The Devil of Nanking Page 3

  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 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 café 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.

  I went back to the street and pulled several folded pages from my bag. One of the last things I’d done in London was to photocopy a map of Tokyo. It was on a very big scale: it covered several pages. I stood in the late sunshine with the crowd streaming round me, and inspected the pages. I looked up and down the long thoroughfare I stood on. It seemed like a canyon because the buildings were so dense and precipitous, the crowds and the neon signs and the buildings bristling with shops and business and noise. What was I supposed to do now? I’d given up everything to come here to see Shi Chongming, and now there was nowhere for me to go, nothing more for me to do.

  Eventually when I’d studied the pages for ten minutes and still couldn’t decide what to do, I crumpled them back into the bag, put the strap across my chest, closed my eyes and turned round and round on the spot, counting out loud. When I reached twenty-five I opened my eyes and, ignoring the strange looks from other pedestrians, headed off in the direction I faced.

  3

  I walked round Tokyo for hours, amazed by the skyscrapers like glass precipices, the cigarette and drinks advertising boards, the tinselly, mechanical voices that floated down everywhere I went, making me picture asylums up there in the sky. Round and round I went, directionless as a worm, dodging commuters, cyclists, tiny lonely schoolchildren immaculate in sailor suits, their leather backpacks polished like beetles’ wings. I have no idea how far I walked, or where I went. When the light had gone from the city, the sweat had soaked through my clothes, the strap of the holdall had dug a groove across my shoulder and there were blisters on my feet, I stopped. I was standing in the grounds of a temple, surrounded by maples and cypresses, fading camellias spotting the shade. It was cool in there, and silent, only the occasional shiver of hundreds of Buddhist prayer slips tied to the branches rustling as a breeze moved through. Then I saw, lined up in ghostly silence under the trees, rows and rows of stone child effigies. Hundreds of them, each wearing a hand-knitted red bonnet.

  I sat down on a bench with a shocked bump and stared back at them. They stood in neat lines, some holding a windmill or a teddy, some wearing little bibs. Rows and rows of blank, sad faces turned to look at me. They could make you cry, those children and their expressions, so I stood and went to another bench where I didn’t have to look at them. I pulled off my shoes and stripped off my tights. My bare feet felt lovely in the cool – I pushed them out in front of me and wriggled my toes. At the entrance to the shrine there was a bowl of water. It was meant for worshippers to purify their hands, but I went to it and used the bamboo ladle to dribble water over my feet. It was cool and clear, and afterwards I scooped a handful into my mouth. When I had finished and turned back, the stone children seemed to have moved. They seemed to have taken a collective step backwards as if they were shocked by my behaviour in this sacred place. I stared at them for a while. Then I went back to the bench, got a packet of biscuits from my bag and started munching.

  I didn’t have anywhere to go. The night was warm and the park was quiet, the great red and white Tokyo Tower all lit up above me. As the sun went down a lamp came on in the trees, and before long the homeless joined me on the surrounding benches. The vagrants, no matter how down and out, all seemed to have little meals, complete with chopsticks, some in lacquered bento lunch boxes. I sat on my bench eating my biscuits and watching them. They ate their rice and stared back at me.

  One of the homeless men had brought with him a pile of cardboard, which he placed near the tiled entrance gate and perched on, naked except for a pair of filthy, stained jogging bottoms, dirt on his round belly. He spent a long time looking at me and laughing – a tiny manic Buddha who had been rolled in soot. I didn’t laugh. I sat on my bench staring at him in silence. He made me think of a photograph in one of my textbooks showing a starving Tokyo man after the war. In that first year when MacArthur set up headquarters, the Japanese lived on sawdust and acorns, peanut shells and tea-leaves, pumpkin stalks and seeds. People starved to death in the streets. The man in my book had a cloth spread out in front of him, two crudely made spoons resting on it. As a teenager I had worried endlessly about those spoons. There was nothing special about them, they weren’t silver or engraved, they were just common little everyday spoons. Probably all that he had left in the world and, because he needed to eat, he was trying to sell them to someone who lacked nothing in the world but two ordinary little spoons.

  They called it the bamboo-shoot existence, the onion life, every layer you peeled away made you cry more, and even if you could find the food you couldn’t get it home because dysentery was breeding in the street mud and you might trail it back to your family. Children appeared on the docksides, fresh from independent Manchuria, the ashes of their families in white wisteria boxes slung round their necks.

