Fannie Huber's Angel Book

Translated from the German by Mitsouko Imai and Yairah Amsel, with introduction by Yairah Amsel.

The legitimacy of Fannie Huber's unusual journal has never been debated in scholarly circles. This is due entirely to the fact that Ms. Huber, the daughter of Jewish-american refugees living in the Japanese city of Kobe, remains virtually unknown to the greater theological community. Nonetheless, she has remained an object of interest to select circles, particularly students of theurgy and the occult. 

It is, however, high time that these writings be scrutinized by more discerning judges. For this purpose we have published this edition.

Very little is known of Fannie Huber's life outside of the pages of her journal which, as shall soon be apparent, do not primarily concern themselves with her day-to-day circumstances. The names of her parents and the building in which the family lived have been uncovered, but no records exist of their eventual fate. It is possible that they were assimilated into the local population and adopted new names accordingly.

Whether Fannie was an ordinary child possessed of a hyper-active imagination or a seer with visionary abilities beyond normal perception, I leave to the reader to determine. For ourselves, we do not venture any sort of hypothesis beyond that which is implicit within our translation. After some debate, we determined to limit this introduction to a few short paragraphs, the better for interested parties to draw their own conclusions concerning the material.

Hello Diary. my name is Fannie. I am named after my Mama, and I like my name and I am not the same sort of Fannie that she is. I wanted a Diary and so the ship's captain gave me one and smiled at me. I cannot make myself smile so I didn't smile back, but I am very grateful to him anyway.

We live in a small apartment but I have my own room which I didn't before so that's very nice. I don't know many un-secret things, but I know a great many secret things, but I can't talk about them because they cannot be talked about. I wish I had a sister or brother the end.

Dear Diary,

I am not going to school anymore, but Mama says I will start going soon again. I will have to learn Japanese which is a hard language but also very pretty. I like that the letters look like pictures. I am not a very good student but I am a good drawer, here is a picture of my cat (he is not actually my cat but he lives near us and I feed him and stroke him so he is mine a little bit)

Dear diary

So many secret things happen to me! every day another secret happens, and I don't know what to do with them. I wish I could tell mother but I can't because they are too secret to say. I wonder if I knew more words I would be better at saying? Maybe there are words for secrets in japanese, and I will say them when I learn them. That would make me smile I think.

I have started school yesterday, but I don't have many friends even though everyone is still nice anyway. I forgot to say it but Dear Diary.

Dear Diary, I have decided to tell you a big secret because I think I can. I have met angels. Every day I have been alive I have met them, and some are tiny tiny and some are big and some aren't any size at all. I was afraid there would be no angels in japan but there are just as many. i think they are all over the world and I love them. here is a picture sort of of an angel I met today by the street sign.

Dear Diary

I have found out I am slow. Japanese is harder than german and german is not easy. It takes me a long time to learn new things, but I love school anyway and I love my teacher whose name is Miss Sensei. for our homework we are supposed to write about what we see, and I will write about some angels I have met I have decided. So now this will not be a diary but instead an angel book. It will be like an encyclopedia like Papa writes but it will be about only one thing.

The First Angel is Fritz Huber who has my same last name. He sometimes looks two ways, depending on what time it is that I meet him. I meet Fritz Huber a lot and he is a kind angel like all of them. Fritz Huber has eyes that are the invisible color, and that is the color of his hands too. His hair looks like snow and I asked him if it is snow but he said no it isn't. Fritz Huber does not come inside because he is allergic to certain kinds of windows that houses have. He is a boy even though most angels are not anything like that. When I met Fritz Huber I was a baby and he has always been a very good friend. He loves me and brings me white apples that you can't get because they grow on very special trees whose branches are too high to reach even in an airplane. The white apples are good and taste warm. They are white on the inside, not a little bit yellow like the regular apples are on the inside. I think the apples are pieces from the moon but I am afraid to ask him even though his is terribly kind always. Here is a picture of Fritz Huber doing his angel dance (all angels are always dancing because that is how angels walk even when they are in the air).

The Second Angel is Lamreps and it is an angel I met in Japan. It is like a cat on the outside but inside it is a sea that is burning on greenish fire. Lamreps says that it knows all of the places that treasure is buried everywhere in the whole world and it will show me some good treasure someday which is very polite of it. But it doesn't know anything except where treasure is buried and how to hear like birds do so I offered to teach it how make a paper house. This is me teaching Lampreps to make a paper house with some paper I got from school.

The Third Angel is Marjori-Marjori and is kind even for an angel. I will not be able to draw it because it is just a touch you get on the back. You will be walking in the woods and then you will get a touch on the back that feels like fuzzy petals falling on you and that is Marjori-Marjori. But even though it is just a touch Marjori-Marjori can talk still, and she says only delicious things and she is happy when people are happy, like some angels aren't. Marjori-Marjori eats which not all angels do. She eats mainly deer but also sometimes foxes and rabbits and things.

The Third Angel is Homeb Woni Hotheb (I don't know if that is how you spell it properly). It is actually every moth. Moths are animals like other animals are but they are also all together Homeb Woni Hotheb. I tried to tell this once to Yuki but she didn't understand me (probably my japanese is too bad). I told her how one moth is a moth, and two moths is moths, but all the moths that ever were at once are Homeb Woni Hotheb. Homeb Woni Hotheb is a very secret angel that I didn't get to meet until I was older. It was a special surprise that Fritz Huber showed it to me when i turned ten. Homeb Woni Hotheb makes things called Votses that are real things but that you can't touch but you can see them by having a bad dream sort of. It makes Votses for people who are going to die soon only, and so it would not make one for me but that's ok its still kind.

