by Mo Hayder
His eyes stopped roving and met mine, and we looked at each other for a long time. There and then, as I was, prone on the floor of Shi Chongming’s office, something terrible and inescapable stood up in me: the knowledge that there wasn’t going to be a quiet escape. Alive or dead, our children would hold us. Just like Shi Chongming I was going to be eternally connected to my dead baby girl. Shi Chongming was in his seventies, I was in my twenties. She would be with me for ever.
I got to my feet and picked up the holdall. I put it on the desk in front of him and stood with my hands resting on it, my head lowered. ‘My little girl died too,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s why I’m here. Did you know?’
Slowly Shi Chongming took his eyes off the holdall and raised them to me. ‘I have never known why you came to me.’
‘Because I did it, you see. It was me.’ I pushed at the tears with the heel of my hand. ‘I killed her myself – my little girl – with a knife.’
Shi Chongming didn’t speak. An awful puzzlement crept into his eyes.
I nodded. ‘I know. It’s terrible, and I’ve got no excuse for – for crying about it. I know that. But I didn’t mean to – to kill her. I thought she would live. I’d read about the Nanking babies, in the orange book, and I – I don’t know why, but I thought maybe my baby would live, too, and so I-’ I sank into the chair, staring down at my shaky hands. ‘I thought she’d be okay and they’d take her away and hide her somewhere, somewhere my… my parents couldn’t find her.’
Shi Chongming shuffled round the table and put his hands on my back. After a long time he sighed and said, ‘Do you know something? I consider myself a man who knows sadness very well. But I – I have no words for this. No words.’
‘Don’t worry. You were kind, you were so kind because you kept telling me ignorance wasn’t the same as evil, but I know.’ I wiped my eyes and tried to smile up at him. ‘I know. You can’t ever really forgive someone like me.’
63
How can you measure the power that the mind exerts over the body? Fuyuki would never have believed that the tiny mummified corpse of Shi Chongming’s baby didn’t hold the secret of immortality. He would never have believed that what he had carefully saved and protected over the years, slowly nibbling away at, was only a placebo, and that what had really kept him alive was his own powerful belief. Those who surrounded him believed it too. When he died in his sleep, only two weeks after the theft of Shi Chongming’s baby, they believed wholeheartedly that it was because he’d lost his secret elixir. But there were others, the sceptics, who wondered secretly whether Fuyuki’s death was brought on by the strain of the sudden interest paid him by a working group based within the USA Department of Justice.
It was a small, dedicated team specializing in the investigation of war criminals, and the team members were delighted to hear from one Professor Shi Chongming formerly of Jiangsu and Todai universities. Now that he had his daughter’s remains safe, Shi Chongming had opened up like a shell in warm water. For fifty-three years he’d been working towards it, trying to get permission to travel to Japan, struggling with the bureaucracy of the Land Defence Agency, but now that he had her everything came out: his notes; the soldier’s ID tags; a collection of unit logs from 1937; photographs of Lieutenant Fuyuki. Everything was packaged up and couriered to Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. A little later a 16mm film followed across the Pacific, a grainy black-and-white film from which the team were able to get a positive identification of Fuyuki.
Some whispered that something was missing from the film, and pointed to some very modern-looking edit points. They said sections must have been removed from it recently. It had been my idea to take out the few frames that showed Shi Chongming giving up his baby. I’d done the splicing myself in a hotel room in Nanking, crudely, with scissors and Scotchtape. I had made a decision for him, overruled him. I had decided that he wasn’t going to martyr himself. It was as simple as that.
I didn’t copy the film before I packed it in bubble-wrap, carefully addressing the parcel with black marker pen. Dr Michael Burana, IWG, Department of Justice. I could have sent it to the doctors in England, I suppose, maybe a copy to the nurse who used to crouch next to my bed in the dark. Maybe a copy, with a dried flower pressed inside, to the jigging girl. But I didn’t need to – because something had happened. I was older now, I knew lots and lots of things. I knew so much that I was heavy with it. I knew instinctively what was born of ignorance and what of madness. I no longer needed to prove anything to anyone. Not even myself.