  Maybe that was the price of ignorance, I thought, looking at the naked vagrant. Maybe Japan had to pay for the ignorant things it did in Nanking. Because ignorance, as I’d got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.

  The homeless were gone when I woke the following morning. In their place, watching me from the bench opposite, his feet planted wide, his elbows on his knees, was a western man of about my age. He wore a salt-bleached T-shirt with the words Big Daddy Blake/Killtime Mix, and a leather thong round his neck, fastened with what looked like a shark’s tooth. His ankles were bare and tanned, and he was smiling as if I was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. ‘Hey,’ he said, raising his hand. ‘You looked so comfortable. The sleep
of angels.’

  I sat up hurriedly, my holdall falling to the ground. I grabbed up my cardigan and wrapped it round me, batting at my hair, licking my fingers and wiping them hurriedly round my mouth, my eyes. I knew he was smiling at me, giving me that look, the half-wondering look that people always give me.

  ‘Hey, did you hear me?’ He came to stand next to me, his shadow falling over my holdall. ‘I said, did you hear me? Can you speak English?’ He had an odd accent. He might have been from England or America or Australia. Or all three. It made him sound as if he came from a beach somewhere. ‘Can – you – speak – English?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Oh, you can?’

  I nodded again.

  He sat down on the seat next to me and put out his hand – pushed straight under my eyes so I couldn’t avoid seeing it. ‘Well, hi, then. I’m Jason.’

  I stared at the hand.

  ‘Said hi. Said I’m Jason.’

  I shook his hand hurriedly then leaned sideways so I wouldn’t brush against him, and fumbled under the bench for my holdall. It was always like this at university, the boys all teasing me because I was so defensive, always making me feel like I should just fall into a hole. I found my shoes inside it and began to pull them on.

  ‘Are those your shoes?’ he said. ‘Are you really going to wear those?’

  I didn’t answer. The shoes were quite old-fashioned. They were black, lace-ups, rather stern-looking, I supposed, and thick-soled. They were quite wrong for a hot day in Tokyo.

  ‘Are you always this rude?’

  I pulled on the shoes and began to tie them, pulling the laces tighter than I needed to, my fingers a little white with the pressure. On my ankles the blisters rubbed against the hard leather.

  ‘Cool,’ he said, amused. He pronounced it kewl. ‘You really are weird.’

  There was something in the way he spoke that made me stop tying the shoes and turn to look at him. The sun was coming through the trees from behind him and I got a brief impression of dark hair, cut quite short, with soft flicks at the back of his neck and round his ears. Sometimes, although no one would guess and I would never ever admit it, sometimes all I ever thought about was sex.

  ‘Well, you are,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you? Weird, I mean. In a nice way. A kind of English way. Is that where you’re from?’

  ‘I . . .’ Beyond him the ghostly stone children stood in their lines, the beginnings of the sun touching the branches above them, catching the dew on their shoulders and bonnets. In the distance the calm skyscrapers sent back a reflection of Tokyo as clean and crisp as a cave lake. ‘I didn’t . . .’ I said faintly. ‘I didn’t know where to sleep.’

  ‘You haven’t got a hotel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just arrived?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He laughed. ‘There’s a room at my place. There’s just about a hundred rooms at my place.’

  ‘At your place?’

  ‘Sure. My house. You can rent a room there.’

  ‘I haven’t got any money.’

  ‘Well, hell-oh! We’re in Tokyo. Don’t listen to the economists, there’s still truckloads of money to be had here. You just open your eyes. There are still hostess clubs on every corner.’

  The girls at university used to fantasize about working in the Tokyo hostess clubs. They’d go on and on about how much they’d earn, the gifts they’d be showered with. I used to sit in the corner in silence, thinking it must be lovely to be that confident.

  ‘I wait tables in one,’ he said. ‘I’ll introduce you to the mamasan, if you want.’

  The colour rushed to my face. He couldn’t imagine how it made me feel to imagine working in a hostess club. I turned away and finished tying my shoes. I got to my feet and brushed my clothes down.

  ‘Serious. It’s awesome money. The recession hasn’t hit the clubs yet. And she likes weirdos, Mama-san.’

  I didn’t answer. I zipped up my cardigan, heaved the holdall over my head so the strap lay diagonally across my chest. ‘Sorry,’ I said clumsily. ‘Got to go.’ I folded my arms and headed away from Jason, across the park. A breeze came through and rattled all the children’s windmills. Above me the sun glinted on the skyscrapers.

