The Devil of Nanking

by Mo Hayder

The characters for the Chinese name Shi Chongming meant something like ‘He who sees clearly both history and the future.’

Because ignorance, as I’d got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.

For long years the schools hadn’t taught about the massacre. All mention of the war was whited out of textbooks.

Most Japanese adults had only the vaguest idea of what had happened in China in 1937.

In only a few weeks they’d killed anything up to three hundred thousand civilians.

She says, and she never tires of saying this, that she can see the future for the simple reason that the future is our past.

‘In China,’ he told me, as he stood in the doorway, his hat pulled down, ‘we don’t think of time the way you do in the West. We believe that our future . . . that our future can be

seen in our past.’

Shintoism puts spirits in trees, plants, birds and insects,

I came to understand one simple thing. I understood ignorance. The more I studied it, the more it became clear that their behaviour was all about ignorance. Oh, there were soldiers in Nanking, a handful, who were truly evil. I don’t dispute that. But the others? Their biggest sin was their ignorance. It is that simple.’

‘You told me that ignorance and evil are not the same thing.

Ignorance you can forgive. Ignorance is never the same as evil.

Some people are crazy and others are sick, and there are others still who are evil or freaky or whatever you call it. But this is very important.’ I took a deep breath. ‘They are not the same as the ignorant.’

I understood about starvation. It is one of those cold shadows, like disease, that trail round the globe in the footsteps of war. There had been two great famines in Stalin’s years: hundreds of Russians had had to survive by eating human flesh. At university I’d been to the inaugural lecture of a professor who’d got into the St Petersburg city archives and found evidence that Leningraders in the great Second World War siege had eaten their dead.

You’d have to be so hungry, so desperate, to eat another human being. Other uneasy names were coming into my head: the Donner pass, the John Franklin expedition, the Nottingham Galley, the Medusa, the Old Christians’ rugby team in the Andes.

Hunger.

You can’t imagine what you might do if you were starving. But there was more: human beings cannibalize for other reasons.

Power.

There had been a research student at university who had been crazy about warlike sects in Africa – I remembered him flypostering the university for a lecture on the Human Leopard Societies of Sierra Leone, and the Liberian Poro child soldiers. I didn’t go to the lecture, but I’d overheard people talking about it afterwards: ‘Believe me, what he was saying was as freaky as ’parently they cut up their enemies and eat them. If it’s someone they’ve defeated it’s supposed to make them stronger.’ Some of the Nanking testimonies recalled corpses on the street with hearts and livers missing. The whispers were that they’d been taken by the Japanese soldiers. To make them more potent in combat.

Healing.

First I found Miao-chuang, eating his daughter’s eyes and hands. Why? To cure himself. Then I found, in the translation of a sixteenth-century medical compendium, the Ben Cao Gang Mu, treatments made from thirty-five different human body parts. Bread soaked in human blood for pneumonia and impotence, human bile dripped into alcohol and used to treat rheumatism. The flesh of executed criminals to treat eating disorders. There were Lu Xun’s outrageous tales of human meat eaten in Wolf Cub Village, and his genuine account of his friend Xu Xilin’s liver and heart being eaten by En Ming’s bodyguards. In a textbook about the Cultural Revolution there was a long description of the outdated tradition of ko ku – the pinnacle of filial piety, the act of boiling a piece of one’s flesh into soup to rescue a beloved parent from sickness.

hunger, power, healing

Maybe you’re never really aware of the ones who are looking out for you until they’re gone.

the past is an explosive, and once its splinters are in you they will always, always work their way to the surface.

You were kind, you were so kind because you kept telling me ignorance wasn’t the same as evil, but I know.’

(for an excellent exploration of the Japanese soldier’s psyche, see Ruth Benedict’s classic The Chrysanthemum and the Sword).

Iris Chang, whose book The Rape of Nanking was

Honda Katsuichi

1999 collection of testimonies The Nanjing Massacre