The Devil of Nanking (48 page)

It was a small, dedicated team specializing in the investigation of war criminals, and the team members were delighted to hear from one Professor Shi Chongming formerly of Jiangsu and Todai universities. Now that he had his daughter’s remains safe, Shi Chongming had opened up like a shell in warm water. For fifty-three years he’d been working towards it, trying to get permission to travel to Japan, struggling with the bureaucracy of the Land Defence Agency, but now that he had her everything came out: his notes; the soldier’s ID tags; a collection of unit logs from 1937; photographs of Lieutenant Fuyuki. Everything was packaged up and couriered to Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. A little later a 16mm film followed across the Pacific, a grainy black-and-white film from which the team were able to get a positive identification of Fuyuki.

Some whispered that something was missing from the film, and pointed to some very modern-looking edit points. They said sections must have been removed from it recently. It had been my idea to take out the few frames that showed Shi Chongming giving up his baby. I’d done the splicing myself in a hotel room in Nanking, crudely, with scissors and Scotchtape. I had made a decision for him, overruled him. I had decided that he wasn’t going to martyr himself. It was as simple as that.

I didn’t copy the film before I packed it in bubble-wrap, carefully addressing the parcel with black marker pen.
Dr Michael Burana, IWG, Department of Justice
. I could have sent it to the doctors in England, I suppose, maybe a copy to the nurse who used to crouch next to my bed in the dark. Maybe a copy, with a dried flower pressed inside, to the jigging girl. But I didn’t need to – because something had happened. I was older now, I knew lots and lots of things. I knew so much that I was heavy with it. I knew instinctively what was born of ignorance and what of madness. I no longer needed to prove anything to anyone. Not even myself.

‘But now it is over,’ Shi Chongming said. ‘And, really, I see my wife was right to say that time circles constantly, because here we are. We have come all the way back to the beginning.’

It was a blue and white December morning, the sun reflecting blindingly from the snow, and we stood among the trees on Purple Mountain above Nanking. At our feet was a fresh, shallow hole and in his arms Shi Chongming held a small bundle wrapped in linen. It hadn’t taken him long to find it, the place where he had given up his daughter. Some things on the mountainside had changed in those fifty-three years: now, little trams flashed red through the trees, taking tourists up to the mausoleum; the city below us was a grown-up twentieth-century city, extraordinary with its hazy skyscrapers and electronic signs. But other things were so unchanged that Shi Chongming became silent when he looked at them: the sun glinting on the bronze azimuth, the black pines drooping under the weight of snow, the great stone tortoise still standing in the shadows, staring impassively at the trees that grew and seeded on the slopes, died and resprouted, died and resprouted.

We had shrouded the baby’s remains in white, and across the bundle I’d tied a little sprig of yellow winter jasmine. In a shop on the Flower Rain Terrace, I’d bought a white
qipao
so I could dress traditionally for the burial. It was the first time I’d worn white in my life and I thought I looked nice in it. Shi Chongming was wearing a suit with a black armband. He said that no Chinese parent should come to their child’s funeral. He said, as he stepped into the hole, that he shouldn’t be here and he certainly shouldn’t be standing in the grave, placing this small bundle in the ground. He should be following etiquette, standing to the left of the grave, averting his eyes. ‘But,’ he said, under his breath, as he scraped dirt down on the tiny shroud, ‘what is as it should be any more?’

I was silent. A dragonfly was watching us. It seemed so strange to me that a little animal that shouldn’t have been alive in the middle of winter had come and rested on a branch near the grave to watch us bury a baby. I stared at it until Shi Chongming touched my arm, said something in a low voice, and I turned back to the grave. He lit a small incense stick, stuck it in the ground, and I made the Christian sign of the cross because I didn’t know what else to do. Then, together, we walked through the trees back to the car. Behind us the dragonfly took off from the branch and the incense smoke floated up out of the fatsia, trailing in a slow bloom up the edge of the mountain across the sycamore trees and into the blue.

