Tokyo (45 page)

No one moved. The second soldier stood a few yards away in the snow, his head bowed, his face in his hands. Even Fuyuki was motionless. Then he turned, said something to the camera, and picked up the baby by a foot - holding her for inspection like a skinned rabbit.

I didn’t breathe. This was it. This was the crucial moment. Fuyuki looked at the baby, with a strange, intense expression, as if she held the answer to an important question. Then, with his free hand, he pulled out his rubber belt and knotted it round her ankles, lashing her tightly round his waist, letting her swing down, hanging upside-down, facing his leg. She twisted there for a few moments. Then her hands flexed.

I sat forward, gripping the chair arms. Yes. I had been right. Her hands were moving. Her mouth opened a few times, her chest rose and fell and her face crumpled in a wail. She was alive. She twisted and reached out blindly, instinctively trying to grasp

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Fuyuki’s leg. When he turned she lost her grip and flared in an arc from his waist like a dancer’s skirt. He did it once, twice, showing off for the camera, letting her weight bump against his uniformed thigh, smiling and saying something. When he stopped and let the baby come to a rest, her instinctive grasping resumed.

The film ran through its guides and at last sputtered out, I felt as if the breath had been punched out of me. I fell forward, on to my knees like a supplicant. The screen was empty, only a few .„

amoebic squiggles and hairs left in the gate. Shi Chongming reached over, switched off the projector and stood looking down at me on the floor. The only sound in the office was the dull thock thock thock of the clumsy old timepiece on the mantelpiece.

‘Is it what you expected?’

I wiped my face with my sleeve. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She lived. It’s what the book said. The babies were living when they came out.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Shi Chongming, in a hushed voice. ‘Yes, she was alive.’

‘For years …’ I lifted my arm to wipe my eyes ‘… for years I thought I’d - I’d imagined that part. Everyone said I was insane, that I’d made it up, that no baby could live through - through that.’ I dug in my pocket for a tissue, balled it up and dabbed at my eyes. ‘I know now I didn’t imagine it. It was all I wanted to know.’

I heard him sit down at the desk. When I looked up he was staring at the window. Outside the snowflakes seemed suddenly bright, as if lit from below. I remember thinking that they looked like tiny angels falling to earth.

Till never be sure how long she survived,’ he said. ‘I pray it wasn’t long.’ He rubbed his forehead and shrugged, looking blankly around the office as if searching for something safe to rest his eyes on. ‘I am told that Fuyuki became well after this. He killed my daughter and I am told that, shortly afterwards, his symptoms disappeared. It was a placebo effect, quite coincidental. The malaria would have left him eventually, and over the years the attacks would have lessened whether or not he had my …’

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

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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.’

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63

How can you measure the power that the mind exerts over the -s

body? Fuyuki would never have believed that the tiny mummified ;jr

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,

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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 grownup 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

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fstone tortoise still standing in the shadows, staring impassively at 4

the trees that grew and seeded on the slopes, died and re sprouted, 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 i

the Flower Rain Terrace, I’d bought a white qipao so I could dress ,f

traditionally for the burial. It was the first time I’d worn white in :

Ť3S

^

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 Jj

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

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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 reemerge 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

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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.