Of Japanese medical melodramas there is no end. Targeted largely at the female audience, they appear on the lineups of Toho and other major distributors with the regularity of cherry blossoms in April.
What's the attraction? It's not as though the vast majority of viewers are in any immediate danger of being stricken down themselves. Perhaps if their lives were as endangered as the films' suffering heroines (and a few heroes) they would prefer another form of entertainment. At least, I would: In my first conscious hours after major surgery many years ago, I wanted distraction in the form of a comic book, not a sob-fest.
Akihiko Shiota's "Dakishimetai: Shinjitsu no Monogatari (I Just Wanna Hug You)" has a plot and even a catch-in-the-throat title typical of the genre. Based on the true story of a young Hokkaido woman who was left half-paralyzed and brain-damaged by a traffic accident, the film, as Shiota explains in a program note, is intended more as a celebration of her life than a depiction of her death in 2011 of a rare childbirth complication, acute fatty liver of pregnancy.