Abstract

Bruna Fujimoto, 49 years old, the daughter of Japanese immigrants who arrived in Brazil in the late 1950s, grew up in a small town with a sizable Japanese minority, where she worked as a receptionist. She married a Brazilian of Italian origin at age 19 in order to please her parents, who wished for her to stay close to home. However, not marrying a Japanese and never having children disappointed her parents. In her early 40s she got divorced and has moved to Rio de
Janeiro five years ago, where she says she is “catching up on lost time”. Ms. Fujimoto presents symptoms of fatigue, irritability, low appetite, and social withdrawal. She attributes her symptoms to worries about securing steady employment, lack of a support network in Rio de Janeiro, and guilt about her ailing mother who’s alone after her father’s recent death. As well, she has been facing
difficulties in finding a stable romantic partner, expressing concern that her age and her ethnicity (“in between Japanese and Brazilian”) is making it difficult for her to find a match. She finds that she is increasingly keeping to herself and reports mounting anxiety over the past few weeks, particularly about her way of gazing at and being with others, which has become reserved (isolated).