‘But now it is over,’ Shi Chongming said. ‘And, really, I see my wife was right to say that time circles constantly, because here we are. We have come all the way back to the beginning.’
It was a blue and white December morning, the sun reflecting blindingly from the snow, and we stood among the trees on Purple Mountain above Nanking. At our feet was a fresh, shallow hole and in his arms Shi Chongming held a small bundle wrapped in linen. It hadn’t taken him long to find it, the place where he had given up his daughter. Some things on the mountainside had changed in those fifty-three years: now, little trams flashed red through the trees, taking tourists up to the mausoleum; the city below us was a grown-up twentieth-century city, extraordinary with its hazy skyscrapers and electronic signs. But other things were so unchanged that Shi Chongming became silent when he looked at them: the sun glinting on the bronze azimuth, the black pines drooping under the weight of snow, the great stone tortoise still standing in the shadows, staring impassively at the trees that grew and seeded on the slopes, died and resprouted, died and resprouted.
We had shrouded the baby’s remains in white, and across the bundle I’d tied a little sprig of yellow winter jasmine. In a shop on the Flower Rain Terrace, I’d bought a white qipao so I could dress traditionally for the burial. It was the first time I’d worn white in my life and I thought I looked nice in it. Shi Chongming was wearing a suit with a black armband. He said that no Chinese parent should come to their child’s funeral. He said, as he stepped into the hole, that he shouldn’t be here and he certainly shouldn’t be standing in the grave, placing this small bundle in the ground. He should be following etiquette, standing to the left of the grave, averting his eyes. ‘But,’ he said, under his breath, as he scraped dirt down on the tiny shroud, ‘what is as it should be any more?’
I was silent. A dragonfly was watching us. It seemed so strange to me that a little animal that shouldn’t have been alive in the middle of winter had come and rested on a branch near the grave to watch us bury a baby. I stared at it until Shi Chongming touched my arm, said something in a low voice, and I turned back to the grave. He lit a small incense stick, stuck it in the ground, and I made the Christian sign of the cross because I didn’t know what else to do. Then, together, we walked through the trees back to the car. Behind us the dragonfly took off from the branch and the incense smoke floated up out of the fatsia, trailing in a slow bloom up the edge of the mountain across the sycamore trees and into the blue.
Shi Chongming died six weeks later in a hospital on Zhongshan Road. I was at his bedside.
In his last days he kept asking me one question over and over again: ‘Tell me, what do you think she felt?’ I didn’t know what to say in reply. It’s always been clear to me that the human heart turns itself inside out to belong, it reaches and strains for the first and nearest warmth, so why should a baby’s heart be any different? But I didn’t tell Shi Chongming this, because I was sure that in his darkest moments he must have wondered if the only human his daughter had reached out to, if the only person she’d felt love for, was Junzo Fuyuki.
And, if I couldn’t answer Shi Chongming, do I have any hope of answering you, my unnamed daughter, except to say that I acted in ignorance, except to say that I think about you every day, even though I’ll never know how to measure your life, your existence? Maybe you weren’t ever a soul – maybe you didn’t get that far. Maybe you were a spectre, or a flash of light. Maybe a little moon soul.
I’ll never stop wondering where you are – if you will re-emerge in a different world, if you have already, if you live now in peace, in love, in a faraway country that I will never visit. But I am sure of one thing: I am sure that if you have returned, the first thing you will do is tilt your face towards the sun. Because, my missing baby, if you have learned anything at all, you have learned that in this world none of us has very long.
Author’s Note
In 1937, four years before the USA was drawn into the Pacific war with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces advanced into mainland China and stormed the capital, Nanking. The events that followed exceeded every Chinese citizen’s worst fears, as the invading army embarked on a month-long frenzy of rape, torture and mutilation.
