［About This Book］
A hospice physician who has spent many years accompanying terminal patients reflects on how the power of humor can heal the heart and enrich human life. The author describes how small jokes exchanged during daily consultations ease tension and foster feelings of trust and reassurance. Through senryū poems and forms of humor unique to Japan, readers can experience firsthand the influence that laughter exerts on the rhythms of everyday life.

The volume also introduces international research on humor therapy and includes a dialogue with Professor Alphonse Deeken, renowned for his studies of life, death, and humor. Centered on the idea that “humor means laughing nevertheless,” the book demonstrates that even in the face of hardship and suffering, laughter sustains both personal relationships and inner well-being.

Written in an engaging and practical style, this collection offers discoveries and gentle smiles to medical professionals, scholars of thanatology, psychology, and communication, as well as to readers interested in Japanese culture and senryū.

[Author Biography]
Tetsuo Kashiwagi

Professor at Kinjo Gakuin University; Professor Emeritus at Osaka University; Honorary Director of the Hospice at Yodogawa Christian Hospital. Graduated from the Osaka University School of Medicine in 1965; after three years in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology there, studied at the University of Washington. Upon his return, he formed a team at Yodogawa Christian Hospital to put terminal care into practice and opened a hospice in 1984. In 1993 he became Professor in the School of Human Sciences at Osaka University. He received the Japan–U.S. Medical Merit Award in 1994 and the Asahi Social Welfare Award in 1998.
Major works: Supporting Life and Death (Asahi Sensho); Caring for the Dying (Igaku-Shoin); Learning About Death (Yuhikaku); Listening to the Hearts of the Dying (Nakayama Shoten); Medicine at the Bedside of Death (NHK Publishing); “Aging” Is Not Scary at All (Nihon Keizai Shimbunsha)