Saori: Man's affair with silicone lover

Senji Nakajima, 61 years old, has lived with 'Saori' for six years in his apartment in Tokyo, Japan. They hang out, go shopping, sleep in the same bed. The only one thing different from any other couple is the fact that Saori is actually a life-size 'love doll'. Nakajima, married with two children, who lives away from home for work, first started his life with Saori six years ago. At first, he used to imagine that the doll was his first girl friend, and used it only for sexual purposes to fill the loneliness, but months later, he started to believe that Saori actually has an original personality, like the sculptor Pygmalion who fell in love with the ivory- made Aphrodite, in Ovidius's 'Metamorphoses' story. 'She never betrays me, and isn’t only after money. I'm tired of modern rational humans. They are heartless,' Nakajima says, 'for me, she is more than a doll, not just silicon rubber. She needs much help, but still is my perfect partner who shares precious moments with me and enriches my life.' ​ He imagines his former girlfriend when he holds her. Plato once said that the world we sense is not the actual reality. The emotions that we perceive when we communicate with others may be nothing more than the idols that were drawn on the walls of a cave. There have been many anecdotal descriptions of people falling in love with non-human objects. There is a story of a man who fell in love with a straw mat in China, and in the 21st century, a woman fell in love and married the Eiffel Tower in France. In this modern era, where many objects with shapes and intelligence resembling those of humans have been produced, we are faced with the same question that becomes more profound each day. What is the actual difference between love with a human being and love with a “Future Eve”? ​ Some of the images were commisioned by Getty Images