What prompted an otherwise disciplined army to behave in this way has been long debated (for an excellent exploration of the Japanese soldier’s psyche, see Ruth Benedict’s classic The Chrysanthemum and the Sword). But perhaps the most contentious issue concerns the numbers of casualties involved. Some in China say as many as four hundred thousand died that winter; some in Japan insist it was no more than a handful. History, we are repeatedly reminded, is written by the victors, but history is rewritten by many other parties: revisionists; politicians; fame-hungry academics; and even to some degree the Americans who sought to mollify Japan, recognizing in its geographical position a strategic advantage in the fight against communism. History can change like a chameleon, reflecting back the answer required of it: and with every concerned agency claiming something different, there may be little hope of ever finding an internationally agreed casualty tally.
In a partially opened mass grave at the official Jiangdongmen memorial site, visitors to Nanking can inspect the mingled remains of unidentified citizens killed in the 1937 invasion. Looking at these bones, attempting to appreciate the real extent of the massacre, it struck me that, whatever the true number of casualties, however great or small, four hundred thousand or ten, each of those unremembered and uncelebrated citizens deserves our recognition for what they represent: the large tragedy of the small human life.
Evidence of the massacre has come down to us in fragments: witness reports, photographs, a few feet of blurred 16mm film shot by the Reverend John Magee. Shi Chongming’s film is fictional, but it is entirely possible that more footage does exist and has not surfaced for fear of reprisals from Japanese holocaust deniers – certainly a print of Magee’s film, which was taken by a civilian to Japan with the intention of distributing it, quickly and mysteriously disappeared without trace. Given this scattered and anecdotal evidence, it is no easy task, when building a fictionalized account of the massacre, to steer a course between the sensationalists and the obfuscators. For a steadying hand in this matter I relied extensively on the work of two people: Iris Chang, whose book The Rape of Nanking was the first serious attempt to alert a wider public to the massacre, and perhaps even more importantly, Katsuichi Honda.
Honda, a Japanese journalist, has been working since 1971 to bring the truth to his sceptical nation. In spite of the fact that there has been a recent sea change in the Japanese appreciation of their past – the Nanking invasion has been cautiously reintroduced to the school curriculum, and no one who witnessed the event will forget the shocked and baffled tears of middle-aged Japanese parents learning the truth from their children – Honda Katsuichi nevertheless lives anonymously for fear of right-wing attacks. His 1999 collection of testimonies The Nanjing Massacre contains several witness accounts of the ‘corpse mountain’ somewhere in the region of Tiger Mountain, including the living human column attempting to climb to safety on thin air. It also contains an almost unbearable first-hand account of an unborn child being cut from its mother’s womb by a Japanese officer.
In addition to Honda’s work, I also plundered the scholarship of the following: John Blake; Annie Blunt of the Bright Futures Mental Health Foundation; Jim Breen at Monash University (whose excellent kanji database can be found at csse.monash.edu.au); Nick Burton; John Dower (Embracing Defeat); George Forty (Japanese Army Handbook); Hiro Hitomi; Hiroaki Kobayashi; Alistair Morrison; Chigusa Ogino; Anna Valdinger; and all at the British Council, Tokyo. Any remaining errors I claim as my own.
Thank you to the city of Tokyo for permitting me to tinker with its remarkable geography, also to Selina Walker and Broo Doherty, for their faith and energy. The usual resounding howl of gratitude goes out to: Linda and Laura Downing; Jane Gregory; Patrick Janson-Smith; Margaret O.W.O. Murphy; Lisanne Radice; Gilly Vaulkhard. A special smile to Mairi the great. And most of all, thank you to my constants, the best constants a heart could hope for: Keith and Lotte Quinn.
For the sake of clarity all Japanese names have been presented according to the Western tradition: personal name followed by family name. Chinese names, however, are represented traditionally, the family name preceding the personal. Chinese names and terms have been mostly transcribed in the official pinyin system of the People’s Republic of China. Exceptions are names or terms that are well known in the West in their Wade-Giles form. These include (with pinyin in brackets) the Daoist classic the I-Ching (Yijing), Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian), the Kuomintang (Guomindang), the Yangtze (Yangzi), Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), and most importantly the city of Nanking as it was known in the 1930s, now known in pinyin as Nanjing.
About the Author
After leaving school at fifteen, Mo Hayder worked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Asia. She also has an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University.
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