acted like a doctor.

I cleaned their wounds and applied ice packs when my friends sprained their ankles, using what I learned from household medical books.

Everyone, including me, believed that I'd be a doctor one day.

My family was poor, so they praised me for that goal.

They told me that I needed to study a lot to become a doctor, so they borrowed some pseudo-medical books from the local library for me.

The rental fees weren't cheap.

So I would speed-read one book in a day and the next day, my parents would go back to the store to exchange it for a different book, saying they accidentally borrowed a book they already borrowed before. By doing so, my parents borrowed two books for the price of one.

Of course, now I know those books were rather useless, but they were highly motivational just the same.

My neighbors called me Dr. Kyousuke-kun, and I was always picked for class health officer at school.

Even my teachers helped me with the classes I needed to take to become a doctor.

Of course, in reality, becoming a doctor isn't as easy as it might seem.

I had to study diligently, and the path was most definitely rough.

To become a doctor, one must attend college.

Since my family was poor, I was told I wasn't allowed to go to an expensive private school.

So I had to be admitted to a national public university.

My grades weren't bad, but the admission rate to national public universities is very marginal.

Especially since I wanted to go to a medical school, my chances were even smaller.

...I studied like crazy.

My only driving force was my childhood dream of becoming a doctor.

The dream of becoming a doctor and to be looked up to by everyone kept me going.

...And I was admitted.

I wasn't at the top of the list, but I made it in. I was finally at the starting point of making my childhood dream come true.

My parents were thrilled.

Neither my father nor mother went to college, so they were proud of their son getting into a public medical school. They invited our relatives over to celebrate.

Although it was a public university, tuition wasn't cheap. But they still had an extravagant celebration anyway.

My father didn't express his emotions much.

He always kept a straight face.

He rarely voiced his opinion or took initiative on anything.

My mother took care of everything, and he showed up last and left without saying a word. He was the typical stern and silent Japanese father of the time.

That's why I was surprised to see him shedding tears of joy, and I cried along with him.

He went around to all my relatives while repeatedly slapping my back saying how proud and lucky he was to have a son like me. He bragged about my achievements to all who would hear them.

The celebration became my farewell party as I was about to leave for Tokyo.

My father yelled "banzai" repeatedly at the station as the train pulled away.

I was a little embarrassed...

but when I could no longer see my father, I could clearly recall the tears pouring down.

The days of hellish studying and exams began after that.

Some days, I was tempted to just give up and submit myself to the lavish lifestyle of the city.

But the letters from my family always encouraged me and gave me the strength to go on.

My dream, then, was to open up my own clinic in my hometown so I could contribute to the region.

I never even dreamed of getting involved with brains.

One day, I noticed a difference in a letter from my family.

The letter said the usual things about how it was at home, and asked how I was doing.

But the postscript was what caught my attention.

"Your father has become really violent lately.

Sometimes he turns the house upside down, and I don't know what to do..."

...I just couldn't picture him acting viciously. I was extremely surprised.

Did something happen?

...But, in the postscript, my mother said that there was nothing she could think of.

My mother and father had been together for a long time.

They'd been together since well before I was born.

So she noticed things that I couldn't.

...She couldn't even think of a reason why my father had become so violent......

What happened?

They got along so well. They were such a lovely couple.

When I caused a problem for my mother when I was little, my father only bonked my head with his knuckle.

Why was he acting this way towards my mother?

Maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding between them.

......I was going home for the New Year.

Maybe I could have a good talk with him then.

But the situation was a lot more serious than I thought.

On one cold winter day,

I found my apartment door unlocked.

I thought someone had broke in... but I found my mother in my apartment with her luggage.

...That's right.

My mother could no longer take my father's fury, and came to stay with me.

This was back when people still believed in the proverb "a woman has no place to settle down all her life".

She couldn't go back to her own family, because they lived in the same region as my father, so she came all the way to Tokyo.

I heard about my father's violence from my mother's own lips.

