Tokyo (17 page)

When he heard the door open he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He looked lazily down at my bare feet, then up to the short yukata, to the flushed skin on my chest. He let the smoke curl up out of his mouth and smiled, raising an eyebrow, as if I was a huge and pleasant surprise to him.

‘Hello,’ he said.

I didn’t answer. I slid the door closed with a bang and locked it, sinking down with my back against it. Dressing like a sexy person - that was one thing. But Jason - well, Jason made me think things about sex that were much, much more frightening.

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21

I*

Nanking, 13 December 1937, nightfall

J*^

They are here. They are here. It is real.

I left the house at midday, and the streets seemed silent. I didn’t see another soul, only shuttered houses, the shops boarded - some with notices pasted on the doors giving details of the rural district where the owners could be found. I turned right on to Zhongyang Road and followed it past the railway where I took a shortcut through an alley to meet up with Zhongshan Road. There I saw three men running towards me as fast as they could. They were dressed as peasants and were blackened all over, as if from an explosion. When I looked up, in the distance over the houses in the area of the Shuixi gate, a pall of smoke was rising grey against the sky. The men continued away from me in the direction I’d come, running in silence, only the sound of their straw shoes slapping on the pavement. I stood on the street, staring after them, listening to the city around me. Now that I wasn’t moving I could hear the distant sound of car horns, mingling horribly with faint human cries. My heart sank. I continued south, expecting the worst as I crept through the streets, keeping close to the houses, ready to dash inside at any moment or prostrate myself and cry, ‘Dongyang Xiansheng! Eastern Masters!’

On the streets nearer the refugee centre one or two businesses had found the courage to open, the owners standing anxiously in the doorway, staring off down the street in the direction of the eastern gates.

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I skipped between buildings, running low to the ground, switching and doubling back through the familiar streets, my heart racing. I could hear the low murmur of a crowd somewhere ahead, and at last I came to a side-street that led up to Zhongshan Road and there, at its head, a huge tide of people crushed against each other, straining in the direction of the Yijiang gate - the great ‘water’ gate that opens out of the city and on to the Yangtze grim expressions on their faces. They all pulled handcarts loaded down with possessions. One or two glanced at me, curious to see someone making no attempt to flee, others ignored me, putting their heads down and leaning their weight into the handcart. Children watched me silently from their perches on top of the carts, bundled up against the cold in quilted jackets, their hands blunt in wool mittens. A wild dog ran among them, hoping to steal food.

‘Are they in the city?’ I asked a woman who had broken free of the crowd and was racing away down the alley I stood in. I stepped in front of her and stopped her in her tracks, my hands on her shoulders. ‘Have the Japanese taken the walls?’

‘Run!’ Her face was wild. The charcoal she’d used to cover her face was smeared with tears. ‘Run!’

She struggled out of my grasp and headed away, screaming something at the top of her voice. I watched her disappear as, behind me, the shouts of the crowd grew to a crescendo, running footsteps scattering into the alleys around me. Then slowly, slowly the footsteps died away, the crush on the road dwindled. At length I crept forward and peered out on to the main road. To my left, in the west, I could see the tail end of the crowd shuffling on to the river, one or two stragglers, the elderly and sick, hurrying to catch up. The road to my left was empty, the ground churned into mud by hundreds of pairs of feet.

I stepped out cautiously and, my heart in my throat, turned in the direction they’d come. I walked in near silence. Outside the ruined Ming Palace, where yesterday I had chatted to the history professor, a few Nationalist tanks rumbled past, kicking up sprays of dirt, the soldiers shouting and waving at me to get off the streets. Then, slowly, silence came back to the city and I was

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alone, walking very quietly in the centre of the empty Zhongshan Road.

At last I came to a halt. Around me nothing was moving. Even the birds seemed to have been silenced on their perches. The pollarded trees on either side led the eye into the distance, straight down the churned-up road, absolutely still and empty and clear as far as the eye could see to where, about half a mile away, the winter sun shone down on the triple arches of the Zhongshan gate. I stood in the centre of the road, took a deep breath and slowly opened my hands, holding them up to the sky. My heart was thumping so loudly it seemed to be almost inside my head.

Was the ground beneath me shuddering, the way it would in a distant earthquake? I looked down at my feet and as I did, from the direction of the gate, there came an explosion that ripped through the silence, making the sycamores bend as if in a strong wind, the birds taking to the air with panicked speed. Flames shot into the sky and a cloud of smoke and dust erupted above the gate. I fell to a crouch, my hands over my head, as another explosion rocketed across the sky. Then came a sound like distant rain that grew and grew until it was a roar, and suddenly the sky was dark, and dust and masonry were falling on top of me and I could see, coming out of the dim horizon, ten or more tanks, their blank, fierce faces bearing down on Zhongshan Road, the terrible hi no maru flag fluttering behind them.

