The Tokyo High Court on Thursday upheld a lower court ruling ordering prizewinning novelist Miri Yuu and publisher Shinchosha Co. to halt publication of a short novel and pay 1.3 million yen to a former friend of Yuu's for violating her privacy.
According to the court, Yuu, 32, defamed the friend in her short novel, "Ishi Ni Oyogu Sakana," ("A Fish Swimming in Stones") by modeling a woman in the story after her. The story, which portrays a Korean playwright's life in Japan, appeared in the monthly magazine Shincho in its September 1994 issue.
Yuu, a second-generation Korean resident, admitted modeling the character after the woman but argued, "This is not the kind of story that makes readers imagine the woman in the story had been modeled after somebody in the real world."