Ys is the next angel and she is a city that you get to by going backwards a certain way. She is a big angel because the whole world would fit in just one window of one building that is in Ys. I went into her once and I asked what the buildings were made of and Fritz Huber said They are the bones of Ys so I guess her bones are on the outside but maybe she just has air for the rest of her and that is why you cough a lot in Ys because she is in the air. 

Black Lydia is the angel I met when we were on the boat. It is an angel that is too small to see but Fritz Huber touched my eyes with his tongue and so then for a little bit I could only see really small things. Black Lydia shines and always is singing a song that is too little to hear, but if you can hear it it is a very sweet sound and not like normal sizes of music at all. But some people who hear it too much forget how to feel their old feelings and then some of them get sick from that. But I would still like to hear it again because Black Lydia's song is lovely. This is what I remember it looked like.

The next angel is called a Arminl and is just wavy. It is like how things can get wavy, like water or when you cry, or wings going up and down, but a Arminl is just that without anything else like the wings or the water. There are three Arming exactly but I have seen only two. 

The next angel is Fritz Huber again because today I found out there is more than one Fritz Huber. Two of the Fritz Hubers were dancing together and they danced so close that there was another Fritz Huber. I saw it and then I asked Fritz Huber what it was and he said I should not have seen that. I asked if I was in trouble but he said no I wasn't and he gave me a white apple to show me he wasn't mad at me.

Dear Diary, today you are a Diary again but tomorrow you can be an angel book again. My Mama is taking me to get some tests done at a special hospital soon, even though I am not sick. I think she is worried because I don't eat my dinner except a little bit, but that is because I am always so full from the apples I get. I would rather eat the apples because they are a lot tastier than ordinary food that tastes like sick and sour. I don't want to go to the hospital but I will.

The next angel is the Hurrfw. The Hurrfw are little but not so little as Black Lydia was. They are exactly the size of my littlest finger. They dance around someone's head to make that person get lost. Then when someone gets very lost so that they can't find their way to their house anymore, the Hurrfw go inside them and turn them all white like bones. But Fritz Huber says they are not bones even though they can move. But the Hurrfw only do it because it makes them laugh and they are very kind even though the people they do it to are stuck forever like statues.

Another good angel is Rags. Rags is an angel I met on my own once, and Fritz Huber said not to go near Rags again because if Rags shines its lights on you then it will make your blood sick. But Rags was very nice and kind and it told me exactly when my Mama and Papa would die so that it wouldn't be a shock which was very thoughtful.

Today is two angels. The first angel is Ini and the second angel is Forelmorest of Form. Fritz Hubert and i were having a picnic by the pine trees and thats when he showed me Ini which was like a cloud that you could see reflections in. Then he showed me Forelmorest of Form which is like black stripes that make everything quiet. Then Forelmorest of Form ate Ini up and Ini made a noise that wasn't anything I'd heard before. Fritz Hubert says that sometimes Forelmorest of Form eats Ini but that's okay because Ini was not screaming, not at all. Forelmorest of Form is still kind because black stripes that make things quiet are good if you want to take a nap I guess, or if you just want to think for yourself without being interrupted. So that is how I found out that some angels eat other angels sometimes.

Dear Diary, today you are a diary again. The doctor says I'm ok except that I'm slow. I have to eat vitamins now which is ok because at least I don't have to taste them and they don't fill me up so I still have room for apples. Fritz Hubert says that soon I will get to see the angel-tree, which is where all the angels grow (it isn't a tree really, it is bigger even than Ys). I am so excited that I wet my bed last night and got talked to by Papa but I'm still excited.

The next angel is my friend Yuki's friend too! She cannot see it but it goes wherever she goes which is kind and I think it is what people call a guardian angel. I do not know what it is called but it looks like if it was raining bits of the sunset but only in one spot shaped like Yuki a little bit and with a purple star right in the middle. It does not talk to me but I can tell it is kind and good because I get a warm feeling when it is near.

Dear Diary, today you are a diary again because Yuki did not come to school and Mama says that she won't come to school again ever so I am very sad because she was the only one who would really play with me and who will teach me to read and write japanese? Im too slow to keep up with the lessons. I hate being slow. I am a little bit mad at Yuki's guardian angel even though I know it was doing its best. But if it really really was doing its best then I bet she would still be able to come to school like usual.

Today's angel is Grigory. Grigory is an angel that looks like a man which most angels do not, except that it is very big like a giant from a story-book. But even though it is so big people do not notice it because its skin is the invisible color. Grigory likes to watch things happen and anything it sees happen happens again and again forever inside its head, so if it sees you crossing the street then you will be stuck crossing the street over and over again in a place made out of just seeing and thats why Fritz Hubert would not let me meet Grigory except from very far away.

Dear Diary, today you are a diary again because I am feeling very different. I am very light and my skin itches where I have a rash that is the invisible color. I am hearing a lot of new sounds and I cannot remember most things except angels. When Fritz Hubert comes I will ask him to make me better, or maybe I will go to that place I went before for tests.

The last angel is a very special angel. Fritz Huber says he is taking me to the angel-tree, and the biggest secret of all is there. I cannot tell you the last angel because that is too big, but I am very excited! I cannot wait to dance beautifully, and understand everything, and never be hungry or scared. That will be good and wonderful.

This concludes Fannie's all too brief diary. No record of her existence beyond the age of twelve is extant.

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