Tokyo (3 page)

When I was at last discharged from hospital, I knew exactly what I had to do next. In hospital I got all my exams through the teaching unit (I got As for most of them, and that surprised everyone - they all acted as if they thought ignorance equalled stupidity) and out in the real world there were charities for people like me, to help us apply to college. They took me through all the stuff I found difficult - phone calls and bus journeys. I’d studied Chinese and Japanese on my own, from library books, and pretty soon I got a place doing Asian Studies at London University. Suddenly, on the outside at least, I appeared almost normal: I had a rented room, a part-time job handing out leaflets, a student rail pass and

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a tutor who collected Yoruba sculptures and Pre-Raphaelite postcards. (‘I’ve got a fetish for pale women,’ he’d once said, eyeing me thoughtfully. Then he’d added, under his breath, ‘As long as they’re not crazy, of course.’) But while the other students were picturing a graduation, maybe postgraduate study, I was thinking about Nanking. If there was ever going to be peace in my life I had to know if I’d remembered the details in the orange book properly.

I spent hours in the library, sifting through books and journals, trying to find another copy of the book or, failing that, another publication of the same witness testimony. There had been a book called The Horror of Nanking published in 1980, but it was out of print. No library, not even the Library of Congress, held a copy and, anyway, I wasn’t even sure if it was the same book. But that didn’t matter, because I had found something else. To my amazement I discovered that there was film footage of the massacre.

In total there were two films. The first was Reverend Magee’s. Magee had been a missionary in China in the 1930s and his film had been smuggled out by a colleague, who was so terrified by what he’d seen that he’d sewn it into the lining of his camel-hair coat on his way to Shanghai. From there the film lay forgotten in a hot southern California basement for several years, disintegrating, becoming sticky and distorted, until it was rediscovered and given to the Library of Congress film collection. I’d seen the video copy at London University library. I’d watched it over and over again, peered at it, studied every frame. It showed the horror of Nanking - it showed things I don’t like to think about even in the light of day - but it didn’t show the torture I’d read about all those years ago.

The second, or rather the mention of it, was Shi Chongming’s. The instant I heard about it I forgot everything else.

It was my second year at university. One spring morning, when Russell Square was full of tourists and daffodils, I was in the library, seated at a low-lit table behind the Humanities abstracts stacks, cramped over an obscure journal. My heart was thumping - at last I’d found a reference to the torture. It was an oblique reference, vague, really, and without the crucial detail, but one

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sentence sent me bolt upright in my chair: ‘Certainly in Jiangsu in the late 1950s, there was mention of the existence of a 16mm film of this torture. Unlike Magee’s film, this film has not, to date, surfaced outside China.’

I grabbed the journal and pulled the Anglepoise low over the page, not quite believing what I was seeing. It was incredible to think there was a visual record of it - imagine that! They could say I was insane, they could say I was ignorant, but no one could say that I’d made it all up - not if it was there in black and white.

‘The film was said to have belonged to one Shi Chongming, a young research assistant from Jiangsu University who had been in Nanking at the time of the great 1937 massacre …’

I reread the paragraph over and over again. A feeling was coming over me that I’d never had before, a feeling that had been packed tight and solid by years of disbelieving hospital staff. It was only when the student at the neighbouring desk sighed impatiently, that I realized I was on my feet, clenching and unclenching my hands and muttering to myself. The hair on my arms was standing on end. It has not yet surfaced outside China …

I should have stolen that journal. If I had really learned my lesson in hospital, I’d have put the journal inside my cardigan and walked straight out of the library with it. Then I’d have had something to show Shi Chongming, proof that I hadn’t made things up from a diseased imagination. He couldn’t have denied it then, and set me questioning my sanity all over again.

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Opposite the huge red-lacquered Akamon gate at the entrance to Todai University there was a small place called the Bambi cafe. When Shi Chongming asked me to leave his office I did, obediently gathering up all my notes and stuffing them back into the holdall. But I hadn’t given up. Not yet. I went to the cafe and chose a seat in the window, overlooking the gate so that I could see everyone coming and going.