She cried, saying she had no idea why such a quiet man changed like that.

She said she wasn't ever going back to him.

I didn't know what to do.

...I asked her if she could talk to him one more time, but the bruises on her body told me it was no use.

To remember what happened afterwards is too much, so I'll be brief.

After my mother left, my father thought she was having an affair and went over to the neighbor's house with a wooden sword.

He was arrested.

He was released immediately, but he assumed someone in the neighborhood was hiding her, so he did the same thing repeatedly.

He eventually reached the point of getting into fights with anyone he saw.

In the end, he picked a fight with some young punks and ended up being beaten to death.

My relatives gave my father a decent funeral, but my mother didn't attend.

It's no use beating a dead horse.

So, nobody said anything negative about my father, but everyone was simply puzzled as to why he changed so much.

What I heard from my relatives about my father's final days was a lot stranger than what I heard from my mother.

My mother only told me about his sudden rage and violence.

But my relatives told me,

he also laughed and grew sad.

...Apparently, he displayed several sudden fluctuations of emotion, especially so in his last years.

They also told me that he started to complain about headaches after an accident he had.

...My father was a construction worker.

He had hit his head hard on a construction board during an accident at work.

He regained his consciousness quickly and seemed fine...

But since the accident, he started to have headaches and behave abnormally.

I sensed the connection between the accident and my father's changes, so I talked to my professor after I went back to Tokyo.

"...Hmm.

I can't say for certain, but it sounds like it's possible your father suffered some kind of brain damage.

There's a chance that blow to his head caused an organic mental disorder.

The symptoms your father showed in his final years are similar to the delirium and mental fluctuations we've often seen in similar patients."

Human behavior is created by the brain.

And if the brain is damaged, it can cause erratic behavior.

In other words, my father wasn't crazy: he was suffering from a disorder.

"If you can perform an autopsy on him, you should check his brain carefully.

Maybe you'll find something like a tumor there."

My father had already been cremated.

So there was no way of knowing.

But hearing about his behavior, I knew for sure.

That was the only way to explain why such a quiet and gentle man would change.

......I tried to explain all this to my relatives to regain my father's honor, but hardly anyone understood.

If his brain was damaged, he would've been dead.

But he was alive and well.

So the accident didn't damage his brain.

It wasn't his brain that caused him to change, it was his mind.

They simply brushed it off like that.

...This is the perception most people have about the brain.

They don't realize the mind and the brain are connected.

Most of the relatives didn't believe me.

...But there was one person who I really wanted to, anyway.

......That was my mother.

As she got older, she grew senile

and she exaggerated the abuse she had to endure.

...All she did was criticize my father.

And every time, she ended up crying, lamenting that she married him.

They were a lovely couple.

We were a great family.

That's why I wanted to convey to her that she was misunderstanding the situation with my father.

My father's behavior was caused by his brain damage.

...What he did to her was very sad, but he didn't want to be that way.

I told her that he wasn't at fault.

But... my mother didn't understand.

Before she took her last breaths, I begged her to forgive my father.

But her final words were "please don't bury me next to that man".

......My father wasn't at fault.

He was simply the victim of a brain disorder.

You don't complain to a person who's coughing because he has a cold.

Because coughing is just a symptom, and he should be sympathized with.

In my father's case, the symptoms weren't as obvious as a cough.

...They took the form of changes in personality, which are much harder to recognize.

If I had studied the brain more, I could have explained it better to my mother so that she could have understood him.

Then they could've been a nice couple again in heaven.

...When I realized that, I cried.

And I also realized that there are plenty of people like my father in this world

who are suffering from a disorder, yet they are misunderstood and despised for it.

And then I found out.

I found out about a miraculous cure for such disorders called a 'lobotomy'.

Ever since that day, I spent my days learning about the brain, so I could help people who are suffering from mental illnesses.

My father is gone.

But if he was still alive, I could cure him myself.

So he and my mother could reconcile.

That's the main reason

why I am here.