Photo/Illutration Seiko Tanabe in 2007 (Photo by Shinobu Ikazaki)

The wartime diary of Seiko Tanabe during her teenage years was found among personal possessions at her home, offering a glimpse into the late author’s early life and deep insight into her thoughts about that period of national turmoil.

Details of the diary will be published in the monthly magazine Bungei Shunju to be released June 10.

Tanabe, a prolific writer whose works include “Josee, the Tiger and the Fish,” died in June 2019 at the age of 91. 

Family members organizing her belongings at her home in Itami, Hyogo Prefecture, found the diary that covered the period from April 1, 1945, to March 10, 1947.

Tanabe was 17 years old when she started keeping the personal log in an A4 notebook.

The pages in the worn-looking notebook are now discolored and brownish with age, but Tanabe’s handwriting, seemingly with a fountain pen, remains visible.

She wrote on the cover of the notebook that “young days” pass quickly but they are precious because they are multicolored and offer a rich harvest.

Tanabe was a second-year student at a women’s professional school in Osaka Prefecture, today’s Osaka Shoin Women’s University, studying Japanese literature.

At one point, she and other students were mobilized to work in an aircraft parts factory.

In the diary, Tanabe documented her mixed emotions toward the wartime nation.

In one entry, she praised kamikaze pilots for “blossoming beautiful flowers” in their youth.

But she also observed that the Japanese “are heading off only for a victory.” Under such circumstances, “individual hope does not count” and “everything--literature, music and art--is buffeted by the swirl of war.”

Her entry on Aug. 15, 1945, the day Japan surrendered, marked a drastic change of tone.

In big fat letters, she wrote that she “feels angry and sad at the same time” and the defeat “cut the bottom of my heart deep to the quick.”

Tanabe also described the day her Osaka home was burned to the ground in an air raid.

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