Shi Chongming died six weeks later in a hospital on Zhongshan Road. I was at his bedside.

In his last days he kept asking me one question over and over again: ‘Tell me, what do you think she felt?’ I didn’t know what to say in reply. It’s always been clear to me that the human heart turns itself inside out to belong, it reaches and strains for the first and nearest warmth, so why should a baby’s heart be any different? But I didn’t tell Shi Chongming this, because I was sure that in his darkest moments he must have wondered if the only human his daughter had reached out to, if the only person she’d felt love for, was Junzo Fuyuki.

And, if I couldn’t answer Shi Chongming, do I have any hope of answering you, my unnamed daughter, except to say that I acted in ignorance, except to say that I think about you every day, even though I’ll never know how to measure your life, your existence? Maybe you weren’t ever a soul – maybe you didn’t get that far. Maybe you were a spectre, or a flash of light. Maybe a little moon soul.

I’ll never stop wondering where you are – if you will re-emerge in a different world, if you have already, if you live now in peace, in love, in a faraway country that I will never visit. But I am sure of one thing: I am sure that if you have returned, the first thing you will do is tilt your face towards the sun. Because, my missing baby, if you have learned anything at all, you have learned that in this world none of us has very long.

In 1937, four years before the USA was drawn into the Pacific war with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces advanced into mainland China and stormed the capital, Nanking. The events that followed exceeded every Chinese citizen’s worst fears, as the invading army embarked on a month-long frenzy of rape, torture and mutilation.

What prompted an otherwise disciplined army to behave in this way has been long debated (for an excellent exploration of the Japanese soldier’s psyche, see Ruth Benedict’s classic
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
). But perhaps the most contentious issue concerns the numbers of casualties involved. Some in China say as many as four hundred thousand died that winter; some in Japan insist it was no more than a handful. History, we are repeatedly reminded, is written by the victors, but history is
rewritten
by many other parties: revisionists; politicians; fame-hungry academics; and even to some degree the Americans who sought to mollify Japan, recognizing in its geographical position a strategic advantage in the fight against communism. History can change like a chameleon, reflecting back the answer required of it: and with every concerned agency claiming something different, there may be little hope of ever finding an internationally agreed casualty tally.

In a partially opened mass grave at the official Jiangdongmen memorial site, visitors to Nanking can inspect the mingled remains of unidentified citizens killed in the 1937 invasion. Looking at these bones, attempting to appreciate the real extent of the massacre, it struck me that, whatever the true number of casualties, however great or small, four hundred thousand or ten, each of those unremembered and uncelebrated citizens deserves our recognition for what they represent: the large tragedy of the small human life.

Evidence of the massacre has come down to us in fragments: witness reports, photographs, a few feet of blurred 16mm film shot by the Reverend John Magee. Shi Chongming’s film is fictional, but it is entirely possible that more footage does exist and has not surfaced for fear of reprisals from Japanese holocaust deniers – certainly a print of Magee’s film, which was taken by a civilian to Japan with the intention of distributing it, quickly and mysteriously disappeared without trace. Given this scattered and anecdotal evidence, it is no easy task, when building a fictionalized account of the massacre, to steer a course between the sensationalists and the obfuscators. For a steadying hand in this matter I relied extensively on the work of two people: Iris Chang, whose book
The Rape of Nanking
was the first serious attempt to alert a wider public to the massacre, and perhaps even more importantly, Katsuichi Honda.

Honda, a Japanese journalist, has been working since 1971 to bring the truth to his sceptical nation. In spite of the fact that there has been a recent sea change in the Japanese appreciation of their past – the Nanking invasion has been cautiously reintroduced to the school curriculum, and no one who witnessed the event will forget the shocked and baffled tears of middle-aged Japanese parents learning the truth from their children – Honda Katsuichi nevertheless lives anonymously for fear of right-wing attacks. His 1999 collection of testimonies
The Nanjing Massacre
contains several witness accounts of the ‘corpse mountain’ somewhere in the region of Tiger Mountain, including the living human column attempting to climb to safety on thin air. It also contains an almost unbearable first-hand account of an unborn child being cut from its mother’s womb by a Japanese officer.

