Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

From Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku, I got every publication I could find on alternative medicine. I also bought some Chinese-Japanese dictionaries, and collections of essays about the yakuza. Over the next few days, while I waited for Fuyuki to come back to the club, I’d lock myself in my room for long, long hours, reading about Chinese medicine until I knew all about Bian Que’s moxibustion and acupuncture with stone needles, about Hua Tuo’s early operations and experiments with anaesthetics. Soon I understood the Qi Gong, ‘frolics of the five animals’ exercises back to front, and could recite the taxonomy of herbs from Shen Nong’s Materia Medica. I read about tiger bones and turtle jelly and the gall bladders of bears. I went to kampo shops and got free samples of eel oil and bear bile from Karuizawa. I was looking for something that could reverse all the principles of regeneration and degeneration. A key to immortality. It was a search that had been going on in one form or another since time began. Even humble tofu, they said, was created by a Chinese emperor in his quest for life without end.

But Shi Chongming was talking about something that no one had ever encountered before. Something surrounded in secrecy.

One day I took all my paints and carefully etched out a picture of a man among the buildings on my wartime Tokyo walls. His face came out crunched, like a kabuki man, so I drew in a Hawaiian shirt, and behind him an American car, the sort of car a gangster might drive. Scattered at his feet, I drew in medicine bottles, an alembic, a still. Something so precious – illegal? – that no one dared talk about it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Shi Chongming. ‘Isn’t it?’

I stared out of his window at the campus, at the trees turning gold and red. The moss on the gymnasium had deepened to a dark purply green, like an underripe plum, and from time to time a ghostly figure in kendo mask and robes passed the opened doors. The shouts of the dojo echoed across the campus, sending the crows up into the trees in great rustling clouds. It was beautiful. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t separate it from its context. I couldn’t help thinking of it trapped by the strapping modern city, by power-hungry Japan. When I didn’t turn from the window, Shi Chongming laughed.

‘So you, too, are one of the number who cannot forgive.’

I turned and looked at him directly. ‘Forgive?’

‘ Japan. For what she did in China.’

The words of a Chinese-American historian I’d studied at university went through my head: ‘ The Japanese were brutal beyond imagination. They elevated cruelty to an art form. If an official apology did come would it be sufficient for us to forgive? ’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying you have?’

He nodded.

‘How could you?’

Shi Chongming closed his eyes, a little smile on his face. He was silent for a long time, thinking about this, and I might have thought he had fallen asleep if it wasn’t for the way his hands moved and twitched, like dying birds. ‘How?’ he said eventually, looking up. ‘How, indeed? It would seem impossible, wouldn’t it? But I have had many, many years to think about it – years when I couldn’t move outside my own country, years when I couldn’t move outside my own house. Until you have been pelted in the street, paraded through your own town bearing propaganda…’ He spread his thumb and forefinger across his chest and I thought immediately of Cultural Revolution photographs, men huddled pitifully together, hounded by the Red Guard, slogans like Intellectual Renegade and Anti-Party Element screaming from placards around their necks. ‘… until you have experienced this you don’t have the tools to understand human nature. It took a long time, but I came to understand one simple thing. I understood ignorance. The more I studied it, the more it became clear that their behaviour was all about ignorance. Oh, there were soldiers in Nanking, a handful, who were truly evil. I don’t dispute that. But the others? Their biggest sin was their ignorance. It is that simple.’

Ignorance. That was something I thought I knew a lot about. ‘What they did on your film. Is that what you mean? Was that ignorance?’

Shi Chongming didn’t reply. His face closed and he pretended to be busying himself with some papers. The mention of the film always turned him a little quiet with me.

‘Is that what you meant? Professor Shi?’

He pushed aside his papers, clearing his desk, ready to get to business. ‘Come,’ he said, gesturing to me. ‘Let’s not talk of that now. Come and sit down and tell me why you’re here.’

‘I want to know what you mean. Did you mean that what they did to the-’

‘Please! Please – you haven’t come here today for nothing. You’ve come to me with ideas – I can see them in your face. Sit down.’

Reluctantly, I came to the desk. I sat opposite him, my hands in my lap.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

I sighed. ‘I’ve been reading,’ I said. ‘About Chinese medicine.’

‘Good.’

‘There was a myth. A story about a god, the divine farmer who divided the plants into orders. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘Taste, temperature and quality. Yes. You’re talking about Shen Nong.’

‘So what I ought to do is decide where Fuyuki’s cure falls in that order. I’ve got to put it in a category?’

Shi Chongming held my eyes.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What have I said?’

He sighed and sat back with his hands on the table, lightly tapping his fingertips together. ‘It’s time I told you a little more about myself.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t want you to waste your time. You should know that I have some very, very good suspicions about what we are looking for.’

‘Then you don’t need me to-’

‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t want to hear what I want to hear. I don’t want a parrot to come back to me, cheeky and obsequious, telling me, “Yes, sir, yes, sir, you were correct all along, O wise one.” No. I want the truth.’ He pulled a battered portfolio out of the pile of books on the desk. ‘I have been working on this for too long to make a mistake at this point. I will tell you everything you need to know. But I will not tell you exactly what I suspect.’

From the portfolio he pulled a handful of yellowing paper tied with a scruffy black ribbon. Out it came, dragging with it pencil shavings, paper-clips, balled tissues.

‘It took me a long time to find Fuyuki, more years than I care to consider. I discovered many, many things about him. Here.’ He pushed the bundle of papers across the table to me. I looked at them, a big untidy pile that threatened to slip off on to the ground. They were in Chinese and Japanese, official letters, photocopied newspapers; one seemed to be a memo on notepaper from a government office. I recognized the kanji for the Land-based Defence Agency.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘Years and years of work. Most of it done a long time before I was permitted to travel to Japan. Letters, newspaper articles and – maybe the riskiest thing I did – reports from special investigators. I don’t expect you to understand them, but you do need to know how dangerous Fuyuki is.’

‘You’ve said that already.’

He smiled thoughtfully. ‘Yes. I understand your scepticism. He seems like a very old man. Maybe even kind. Benevolent?’

‘You can’t say what someone’s like until you’ve talked to them for a bit.’

‘Interesting, isn’t it? The most powerful sarakin loan shark in Tokyo, one of the biggest manufacturers and illegal importers of methamphetamine – interesting how innocuous he appears. And yet don’t be fooled.’ Shi Chongming sat forward, looking at me intently. ‘He is ruthless. You cannot imagine how many died in his determination to establish his amphetamine routes between here and any number of poor Korean ports. And maybe the most intriguing thing is the care with which he chooses the people who surround him. He has a unique technique – it’s all in there in those papers, if you know how to look. What a skilled manipulator he is! He scours the newspapers for arrests, carefully selects certain offenders and finances their defence cases. If they escape conviction they are sworn to Fuyuki for life.’