I jumped up and ran in the direction of my house, the sound of my breathing and my footsteps drowned by the rumble of tanks and the shrill peal of whistles coming from behind me. I ran and ran, my lungs screaming, my pulse thundering, on and on up Zhongshan Road, right on to Zhongyang Road, ducking into a side-street, then slipping behind the Liu house, and into the alley where at last the steady rain of dust and masonry dwindled. The house was silent. I battered on the door until the locks opened and Shujin was standing there, looking at me as if she was seeing a ghost.

They’re here,’ she said, when she saw my face, when she saw how out of breath I was. ‘Aren’t they?’

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I didn’t answer. I came inside and locked the door carefully behind me, securing all the bolts and braces. Then, when my breathing had returned to normal, I went upstairs and sat on my day-bed, finding a place among the Japanese language books, and pulling a quilted throw over my feet.

And so - what can I write? Only that it has happened. And that it was straightforward. On this crisp afternoon, which should have been beautiful, they have taken Nanking as casually as a child reaches into the air and squashes a dragonfly. I am afraid to look out of the window - the Japanese flag must be flying all over the city.

^T1) Nanking, 14 December 1937, morning (by the lunar .^Xnte calendar the twelfth day of the eleventh month)

In the night it snowed, and now, looming up beyond the city walls, Purple Mountain, Great Zijin, is not white, but red with fire. The flames bathe everything around it in the colour of blood, casting a terrible halo in the sky. Shujin spends a long time staring at it, standing at the opened door, silhouetted against the sky, the cold air coming in until the house is freezing and I can see my own breath.

‘See?’ she says, turning stiffly to look at me. Her hair is loose and straight down the back of her gown, and her triumphant eyes are filled with red light. ‘Zijin is burning. Isn’t it exactly as I said?’

‘Shujin,’ I say, ‘come away from the door. It’s not safe.’

She obeys, but it takes time. She closes the door and comes to sit in silence in the corner, clutching against her stomach the two ancestor scrolls she brought from Poyang, her cheeks red from the cold.

Most of this morning I have been sitting at the table with a pot of tea, the bolts shot on the door, the tea in the cup getting cold. Last night we got a few minutes of fitful sleep, both dressed and still wearing shoes in case we had to flee. From time to time one of us would sit up and stare at the closed shutters, but neither of us spoke much, and now, although it is a bright day, in here

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the rooms are dark, shuttered and silent. Every half an hour or so we switch on the radio. The reports are confused - an impossible mixture of propaganda and misinformation. Who knows what is true? We can only guess at what is happening. From time to time I recognize the rumble of tanks on Zhongshan Road, and occasional gunfire, but everything seems distant and punctuated by such long silences that sometimes my mind wanders, and I forget briefly that we are being invaded.

At about eleven o’clock we heard something that might have been a mortar attack, and for a moment our eyes met. Then came distant explosions, one-two-three-four in a sudden continuous string, and silence again. Ten minutes later a demon clattering rose in the alley. I went to the back, peeped through a shutter and saw that someone’s goat had slipped its tether, and was now in panic - racing aimlessly through the back plots, bucking and charging into trees and corrugated-iron buildings. Under its hoofs it crushed the summer’s rotten pomegranates until the snow appeared filthy with blood. No one came to catch the goat, the owners must have already fled the city, and it was twenty minutes before it found its way into the street and silence once again descended on our alley.

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22

After that night Jason started watching me. He developed a habit of staring right at me, when we were walking home from the club, when I was cooking, or just when we were all sitting in the living room in front of the television. Sometimes I’d turn round to light a customer’s cigarette and Jason would be standing a few feet away, looking at me as if he was secretly entertained by everything I did. It was horrible and scary and exciting all at the same time - I’d never had anyone look at me like that before and I couldn’t imagine what I’d do if he ever came near me. I found excuses to keep out of his way.

Autumn came. The winey heat, the hot metal, frying and drains smell of Tokyo gave way to a cooler, starker Japan that must have been waiting near the surface all along. The skies were cleared of their haze, the maples drenched the city with russet, and the smell of woodsmoke came out of nowhere, as if we were back in post-war Japan among the cooking fires of old Tokyo. From the gallery I could reach out and pick ripening persimmon straight from the branch. The mosquitoes left the garden and that made Svetlana sad - she said that now they had left we were all doomed.

Still Fuyuki hadn’t come to the club. Shi Chongming remained as obstinate, as tight-lipped as ever, and sometimes I thought my chances of ever seeing the film were slipping away. One day, when I couldn’t bear it any longer, I took a train to Akasaka and in a

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public booth called the number on Fuyuki’s card. The Nurse, I was sure it was the Nurse, answered, with a feminine, ‘Moshi moshi,’ and I froze, the receiver to my ear, all my courage disappearing in a second. ‘Moshi moshi^ she repeated, but I had already changed my mind. I slammed down the phone and walked away from the booth as quickly as I could, not looking back. Maybe Shi Chongming had been right when he said that I’d never make silk out of a mulberry leaf.

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.

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‘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?’