In addition to Honda’s work, I also plundered the scholarship of the following: John Blake; Annie Blunt of the Bright Futures Mental Health Foundation; Jim Breen at Monash University (whose excellent
kanji
database can be found at csse.monash.edu.au); Nick Burton; John Dower (
Embracing Defeat
); George Forty (
Japanese Army Handbook
); Hiro Hitomi; Hiroaki Kobayashi; Alistair Morrison; Chigusa Ogino; Anna Valdinger; and all at the British Council, Tokyo. Any remaining errors I claim as my own.

Thank you to the city of Tokyo for permitting me to tinker with its remarkable geography, also to Selina Walker and Broo Doherty, for their faith and energy. The usual resounding howl of gratitude goes out to: Linda and Laura Downing; Jane Gregory; Patrick Janson-Smith; Margaret O.W.O. Murphy; Lisanne Radice; Gilly Vaulkhard. A special smile to Mairi the great. And most of all, thank you to my constants, the best constants a heart could hope for: Keith and Lotte Quinn.

For the sake of clarity all Japanese names have been presented according to the Western tradition: personal name followed by family name. Chinese names, however, are represented traditionally, the family name preceding the personal. Chinese names and terms have been mostly transcribed in the official
pinyin
system of the People’s Republic of China. Exceptions are names or terms that are well known in the West in their Wade-Giles form. These include (with
pinyin
in brackets) the Daoist classic the I-Ching (Yijing), Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian), the Kuomintang (Guomindang), the Yangtze (Yangzi), Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), and most importantly the city of Nanking as it was known in the 1930s, now known in
pinyin
as Nanjing.

Just after lunch on a Tuesday in May and nine feet under water in Bristol’s ‘floating harbour’, police diver Sergeant ‘Flea’ Marley closed her gloved fingers round a human hand. She was half taken off-guard to find it so easily and her legs kicked a bit, whirring up silt and engine oil from the bottom, tipping her bodyweight back and upping her buoyancy so she started to rise. She had to tilt down and wedge her left hand under the pontoon tanks, then dump a little air from her suit so she was stabilized enough to get to the bottom and take a little time to feel the object.

It was pitch dark down there, like having her face in mud, no point in trying to see what she was holding. With most river and harbour diving everything had to be done by touch, so she had to be patient, allow the thing to feed its shape from her fingers up her arm, download an image in her mind. She palpated it gently, closing her eyes, counting the fingers to reassure herself it was human, then worked out which digit was which: the ring finger first, bent away from her, and from that she could figure out which way the hand was lying – palm upward. Her thoughts raced, as she tried to picture how the body would be – on its side probably. She gave the hand an experimental tug. Instead of there being a weight behind it, it floated free of the silt, coming away easily. At the place where a wrist should be there was just raw bone and gristle.

‘Sarge?’ PC Rich Dundas said, into her earpiece. His voice seemed so close in the claustrophobic darkness that she startled. He was up on the quay, tracking her progress with her surface attendant who was meting out her lifeline and controlling the coms panel. ‘How you doing there? You’re bang over the hotspot. See anything?’

The witness had reported a hand, just a hand, no body, and that had bothered everyone in the team. No one had ever known a corpse to float on its back – decomposition saw to that, made them float face down, arms and legs dangling downwards in the water. The last thing to be visible would be a hand. But now she was getting a different picture: at its weakest point, the wrist, this hand had been severed. It was just a hand, no body. So there hadn’t been a corpse floating, against all physical laws, on its back. But there was still something wrong about the witness statement. She turned the hand over, settling the mental picture of the way it was lying – little details she’d need for her own witness statement. It hadn’t been buried. She couldn’t even say it was buried in the silt. It was just lying on top of it.

‘Sarge? You hear me?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I hear you.’

She picked up the hand. She cupped it gently, and slowly let herself sink to hover above the silt at the bottom of the harbour.