Mo Hayder: The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

Shi Chongming looked at it all in silence, sinking slowly into his chair, a strange look on his face. My sketches and diagrams aren’t very good, but I don’t mind it any more when people laugh at them – each one means something important to me, each one helps me order my thoughts, each one reminds me that every day I’m getting nearer the truth of something that happened in Nanking in 1937. ‘And this…’ I unfolded a sketch and held it up. It was on a sheet of A3 and over the years transparent lines had worn into it where it had been folded for storage. ‘… this is supposed to be the city at the end of the invasion. It took me a whole month to finish. That’s a pile of bodies. See?’ I looked up at him eagerly. ‘If you look carefully you can see I’ve got it exactly right. You can check it now, if you want. There are exactly three hundred thousand corpses in this picture and-’

Shi Chongming got abruptly to his feet and moved from behind the desk. He closed the door, crossed to the window overlooking the archery hall and lowered the blinds. He walked with a slight tow to the left and his hair was so thin that the back of his head seemed almost bald, the skin corrugated, as if there was no skull there and you could see the folds and crevices of his brain. ‘Do you know how sensitive this country is to mention of Nanking?’ He came back and sat down at his desk with arthritic slowness, leaning across to me and talking in a low whisper. ‘Do you know how powerful the right wing is in Japan? Do you know the people who have been attacked for talking about it? The Americans -’ he pointed a shaky finger at me, as if I was the nearest representation of America ‘- the Americans, MacArthur, ensured that the right wing are the fear-mongers they are today. It is quite simple – we do not talk about it.’

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 that when 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.