Above me, as far as the eye could see, the skyscrapers of Tokyo rose glittering into the sky, reflecting the sun back from a million windows. I sat hunched forward, staring up at this incredible sight. I knew a lot about this phoenix city, about how Tokyo had risen from the ashes of war, but here, in the flesh, it didn’t seem quite real to me. Where, I thought, is all of wartime Tokyo? Where is the city that those soldiers came from? Is it all buried under this? It was so different from the dark images I’d had all these years, of an old charcoal-stained relic, bombed streets and rickshaws -1 decided I would think of the steel and roaring ferroconcrete as an incarnation of Tokyo, something superimposed over the authentic city, the real beating heart of Japan.

The waitress was staring at me. I picked up the menu and pretended to be studying it, my face colouring. I didn’t have any money, because I really hadn’t thought this far. For my plane ticket I’d worked packing frozen peas in a factory, wearing away the skin on my fingers. When I told the university that I wanted

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to come out here and find Shi Chongming they said it was the last straw. That I could stay in London and finish my failed courses, or leave the university entirely. Apparently I was ‘destructively preoccupied with certain events in Nanking’: they pointed to the unfinished modules, the law department core courses I hadn’t even turned up for, the times I’d been caught in the lecture hall doing sketches of Nanking instead of making notes on the economic dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region. There was no point in asking them for research funds to travel, so I sold my belongings, some CDs, a coffee-table, the old black bike that had got me around London for years. After the plane ticket there wasn’t much left - just a grubby fistful of yen shoved into one of the side pockets of my holdall.

I kept glancing up at the waitress, wondering how long it would be before I’d have to order something. She was starting to look upset, so I chose the cheapest thing on the menu - a melon ‘Danish’ covered in damp sugar grains. Five hundred yen. When the food arrived I counted out the money carefully and placed it on the little saucer the way I could see all the other customers doing.

There was a little food in my holdall. Maybe no one would notice if I got some of it out now. I had packed eight packets of Rich Tea biscuits. There was also a wool skirt, two blouses, two pairs of tights, a pair of lace-up leather shoes, three Japanese language books, seven textbooks on the Pacific war, a dictionary and three paintbrushes. I’d been vague about what was going to come after I’d got Shi Chongming’s film, I hadn’t really thought about the practicalities. There you go, Grey, I thought. What were the doctors always telling you? You’ll have to discover ways of thinking ahead - there are rules in society that you will always have to consider.

Grey.

Obviously it isn’t my real name. Even my parents, tucked away in the crumbling cottage, where no roads came and no cars passed, even they weren’t that odd. No. It was in hospital that I got the name.

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It came from the girl in the bed next to me, a pale girl with a ring in the side of her nose and matted hair that she’d spend all day scratching: ‘Trying to dred it up, just want to dred it up a bit.’ She had scabs around her mouth from where she’d sniffed too much glue, and once she’d untwisted a coat hanger, locked herself in the toilets and pushed the sharp end up under her skin from her wrist all the way to her armpit. (The hospital tried to keep people like us together, I’ll never know why. We were the ‘self-harm’ ward.) The girl in the dreds always seemed to have a confident smirk on her face and I never thought she would speak to me of all people. Then one day we were in the breakfast queue and she sensed me waiting behind her. She turned and looked at me and gave a sudden laugh of recognition. ‘Oh, I get it. I’ve just sussed what you look like.’

I blinked. ‘What?’

‘A grey. You remind me of a grey.’

‘A what?

‘Yeah. When you first got in here you were still alive. But,’ she grinned and pointed a finger at my face, ‘you’re not now, are you? You’re a ghost, Grey, like all of us.’

A grey. In the end she had to find a drawing of a grey to explain what she was talking about: it was an extra-terrestrial with a big head, blank, insect-like eyes set high and even, and strange, bleached-out skin. I remember sitting on my bed, staring at the magazine, my hands getting colder and colder, my blood slowing to a crawl. I was a grey. Thin and white and a little bit see through. Nothing at all left alive in me. A ghost.

