The autumn wind is bleak and the weather is cool,

The grass and trees are shaken and the dew is frosted;

Seventy years have passed,

Things are people, not memories.

Just like the scene described in this poem, this is a memory that has been dusty for a long time and I have to talk about it at this time. Humans, ghosts, corpses, demons, and gods all exist in this world, except for the emotion in their hearts, and the words of the authorities, maybe in a certain corner, at a certain time, there are such people who have indeed encountered and participated in some little-known wonders in the past......

(I, an old man who is dying, write these stories, I don't expect you to believe them, just to give future generations more to talk about after dinner, not for anything else, just for the old memories in my heart.) ）――

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In the early autumn of 2013, I returned to my hometown, Mizusawa Village, a small fishing village on a small island in the East China Sea, which has not changed much in decades. Reinforced concrete can't hide the traces of history, except for the people who live and die in and out, and the people who have gone away from the country back and forth, no one will record the bits and pieces of this village. Maybe these are just a slap in my heart now, and I can't hurt a trace of flesh and skin, but for my past self, it is fate.

There is an old Chinese saying: Seventy-three, eighty-four, the king of Hades does not invite himself to go, for the elderly, this is indeed a "threshold", and it just so happens that I have reached this age. I was scared, and that reminded me of what I had experienced.

To introduce it formally, my name is Xiong Layue, but these three words are not my real name, why do you say that, it is much more complicated.

I heard my deceased mother say that I was born in the twelfth lunar month, probably for this reason, and my childhood friends called me "Twelve". However, she didn't tell me when I was born, and of course I asked why, but she always found all sorts of reasons to prevaricate, and this incident made me depressed for a while.

But I can also empathize with my parents' feelings, and I don't dwell on this big or small issue. When I was a child, I didn't understand, my family was poor, I had many children, who would celebrate a small birthday, and over time, I didn't take it to heart, but sometimes my partners didn't want to ask, and I could only be speechless.

I was the youngest in the family, with four older sisters, and the age difference between me and the youngest sister was five years, and they were both born the next year, so at home, I seemed very different, and I once thought I had picked it up from outside. But my parents were very kind to me, especially to me, which made me both happy and wondering, wondering if I was valued because I was the only boy in the family. At that time, the idea of patriarchy was particularly strict, and it was the same in Mizusawa Village, where I dare not say that my parents were also one of them.

By the way, I still have a grandfather, some people will ask, who doesn't have a grandfather, I specifically mentioned that I haven't seen my grandmother, grandfather, or grandmother since I can remember. My mother said that she was a foreign daughter-in-law, and her grandparents died when she was a child, and my grandmother died shortly before I was born, so my relatives in the previous generation were only grandpa.

Grandpa is the "man of the hour" in the village, not because of his great exploits and handsome appearance, but because of his ability. Grandpa is the only funeral director in the village, although there is no technical content, but every family in Mizusawa Village will ask grandpa to take care of a series of processes when a loved one dies. Properly putting the ancestors into the soil for peace, and at the same time not committing taboos, is the most exquisite thing for rural people, it can be said that sometimes white things are more grand than red things. A month ago, I received a call from the village committee of Mizusawa Village, saying that the village was going to be demolished and that I needed to go through the formalities, so I rushed back from thousands of miles away. According to the people in the village committee, I am the only person who can be found in the family. I can also understand that, because when my parents died, my four sisters and I were only reunited twice, and the last time we decided the future of the family. At that time, no one realized that the house would be so valuable today, although it was located in a small fishing village, and the area of the old house could be worth 1.8 million. My sisters have already married him, so after consultation, we decided to hand over the task of taking care of the family to me in the future, after all, this is the ancestral house, and maybe there is a possibility of coming back when. Since then, we have been in contact on and off a few times, and I have calculated that it has been almost thirty years, and we will not meet more than five fingers together, but we will come back every time my parents die, but we have not been able to gather them all, and all I see are the ingots and candles and offerings that have been burned in front of my parents' graves. Pushing open the wooden door of my hometown, there is a desolation in the familiar smell, and the memories of my childhood make me tie to my heart. The green rolling pin, the rusty iron pot, the bamboo chair with a broken leg, the spring bed without a mattress, and the dusty corners and corners seemed to be the only new thing I had here, but I didn't expect that in this home, I still didn't fit in. I'm used to it, family, love, friendship, for me, it's a luxury, it comes and goes just as suddenly. Things are not people, memory is like a long corridor, where you go, you only have the present in your eyes, the lost time can never come back, the future journey can not be determined, there is no regret medicine in life, and there is no turning back. Melancholy is melancholy, and things still have to be done. After the death of my parents, the old house became an inheritance, although their hukou has moved out, but I think that all the children should be notified of the important matters related to the family, plus the people of the village committee told me that it will take more than half a year to officially demolish and relocate, during which I have to maintain correspondence, and there are many procedures to go through from time to time, for me, an elderly man, the fatigue of the journey back and forth has become an annoyance, so I plan to live here. During this time, finding my four sisters became my top priority, and although I was old, my hands and feet were still neat, and my brain was clear. I walked back and forth around the old house a few times, both familiar and unfamiliar, imagining how the seven members of the family used to eat at the same dining table, sleep on the floor, play with each other, and care for each other, and these have all come to naught, and it is futile to remember and hurt my body. I kept the memorable photos and old stocks, and moved them to the upstairs room, and the next day, I went to connect the water and electricity, and invited the decorator to simply decorate it, at least it was comfortable. In fact, the old house is not big, plus the yard is more than 100 square meters, but there are two floors, the upstairs does not move temporarily, and the downstairs two rooms are opened, one as a bedroom, one as a bathroom, and then the front door is closed, and a small door is opened in the yard, so that the room is directly through the yard and the door, and it is much easier to walk. I planted some more flowers and plants in the yard, and in about half a month, the old house had a new look. When I was idle, I felt a lot more relaxed, sitting on the recliner and admiring the old things I had cleaned up. As the sun sets, the afterglow shines, and it's still the same sentence, when I'm older, I'm more nostalgic, I look at the old black and white photos, looking at the smile of the family, maybe that time is the happiest time in my life, not the experiences that began more than fifty years ago. Human life is rough and bumpy, many experiences change the trajectory of life, but I encounter things that I can't choose, I feel that I am not racing against time, but looking for the starting point of time. I wanted to skip this thrilling journey, but things often inadvertently reminded me that a journal stained with black blood fell out of the photo album in front of me, hard as a brick, and shattered my peace of mind with a loud sound. It was a diary made of crusty green cloth, and I remember that when my father gave it to me, it really confused me, because this kind of color and material booklet was extremely rare at that time, and it was not at all what I should have, but the contents of it were inextricably linked to me.

I picked up the diary, the green had faded, and the blood stains had merged into black, and the pages had been glued together, and I finally turned a page, and the words were connected into a picture, almost blurry, as if to tell me, the past is over, and it is also more troublesome to look at it again, and because of this diary, it has changed my life......