  He caught up with me at the park exit. ‘Hey,’ he said. I didn’t stop so he walked sideways next to me, grinning. ‘Hey, weirdo. Here’s my address.’ He shoved out his hand and I stopped to look at it. He was holding a scrap of a cigarette carton with an address and phone number scrawled on it in biro. ‘Go on, take it. You’d be funny in our house.’

  I gazed at it.

  ‘Go on.’

  I hesitated, then grabbed the piece of cardboard, crunched my hand back up into my armpit, put my head forward and went on my way. Behind me I heard him laugh and cheer. ‘You’re awesome, weirdo. I like you.’

  *

  That morning, when the Bambi café waitress brought my iced coffee and Danish, she also put down on the table a huge plate of rice, some balls of fried fish, two small dishes of pickled vegetables and a bowl of miso soup.

  ‘No,’ I said in Japanese. ‘No. I didn’t order this.’

  She glanced over to where the manager was checking receipts at the cash desk, then turned to me, rolled her eyes to the ceiling and put her finger to her lips. Later, when she brought me the chit I saw she’d charged me only for the Danish. I sat for a while, not knowing what to say, staring at her as she went round the other tables, pulling her notepad out of her pie-crust apron pocket, scratching her head with a pink Maruko Chan pen. You just don’t get that sort of generosity every day, at least not as far as I know. I suddenly wondered who her father was. Her grandfather. I wondered if he’d ever talked to her about what happened in Nanking. For long years the schools hadn’t taught about the massacre. All mention of the war was whited out of textbooks. Most Japanese adults had only the vaguest idea of what had happened in China in 1937. I wondered if the waitress even knew the name Nanking.

  You have to study something for a long time before you understand it. Nine years, seven months and nineteen days. And even that, it turns out, isn’t long enough for some things. Even after everything I’ve read about the years when Japan invaded China, I still don’t really know why the massacre happened. The experts – the sociologists and the psychologists and the historians – they all seem to understand. They say it was about fear. They say that the Japanese soldiers were afraid and tired and hungry, they’d fought tooth and nail for Shanghai, beaten off cholera and dysentery, marched across half of China, and were close to breaking-point when they got to the capital. Some of them say that the Japanese soldiers were just products of a power-hungry society, that they’d been brainwashed into seeing the Chinese as a lesser species. Some say that an army like that, walking into Nanking and finding hundreds of thousands of defenceless citizens hiding in the bombed-out buildings . . . Well, some people say, maybe what happened next was hardly surprising.

  It didn’t take the Imperial Japanese Army long. In only a few weeks they’d killed anything up to three hundred thousand civilians. When they had finished, so the stories go, you didn’t need boats to get from one side of the Yangtze river to the other. You could walk across the corpses. They were so inventive in the new ways they found to kill. They buried young men up to their necks in sand and drove tanks at their heads. They raped old women, children and animals. They beheaded and dismembered and tortured; they used babies for bayonet practice. You wouldn’t expect anyone who had lived through that holocaust to trust the Japanese again.

  There had been a 16mm projector in Shi Chongming’s office. I’d been wondering about it all night. Whenever I started to think I’d imagined the reference in the journal I’d whisper to myself: ‘What does a professor of sociology need a film projector for?’

  He arrived at the university just before ten o’clock. I saw him at a great distance, very tiny like a child, moving painfully along the pavement. His navy tunic was fastened in ties at one side in a very unJ
apanese way and he hobbled along on his cane, going at half the speed of the others, a black plastic fisherman’s hat crammed down over his long white hair. By the time he reached the red lacquered gate I was waiting, watching him coming down the street towards me.

  ‘Hello?’ I took a step forward and Shi Chongming stopped in his tracks.

  He looked at me angrily. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ He limped away in the direction of the Institute. I followed, walking shoulder to shoulder with him. It must have looked rather polite in a way, a dour little academic hobbling along, pretending there wasn’t a gangling foreign girl in strange clothes keeping pace with him. ‘I don’t like what you’re bringing.’

  ‘But you’ve got to talk to me. This is the most important thing in the world.’

  ‘No. You’ve got the wrong man.’

  ‘I haven’t. It’s you. Shi Chongming. What’s on that film is what I’ve been looking for for nearly ten years. Nine years, seven months and—’

  ‘And eighteen days. I know. I know. I know.’ He came to a halt and looked at me. The anger had brought out little orange flecks in his irises. He gazed at me for a long, long time, and I remember thinking vaguely that I must remind him of something because his expression was so intent and thoughtful. At length he sighed and shook his head. ‘Where are you staying?’