Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

‘She’s kinda sexy,’ I heard Jason tell the bar staff when he came out with her order. He leaned his elbows casually on the bar and spoke to no one in particular. ‘Sexy in a freako S and M way.’ He looked over his shoulder at her, a small, amused smile twitching at his mouth. ‘Reckon I’d do the bad thang with her if I had to.’ He turned back then, and saw me standing at the bar, staring at him in silence. He winked and raised his eyebrows, as if sharing a tremendous joke with me. ‘Nice legs,’ he explained, nodding at the Nurse. ‘Or maybe it’s the heels that are doing it for me.’

I didn’t answer. I snatched up the oshibori and turned away, a stupid blush spreading all over my face and my shoulders. The thing about Jason was that he always made me feel a little like crying.

It’s funny how people can plant ideas in your head. Much, much later that night, I looked down at my legs, crossed neatly under the table. I was quite drunk, and I remember seeing them, crossed primly at the ankles, and thinking, What do nice legs look like? I smoothed down my tights and moved my knees apart a little, so that I could see my thighs a little more clearly. I turned them so I could see the calf and the little tautness when I flexed my feet. I wondered if ‘nice legs’ looked anything like my legs.

Nanking, 4 April 1937, the Festival of the Clear and Bright

My mother must be laughing now – she must be looking at me and laughing at all my reservations and my cold impatience over this marriage. Because, it seems, Shujin and I are going to have a child! A child! Imagine that. Shi Chongming, the ugly little toad, a father! Here, at last, is something to celebrate. A child to bring order to the laws of physics and love, a child to reveal reason behind the subtle codes of society. A child to help me embrace the future wholeheartedly.

Shujin, naturally, has been thrown into a frenzy of superstition. There are so many important things to consider. I watch her in bemusement, trying to take it all in, trying to treat it all with the deepest seriousness. First, this morning, came a long list of forbidden food – she will no longer allow squid and octopus and pineapple into the house, and I am to make a daily trip to the market to buy black boned chicken, liver, plum, lotus seed and balls of congealed duck blood. And from today it is my responsibility to kill the chickens that come squawking home from market, for if Shujin kills any animal, even an animal for food, it appears that our baby will take on the beast’s shape and she will give birth to a chicken or a duck!

But, and this is the most important of all, we must not refer to our son (she is sure we will have a son) as ‘baby’ or ‘child’, because the bad spirits might hear us and try to steal him at birth. Instead she has given him a name to confuse the spirits, a ‘milk-name’, she calls it. From herein ‘moon’ is how we must refer to our child whenever we speak. ‘You cannot imagine the manner of evil beings who would snatch away a newborn. Our moon soul would be the most precious prize a demon could ever hope for. And,’ here she held up her hand to stave off my interruption, ‘never forget – our little moon is very fragile. Please don’t shout or be argumentative around me. We must not disturb his soul.’

‘I see,’ I said, a small smile playing on my mouth, because I found the level of her ingenuity quite marvellous. ‘Well, in that case, moon soul it is. And from this moment on let only peace exist between these four walls.’

The Russians said it was no surprise that Jason was making jokes about the Nurse. They said they’d always known he was a strange one. They said that his walls were covered with horrible photographs, that he often received wrapped specialist magazines from mailing addresses in Thailand, and that sometimes odd things with no great value went missing around the house: Irina’s statuette of a fighting bear in real animal skin, a single wolf-fur glove, a photograph of the girls’ grandparents. Maybe, they speculated, he was a devil worshipper. ‘He watch sick stuff, sick till it make you to puke. His videos, always the videos with death.’

You could see the videos they were talking about displayed in the rental shops on Waseda Street. They all had titles like Faces of Death and Mortuary Madness and all the lettering seemed to be in lurid blood drips. Genuine autopsy footage! the covers boasted, and you’d have thought they were all about sex if you saw the crowds of adolescent boys that always seemed to be hanging around that corner of the shop. I’d never actually seen one of the videos in the house so I didn’t know if the Russians were telling the truth. But I had seen Jason’s photographs.

‘I’ve been in Asia for four years,’ he’d told me. ‘You can take your Taj Mahals and your Angkor Wats. I’m looking for something…’ he’d paused then and rubbed his fingers together, as if he was trying to mould the words from the air, ‘… I’m looking for something more – something different.’ Once I’d happened to pass his room when the door was open and the room was empty. I couldn’t help it, I had to step inside.

I saw what the Russians meant. There were photographs pinned to every inch of the wall and the images were as horrible as they’d said: here was a pitifully crippled man, naked except for a garland of marigolds, sitting dejectedly on the banks of what I decided must be the Ganges, there were young Filipino men nailed to crucifixes, vultures gathering for human flesh on the incredible Towers of Silence at a Parsi funeral. I even recognized the prayer flags and smouldering juniper of a sky-burial charnel ground outside Lhasa because I’d done Tibet in a module at university. But, I thought, looking at a photo of a wide plume of smoke shooting from an indistinct shape on a platform, the words ‘ Varanasi funeral pyre ’ scrawled below it, there was something oddly beautiful about all this, a sense in this room, like a scent, of a vivid curiosity. When at last, unnoticed, I stepped quietly out into the corridor, I had decided that the Russians were wrong. Jason wasn’t odd or morbid, he was fascinating.

He was supposed to be a waiter at the club, but all week I’d barely seen him lift a tray. Sometimes he’d stop at tables and chat amiably for some time with the customers, just as if he, not Strawberry, was the owner. ‘He’s waiter but he don’t do nuh-think,’ murmured Irina. ‘He don’t need to do no work because Mama Strawberry lurve him.’ She seemed to like the cachet that a gaijin waiter gave her. And then there were his looks. The Japanese hostesses all giggled and blushed when he walked by. Often he would sit at Strawberry’s desk, sipping champagne, with his waiter’s tuxedo all open and showing off his body, while she simpered and adjusted her dress straps, sometimes leaning back in her chair and running her hands down her body.

He didn’t spend much time in the house – and finding his room open like that was unusual. Ordinarily the door was shut, we all had locks on our bedroom doors, and often he’d lock up and leave early, before any of us woke, or he’d take a taxi from the club and not come home until the following night. Maybe he was out in the parks, looking for women asleep on benches. But there were impressions of him everywhere – a pair of moccasins lying on the staircase, lime-scented shaving cream drying in rings on the bathroom shelf, business cards in pale pink propped up against the kettle, with names like Yuko and Moe in feminine script.

I pretended not to be fazed by all this, but I was. Secretly I was completely dazzled by Jason.