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One of fun places to visit in my childhood was my mother’s parents’ home. I liked to see my grandparents and my cousins. My mother’s sister, or my aunt, had succeeded the family by taking her husband into the family as a son-in-law of my grandparents. Although every visit was fun for me, constant domestic disputes were rampant in the family since three generations lived together under one roof. Every time the dispute aggravated, they turned to a fortune teller. Strangely, the fortune tellers almost always attributed the problem to their dining room, particularly the position of the stove in the kitchen. One fortune teller said that the place for fire in the house was wrong and they remodeled the kitchen to move the stove. As their disputes weren’t settled, they asked another fortune teller for help. They were again told the direction of the stove was evil and redid the kitchen. They had repeated this process for numerous times and eventually the kitchen got back to exactly what it had originally been. They heavily relied on not only fortune telling but psychic things overall. When countless kitchen remodeling didn’t stop their disputes and a fight between my grandparents and my uncle got really ugly, he cut my grandfather’s cherished persimmon tree in anger. And soon, my uncle began to complain of a pain in his leg. The pain was too severe for him to walk or to sleep. He saw a doctor, who couldn’t find anything wrong in his leg. Because the pain was felt like his leg was being cut with a saw, he was convinced that it was caused by a curse of the persimmon tree he had cut. He and my aunt called an exorcist for purification, and his pain was gone in an instant. To me it seemed, and still does, that remorse simply caused the pain. The rift was never mended and their house, although it had accepted every piece of fortune tellers’ advice for good luck, burned to the ground twenty years or so later. By the time the new house was built, my grandfather and my uncle had passed away, and my grandmother and my aunt had been in the hospital. They never lived together again, so the disputes finally ended…
