MORIOKA, JAPAN--One day, Kumako Kumada, the 48-year-old housewife of a salaryman, felt dizzy and found herself unable to sleep.

Kumada wanted to talk to her husband about the problem, but he is a chauvinistic man who only speaks when he tells her to draw his bath, make his tea and set his bed.

Unable to talk to anybody, she collapsed.

This is the opening sequence of a manga titled, "Soreyuke Konenki" (Getting Through Menopause), by physician Emi Chida, 43. She uses manga she has drawn as teaching material in health seminars.

"Soreyuke Konenki" is her second manga. The first one is about lifestyle diseases, and the third one is about depression. A planned fourth one will be about metabolic syndrome. All stories feature the Kumada family--who appear as bears.

Chida's childhood dream was to become a manga artist as she loved such comics as the baseball classic "Kyojin no Hoshi" (Star of the Giants) and "Doraemon." She drew characters from those manga, and her friends praised the drawings.

As she grew up, she decided to become a doctor because she loved Osamu Tezuka's "Black Jack," a manga about a gifted surgeon.

In 1999, she opened a clinic in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, together with her surgeon husband. It was a year later that she finished her first manga.

"I wanted to tell people of the importance of preventive medicine," she says.

All of her stories have a happy conclusion.

"I want them to be alive for the people who wanted to live, but could not," she says, referring to patients she saw die while she worked as doctor in a hospital.

While she is busy with her manga and her medical practice, Chida also is active as a member of a baseball team of local doctors.