Grandmother's Diary

(Translated by Saya)

Ever since I was a small child, I had been very attached to my grandmother.
I would visit my grandmother's home often, even after I became a middle school student.

My grandmother was my father's mother, but my father died of an accident when I was little.
My grandfather died early too, and so my grandmother said she was very fond of me, since I was the only blood relative that was left to her.
But my mother was somehow on bad terms with my grandmother, and so she never set a foot in the grandmother's house.

Every Sunday morning, I would pay a visit to a shrine with my grandmother.
She was a very pious person. She never missed a day without going to the shrine; come rain or shine, she would visit the shrine on every Sunday, ever since my father passed away.
I loved going to the shrine with her. I still remember vividly the warmth I felt when we joined our hands.

A Shrine

My grandmother would always press her palms together, make a deep bow, and then close her eyes for a long time to pray.
I would always do a very brief praying, and then for the rest of the time just watch my grandmother's serious face.
When she finished, I would always ask her, "what were you praying about?"
But she only smiled and never answered me.
I didn't feel too bothered by it, and would soon start thinking about the ice cream my grandmother would buy for me on the way back; and we then would go home together, happily chatting with each other all the way.



I am changing the subject suddenly but I had always been able to see and hear things that others couldn't see or hear since my early childhood. Because of this I had always been troubled by spirits.
I had sleep paralysis everyday, and was never really able to sleep soundly.
When I lay on my bed, I would feel something touching my feet or stabbing my stomach with a needle and doing other such things, and occurrences like these became even more intense and frequent as years went by.
I went to see several psychics with my mother, but they would always demand expensive fees and in the end nothing they did really worked, so I had lost all hope of becoming better pretty early on in life.

By the time I was in the third year of middle school, attacks from spirits had become even fiercer. I had car accidents for numerous times, and every night I suffered from sleep paralysis and would often see hallucinations (such as seeing insects and several strands of hair on my serving of rice) and as a result gradually started losing my mind and began frequently missing school.

During the hours when my mother was out for work, my grandmother would always come to my house and hold my hand.
The time spent with my grandmother was the only time I felt at peace.
My mother worked until late so we never had time to sit down and talk.
Every day I would throw up and alternate between suffering from anorexia and bulimia.  My physical and mental condition were both always poor and unstable, and I even tried to commit suicide several times.
But I would somehow fail to kill myself every time, and for a long time I had to endure the pain of being alive and not being able to die.
I couldn't even go and pray at the shrine with my grandmother anymore like before.

Right after I graduated the middle school, my grandmother, who was my only light in my life, passed away.
I cried like I had never cried before.
I spent days on end hugging my grandmother's clothes while crying at the same time.
Even at a time like this, my mother still went to work like everything was normal. Although I lived off my mother's salary and was grateful to her, I couldn't help but feel a little resentful towards her.

It took me two weeks after my grandmother passed away to notice that the attacks from spirits had stopped.
One of the few friends I had said to me over the phone:
"Your grandmother must have taken all your troubles with her and gone to Heaven." 
When I heard that, I sobbed my heart out again.

A year later, all the spirit-related troubles ceased completely. I became totally healthy in mind and body, and started attending a correspondence school and made many friends in a part-time job.
One day it was decided that my grandmother's house would be put on sale, so I went there to clean it up.
I had been feeling serene and visiting her grave everyday.

When I was sorting out some stuff in the closet, I discovered a few of my grandmother's old diaries inside a wrapping cloth.**
It appeared it was her habit to write a diary entry on every Sunday.
No sooner had I read those entries than I was struck by horror.

The first entry was dated on the day my father died.
Previously I had been told that he died of an accident, but it was written that he actually committed suicide.
It was my mother's affair with another man that drove him to it.
I felt shocked and disgusted. Tears started to well up in my eyes.
However, the moment I turned to the next page, my blood turned cold as ice.
There, filling the page from edge to edge, were words of anger and hatred directed towards me.
It started off with a sentence that said "she is a child fathered by that woman's lover," and went on with such words as "I want to kill her," and "she should die." The grandmother in the diary was a very different person from the grandmother I had known.

The purpose of my grandmother's visit to the shrine everyday was to wish that I suffer and die a horrible death.
For such a long period of time, every week - no,  every minute of every day, she prayed that I would continue to suffer.
Her only wish, while she was alive, was to curse me - a child who was always beside her and adored her - to death.
It seemed her prayers were answered, because I did suffer greatly.
My grandmother too ended up dying in pain.

I burned all her diaries.
It has been years since it happened but I still cannot forget it.
I have never told about this to anyone.

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A furoshiki

** Wrapping cloth  (pictured left)-  Furoshiki, in the original text.  It is a type of traditional Japanese wrapping cloth traditionally used to transport clothes, gifts, or other goods (Wikipedia).