Japanese actress Saki Kagami (加賀美早紀), 41, has been rushed to the hospital for a blood-related illness and is pausing her entertainment career for the time being, she revealed on her YouTube channel.
In an October 5 post titled “A Report,” Kagami wrote that she had previously battled leukemia and was once told she had less than three months to live, but had since gone into remission. She explained that she has now been hospitalized again for another blood disease. “I will be taking a break from work for the time being,” she wrote.
Kagami shared details of her hospital stay in a series of posts. In one, titled “Hospitalized. Tomorrow is a bone marrow test and some other test. Ugh,” she posted a photo of her bandaged wrist, captioned with a note about having blood drawn five or six times along with IV drips on both arms, joking that her body was running out of blood. The following day, she posted photos of injection pads on her wrist and the inside of her elbow, writing that having blood drawn from the wrist was painful.
In the same update, Kagami described being taken to the hospital by ambulance before being referred, via letter, to a hospital specializing in blood disorders. She said a doctor had just given her the results of her blood test, adding, “It does seem iffy. They’re going to do a bone marrow test next. Please, no.”
Who is Saki Kagami?
Kagami made her entertainment debut as a newcomer, winning the lead role through auditions for the 2001 film “Platonic Sex,” a role that earned her the Best New Actress prize at the 25th Japan Academy Film Prize. She retired from entertainment in 2011, citing emotional trauma, before returning in 2013 as an exclusive model for the magazine Ane ageha. She announced her marriage in 2016, and in March 2017 publicly disclosed that she had been diagnosed with stage 3 cervical cancer.
Author’s Comment
I’ll say this: the woman has survived a terminal leukemia prognosis and stage 3 cervical cancer, and she’s narrating her new hospital stay with wrist-bandage selfies and jokes about running out of blood. That’s not oversharing, that’s grit with a sense of humor. Japanese celebrity culture usually keeps illness behind a tightly worded agency statement, so watching Kagami live-blog her own blood draws is genuinely rare, and it’s exactly why her fans trust her. I don’t know what this new diagnosis turns out to be, and neither does she yet, so let’s not speculate. I just hope that bone marrow test comes back kinder than the last few scares she’s lived through.
