The Devil of Nanking Read online

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘But I’ve come all this way to see you.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to turn round and go back,’ he answered. ‘This is my past you’re talking about. I am not here, in Japan of all places, to discuss the mistakes of the past.’

  ‘You don’t understand. You’ve got to help me.’

  ‘Got to?’

  ‘It’s about one particular thing the Japanese did. I know about most of the atrocities, the killing competitions, the rapes. But I’m talking about something specific, something you witnessed. No one believes it actually happened, they all think I made it up.’

  Shi Chongming sat forward and stared at me directly. Usually when I tell them what I’m trying to find out about, people give me a distressed, pitying look, a look that says, ‘You must have invented it. And why? Why would you make up a dreadful thing like that?’ But this look was different. This look was hard and angry. When he spoke his voice had changed to a low, bitter note: ‘What did you say?’

  ‘There was a testimony about it. I read it years ago, but I haven’t been able to find the book again, and everyone says I made that up too, that the book never really existed. But that’s okay, because apparently there’s a film, too, shot in Nanking in 1937. I found out about it six months ago. And you know all about it.’

  ‘Preposterous. There is not a film.’

  ‘But – but your name was in an academic journal. It was, honestly, I saw it. It said you had been in Nanking. It said you had seen the massacre, that you’d seen this kind of torture. It said when that you were at Jiangsu University in 1957 there were rumours that you had a film of it. And that’s why I’m here. I need to hear about . . . I need to hear about what the soldiers did. Just one detail of what they did, so I know I didn’t imagine it. I need to know whether, when they took the women and—’

  ‘Please!’ Shi Chongming slammed his hands on the desk and got to his feet. ‘Have you no compassion? This is not a kaffeeklatsch!’ He hooked up a cane from the back of his chair and limped across the room, unlocking the door and taking his nameplate off the hooks. ‘See?’ he said, using the cane to close the door. He held up the nameplate to me, tapping it to make his point. ‘Professor of Sociology. Sociology. My field is Chinese medicine. I am no longer defined by Nanking. There is no film. It is finished. Now, I’m very busy and—’

  ‘Please.’ I gripped the sides of the desk, my face flushing. ‘Please. There is a film. There is. It was in the journal, I saw it. Magee’s film doesn’t show it, but yours does. It’s the only film anywhere in the world and—’

  ‘Ssssh,’ he said, waving the cane in my direction. ‘Enough.’ His teeth were long and discoloured, like old fossils prised from the Gobi – polished yellow on rice husk and goat meat. ‘Now, I have absolute respect for you. I have respect for you and for your unique institute. Quite unique. But let me put this quite simply: there is no film.’

  *

  When you’re in the business of trying to prove that you’re not crazy, people like Shi Chongming really don’t help. To read something, in black and white, only to be told the next minute that you’ve imagined it – well, that’s the kind of thing that can make you as mad as they all say you are. It was the same story all over again, exactly the same as what had happened with my parents and the hospital when I was thirteen. Everyone there said that the torture was all in my imagination, all part of my madness – that there could never have been such terrible cruelty. That the Japanese soldiers were barbarous and ruthless, but they could not have done something like that, something so unspeakable that even the doctors and nurses, who reckoned they’d seen everything in their time, lowered their voices when they talked about it. ‘I’m sure you believe you read it. I’m sure it’s very real to you.’

  ‘It is real,’ I’d say, looking at the floor, my face burning with embarrassment. ‘I did read it. In a book.’ It had been a book with an orange cover and a photograph of bodies piling up in the Meitan harbour. It was full of stories of what had happened in Nanking. Until I read it I’d never even heard of Nanking. ‘I found it at my parents’ house.’

  One of the nurses, who really didn’t like me at all, used to come to my bed when the lights were off, when she thought no one was listening. I’d lie, stiff and still, and pretend to be asleep, but she’d crouch down next to my bed anyway, and whisper into my ear, her breath hot and yeasty. ‘Let me tell you this,’ she would murmur, night after night, when the flower shadows of the curtains were motionless on the ward ceiling. ‘You have got the sickest imagination I’ve ever known in ten years in this fucked-up job. You really are insane. Not just insane, but evil too.’

  But I didn’t make it up …

  I was afraid of my parents, especially of my mother, but when no one in the hospital would believe that the book existed, when I was starting to worry that maybe they were right, that I had imagined it, that I was mad, I got up my courage and wrote home, asking them to look among all the piles of paperbacks for a book with an orange cover, called, I was almost sure, The Massacre of Nanking.

  A letter came back almost immediately: ‘I am sure you believe this book exists, but let me promise you this, you didn’t read such rubbish in my house.’

  My mother had always been so certain that she was in control of what I knew and thought about. She wouldn’t trust a school not to fill my head with the wrong things, so for years I was educated at home. But if you’re going to take on a responsibility like that, if you are so afraid (for whatever private, anguished reason) of your children learning about life that you vet every book that comes through the door, sometimes ripping offending pages from novels, well, one thing’s for sure: you have to be thorough. At least a little more thorough than my mother was. She didn’t see the laxity creeping into her home, coming through the weed-choked windows, slinking past the damp piles of paperbacks. Somehow she missed the book on Nanking.

  ‘We have searched high and low, with the greatest of intention of helping you, our only child, but I am sorry to say, in this instance you are mistaken. We have written to your Responsible Medical Officer to tell him so.’

  I remember dropping the letter on to the floor of the ward, a horrible idea occurring to me. What if, I thought, they were right? What if the book didn’t exist? What if I really had made it all up in my head? That, I thought, a low thumping ache starting in my stomach, would be the worst thing that could ever happen.

  Sometimes you have to go a long way to prove things. Even if it turns out that you’re only proving things to yourself.

  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 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 sa
me 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 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.

  2

  Opposite the huge red-lacquered Akamon gate at the entrance to Todai University there was a small place called the Bambi café. 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 café 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 – I 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 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.

  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 ou
trageous: 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 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.