I knew why. It was because I didn’t know what to believe any more. My parents wouldn’t back me up, and there were other things that made the professionals think I was crazy - all the stuff about sex to start with. And then there was my weird ignorance about the world.

Most of the staff thought secretly that my story was a little outrageous: brought up with books, but no radio or TV. They’d laugh when I jumped in shock when a Hoover started up, or a bus rumbled by on the street. I didn’t know how to use a Walkman or a channel-changer and they’d sometimes find me stranded in odd

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places, blinking, forgetting how I’d got there. They wouldn’t believe it was because I’d grown up in isolation, cut off from the real world. Instead they decided it was all part of my madness.

‘I suppose you think ignorance is some sort of excuse.’ The nurse who used to come in the middle of the night and hiss all her opinions in my ear thought my being ignorant was the biggest of sins. ‘It’s not an excuse, you know, it’s not an excuse. No. In fact, in my book ignorance is no different from pure, straight evil. And what you done was just that - pure, straight evil.’

When the waitress had gone, I unzipped my holdall and took out my Japanese dictionary. There are three alphabets in Japan. Two are phonetic and they’re easy to understand. But there’s a third one, too, evolved centuries ago from the pictorial characters used in China, and it’s far more complex and far, far more beautiful. Kanji, it’s called. I’ve been studying it for years, but sometimes when I see kanji it still makes me think about the littleness of my life. When you stop to consider the lifetime of history and intrigue all hidden in a single scripted picture tinier than an ant how can you not feel like a waste of air? Kanji had a beautiful logic for me. I understood why the symbol for ‘ear’ pressed close up to the symbol for ‘gate’ would mean ‘listen’. I understood why three women clustered together meant ‘noisy’ and why adding splashy lines to the left of any character would change its meaning to include water. A field with an added water symbol meant sea.

The dictionary was my constant companion. It was small and soft and white and familiar, bound in something that could have been calfskin, and it fitted inside my hand as if it was moulded there. The girl with the dreadlocks had stolen it from a library when she got out of hospital. She had mailed it to me as a present when it got round the patients that I was leaving at last. She’d put a card between the pages that said: ‘I believe you. Stick it to them all. Go and PROVE IT, girl.’ Even all those years later I was still secretly thrilled by that card.

I opened the dictionary to the front page, the page with the library stamp on it. The characters for the Chinese name Shi Chongming meant something like ‘He who sees clearly both

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history and the future.’ With a red felt-tip from the bottom of my bag I began to sketch out the kanji, intertwining them, turning them upside-down, sideways, until the page was covered with red. Then in the gaps, using very tiny letters, I wrote Shi Chongming in English, over and over again. When there was no more room I turned to the back page and sketched out a map of the campus, putting in a few hedges and trees from memory. The campus was so beautiful. I’d only seen it for a few minutes, but it had seemed like a wonderland in the middle of the city: shadowy gingko crowded around white gravel paths, ornate roofs and the cool sounds of a dark lake in the forest. I drew in the archery hall, then added a few stone lanterns from my imagination. Lastly over Shi Chongming’s office I carefully drew a picture of me standing in front of him. We were shaking hands. In his other hand he was holding a film in a canister, ready to pass it over to me. In my image I was trembling. After nine years, seven months and eighteen days, I was at last going to get an answer.

At six thirty the sun was still hot, but the big oak doors to the Institute of Social Sciences were locked, and when I pressed my ear to them I couldn’t hear anything inside. I turned and looked around, wondering what to do next. I’d waited for Shi Chongming in the Bambi cafe for six hours and although no one had said anything I’d felt obliged to keep buying iced coffees. I’d had four. And four more melon pastries, wetting my fingers and dabbing up the stray grains of sugar on the plate; reaching a sneaky hand under the table and digging surreptitiously in my bag for some Rich Tea biscuits whenever the waitress wasn’t looking. I had to break bits off under the table and put my hand casually to my mouth pretending I was yawning. The handful of yen notes dwindled. Now I realized it had been a waste of time. Shi Chongming must have gone a long time ago, leaving from a different entrance. Maybe he’d guessed I’d be waiting.