The Devil of Nanking Read Free Page A

visualize what had happened. ‘Especially Nanking. Look,’ I held up a crumpled paper covered in tiny characters, ‘this is about the invasion – it’s a family tree of the Japanese chain of command, it’s all written in Japanese, see? I did it when I was sixteen. I can write some Japanese and some Chinese.’
    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