Mio's Hospital Diary

In 2002, Mio Matsumoto was an art student in London, with an unrequited crush on a classmate. She decided to write and draw a diary in pictures about this, but soon after she developed tongue cancer. So My Diary became a very different book. I wondered whether it helped her cope at a difficult time. “As I couldn’t share all my feelings with my close family and friends at that time”, Mio Matsumoto replied, “it helped me to blow off my stress and negative thoughts by writing and drawing them”.

Though it sounds like the book may have been very serious and depressing as a result, this is not actually the case. “It came together like a normal diary to me” the author says, and it does resultantly have a very natural pacing. “When I was a student”, she says, “I saw Tracy Emin’s artwork and realised that I could be very free with expressing my mind and feelings. Since then I try not to control the style of my drawings or what I write”.

This approach means that the Mio of the book is extremely easy to empathise with. And she’s very likeable. Unusually for a book about someone with cancer, the book is often light-hearted – one of Mio’s great worries is that she may be cured, but left unable to kiss ever again. Similarly, funny incidents occur with unusual regularity. “That all happened in my real life at the time…” she says “I didn’t mean to be funny since I was just writing what I saw, what I felt, and what I thought. So when people told me the book was funny, I was a bit surprised. I think that’s good though.”

This account of hospitalisation can, of course, afford to be light-hearted, because we know that the author had to be alive to write the book. And I suspect this means that there was a happy ending, in that a traumatic time resulted, eventually, in the very book that’s now available to buy. The author’s friends and family are featured a lot in ‘My Diary’, and so to confirm my suspicions, I asked what their reaction was to the book. Happily, Mio Masumoto replies that “They are just very happy about the publication of the book since they know it represents a special moment of my life”. Good news all round. [Jack Lynch]