Tokyo (2 page)

‘I - I’m—’ I swallowed. ‘I’m a student. Sort of.’ I fumbled my cardigan sleeve up and pushed out my hand to him. I hoped he didn’t notice my bitten nails. ‘From the University of London.’

He eyed me thoughtfully, taking in my white face, my limp hair, the cardigan and the big shapeless holdall. Everyone does this the first time they meet me, and the truth is, no matter how much you pretend, you never really get used to being stared at.

‘I’ve been needing to meet you for almost half my life,’ I said. ‘I’ve been waiting for this for nine years, seven months and eighteen days.’

‘Nine years, seven months and eighteen days?’ He raised an eyebrow, amused. ‘So long? In that case you had better come in.’

I’m not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person’s gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough. It had taken me such a long time to track down Shi Chongming. He was in his seventies, and it was amazing to me that, in spite of his age and in spite of what he must feel about the Japanese, he was here, a visiting professor at Todai, the greatest university in Japan. His office overlooked the university archery hall, where dark trees gathered round the complex tiled roofs, where the only sound was crows calling as they hopped between the evergreen oaks. The room was hot and breathless, dusty air stirred by three electric fans that whirred back and forward. I crept in, awed that I was really there at last.

Shi Chongming shifted piles of paper from a chair. ‘Sit. Sit. I’ll make tea.’

I sat with a bump, my heavy shoes pressed rigidly together, my bag on my lap, clutched tightly to my stomach. Shi Chongming limped around, filled an electric Thermos from a sink, oblivious to the water that sprayed out and darkened his mandarin-style tunic. The fan gently shifted the stacks of papers and crumbling old volumes that were piled on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. As

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soon as I walked in I’d seen, in the corner of the room, a projector. A dusty 16mm projector, only just visible where it had been pushed up in the corner among the towering piles of paper. I wanted to turn and stare at it, but I knew I shouldn’t. I bit my lip and fixed my eyes on Shi Chongming. He was delivering a long monologue about his research.

‘Few have a concept of when Chinese medicine first came to Japan, but you can even look at the Tang era and see evidence of its existence here. Did you know that?’ He made me tea and rustled up a wrapped biscuit from somewhere. ‘The priest Jian Zhen was preaching it, right here, in the eighth century. Now there are kampo shops everywhere you look. Only step outside the campus and you’ll see them. Fascinating, isn’t it?’

I blinked at him. ‘I thought you were a linguist.’

‘A linguist? No, no. Once, maybe, but everything has changed. Do you want to know what I am? I’ll tell you - if you take a microscope and carefully study the nexus where the bio technologist and the sociologist meet…’ He smiled, giving me a glimpse of long yellow teeth. ‘There you’ll find me: Shi Chongming, a very little man with a grand title. The university tells me I’m quite a catch. What I’m interested in is just how much of all this …’ he swooped his hand round the room to indicate the books, colour plates of mummified animals, a wall-chart labelled Entomology of Hunan ‘… how much of this came with Jian Zhen, and how much was brought back to Japan by the troops in 1945. For example, let me see …’ He ran his hands over the familiar texts, pulled out a dusty old volume and put it down in front of me, opened at a bewildering diagram of a bear, dissected to show its internal organs coloured in printer’s pastel shades of pink and mint. ‘For example, the Asiatic black bear. Was it after the Pacific war that they decided to use the gall bladder of their Karuizawa bear for stomach ailments?’ He put his hands on the table and peered at me. ‘I expect that’s where you come in, isn’t it? The black bear is one of my interests. It’s the question that brings most people to my door. Are you a conservationist?’

‘No,’ I said, surprised by how steady my voice was. ‘Actually,

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no. It’s not where I come in. I’ve never heard of the - the Karuizawa bear.’ And then I couldn’t help it. I turned and glanced at the projector in the corner.’!…’! dragged my eyes back to Shi Chongming. ‘I mean that Chinese medicine isn’t what I want to talk about.’

‘No?’ He lowered his spectacles and looked at me with great curiosity. ‘Is it not?’

‘No.’ I shook my head precisely. ‘No. Not at all.’

‘Then …’ He paused. ‘Then you’re here because … ?’

‘Because of Nanking.’

He sat down at the table with a frown. ‘I’m sorry. Who did you say you were?’

T’m a student at London University. At least, I was. But I wasn’t studying Chinese medicine. I was studying war atrocities.’

‘Stop.’ He held up his hand. ‘You have come to the wrong man. I am of no interest to you.’

He started to get up from the desk but I unzipped my holdall hastily and pulled out the battered pile of notes secured in an elastic band, dropping some in my nervousness, picking them up and putting them all untidily on the desk between us.

‘I’ve spent half my life researching the war in China.’ I undid the band and spread out my notes. There were sheets of translations in my tiny handwriting, photocopies of testimonies from library books, sketches I’d done to help me 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

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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

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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 1937.1 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 when that 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.’

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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. Tm 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. The 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: 7 am sure you believe

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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.

‘ We have searched high and low, with the greatest of intention of helping you, our only child, but I am sorry to say, in this instance you are mistaken. We have written to your Responsible Medical Officer to tell him so.’

I remember dropping the letter on to the floor of the ward, a horrible idea occurring to me. What if, I thought, they were right? What if the book didn’t exist? What if I really had made it all up in my head? That, I thought, a low thumping ache starting in my stomach, would be the worst thing that could ever happen.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to prove things. Even if it turns out that you’re only proving things to yourself.