Another Japanese tale of horror

PART ONE

There was once a girl of middling appearance and marriageable age who lived in a remote house with her parents. She used to sell candies in the nearest village. She would push round a wooden cart and the neighbourhood children would scramble up to it. The cart was a rather dilapidated one, but she made it attractive with bright coloured cloths. When the candies were sold, and her work finished for the day, she would walk the few miles back home. To anyone watching her as she made her way, it might seem that she was thinking. Not merely daydreaming, or turning things over in the everyday sense, but actively, furiously thinking. An onlooker might be reminded of ants, or of a cloud of mosquitos. There was something rather disturbing about it.
She had much the same manner at dinner, but her parents were used to it. As soon has she had finished, she marched out rather stiffly to her bedroom, and took out an old book with many hundreds of blank pages. This was her diary, and every night without fail she would fill out a page with whatever it was that she wrote - because no one to this day has any idea what she did write, or what it was that so troubled and preoccupied her. Her father had little interest in his daughter, and it would never have occured to him to read it, and her mother, with whom she made the candies each morning, had never learned to read or write.

An elderly man trudged his way up to the remote house one evening. From her room the girl could hear the old man and her father talking. Not unnaturally, in the course of her work in the village, she had attracted a number of admirers, and not just among the children. What was taking place that night, as her mother knelt by the table pouring saké, was a negotiation. And sure enough, when she arrived home the following evening and greeted her parents, her father informed her that she was going to be married, to a young farmer in the nearby village. He had noticed her as she lifted the cloth from the sweets on her cart, surrounded by a press of excited children, and he had watched her from a distance as she pushed her cart home, her head bent, and her long hair blown by the wind into tangles.
And that night, as every night, the girl wrote her diary, in lines now graceful and flowing, now jagged and broken.
She remembered him, vaguely. He had a yearning expression. He was the heir to a reasonable-sized farm and a substantial, if rather characterless, farmhouse. The wedding would take place in a matter of months, and now, whenever she wheeled her sweet-cart into the village, she avoided looking around at the houses and surrounded herself with the children.
It was around this time that her diary-activity became more intense and concentrated. Each night she would stay up until the early hours, straining her eyes at the pages.
Eventually the day came when she was to be married, and the night when she would be accompanied back to his farm by her husband, and the morning when she would have get up before sunrise, before even the birds, and set out her husband's clean clothes and prepare his breakfast. Each day would be like that, stretching out monotonously until what seemed like infinity, but her consolation, and her curse, was that each night she retired to their bedroom before him, writing and writing with intense concentration.
She refused to show her husband what she was writing, and indeed to say anything meaningful about what she was putting in her diary. She would glower at him horribly if he so much as approached it. For the first few months of his marriage, he was happy to humour her in this, and he did not treat it as an insult. He had been lonely a long time, and had long found her fascinating. He was glad to be married, and to have his food prepared for him. He felt grateful to heaven. And yet, as the months went by, the couple began to chafe against each another. He found her secretive devotion to the heavy book troubling, exasperating, and finally disgusting.
One afternoon as she walked into the village to buy provisions, he opened the cupboard in which she kept it, carefully, slowly removed it, and stared at its dark cover, challenging himself to open it. It was absurd, he felt, that he should even feel nervous about it. It was a hundred times-over his right as a husband to open the pages and discover for himself what she was writing. And at that moment the room became grey as a cloud crossed the sun, and a strange chill came over him.

to be continued...