The Devil of Nanking (34 page)

I flattened a piece of paper on the floor and got out my jar of paintbrushes. I sat for a while, surrounded by my books and paints, my hands resting on my ankles, staring up at Mickey Rourke’s light. I was trying to imagine, really imagine, what it would be like to eat another human being. At university I’d been expected to read so much, about so many unimportant things: years of rubbish were lying around in my head. I had to concentrate very, very hard to remember the things I needed now.

After a while I put out my cigarette and mixed together a little yellow ochre, some rose madder and zinc white. I went quickly, letting the paint ridge and pool where it wanted. There was one reason you might eat another human, I thought, one good reason. A face flowed out of the end of my paintbrush, gaunt cheeks, neck like a stalk; below it, the shadowed rack of ribs, a tapering bone of a hand resting on the frozen ground. A starving man.

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. I dripped on to the paper a long, dry shinbone, the foot growing on the end like an awkward fruit. 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. And what did the Chinese mean when they said
Yi zi er shi
: ‘We are hungry enough to eat each other’s children’?

I painted the
kanji
for it.

Hunger
.

I lit another cigarette and scratched my head. You can’t imagine what you might do if you were starving. But there was more: human beings cannibalize for other reasons. I switched to a calligraphy brush and wetted the pine soot tablet. I loaded the brush with ink and slowly, slowly drew out a single
kanji
: a little like the character for number nine, but with a backward flick to its tail.

Power
.

There had been a research student at university who had been crazy about warlike sects in Africa – I remembered him fly-postering 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.

I looked at the symbol for ‘power’, then refilled my brush and under it drew out two more characters: ‘Chinese’ and ‘method’.
Kampo
. Chinese medicine.

Healing
.

What did I remember from the reading I’d done? I pulled out all the books from Kinokuniya and sat, some of them cracked open over my knee, some resting on top of the paintings. I kept one finger holding a place in one book while I leafed through another, the paintbrush between my teeth. Mickey Rourke’s gold light shone in squares on the
tatami
.

It was amazing. It was all there. I’d been reading it for weeks, over and over again, and I still hadn’t seen it. But now, with my new eyes, I was seeing it all. 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.

I picked up the three sheets of
kanji
– hunger, power, healing – went to the wall, pinned them on to the Tokyo skyline and looked at them thoughtfully. Japan’s history was all coiled around China’s: so many things had been transferred, why not this? If human flesh could be a medicine in China, then why not here in Japan? I returned to my textbooks. There
had
been something. I had a vague, vague recollection of something . . . Something I’d read in a module at university.

I pulled out a study of post-war Japan. Somewhere in it were transcripts of the Tokyo war trials. I quickly lit a cigarette, sat down cross-legged on the floor and leafed through it. I found what I was looking for two-thirds of the way through: the testimony of a young Japanese woman employed during the war by the notorious 731 unit. I sat there in the dim light, my hands and feet suddenly terribly cold, and read the chapter: ‘Dubbed “maruta” (logs), allied servicemen POWs were subjected to vivisection and human experimentation.’

There was a picture of the assistant who had given evidence. She was young, pretty, and I could imagine the chill and absolute silence in the great military training auditorium, no one in the court moving – or even breathing – as she described in a small, clear voice the day she had eaten the liver of an American serviceman. ‘
For my health
.’

I sat there for a long time, staring at the picture of this beautiful young cannibal. In 1944 at least one person in Japan had thought that cannibalism could help their health. It was time to take Fuyuki much more seriously than I ever could have imagined.

It took me a long time to fall asleep, the duvet wrapped round me like a shroud, and when I did I dreamed that everything in the room was laid out just as it was in real life. I was on the futon, exactly as I was in reality, in my pyjamas, lying on my side, one hand under the pillow, one on top, my knees drawn up. The only thing that differed was that in the dream my eyes were open – I was wide awake and listening. A steady rhythmic noise came from the corridor, muffled, like someone having a whispered conversation. From the other side, the window, there was the sound of something gnawing at the mosquito screen.

My dream self’s first thought was that the gnawing was a cat, until with a wrench and a grinding of steel wire the screen gave, and some heavy thing like a bowling ball rolled into my room. When I squinted down I saw that it was a baby. It lay on the floor on its back, crying, its arms and legs agitating, going up and down like pistons. For a brilliant, exhilarating moment I thought it must be my baby girl, having made it at last across the continents to see me, but just as I was about to reach for her, the baby rolled on to its side and reached blindly for me. I felt hot breath and a little tongue licking the sole of my foot. Then, with horribly vicious speed, she snapped her gummy teeth round my toes.

I bolted from the bed, shaking her and batting at her, grabbing her by the head and trying to prise open her jaws, but she clung on, snarling and snapping and turning furious somersaults in the air, saliva coming from her mouth. At last I gave a final kick and the baby flew against the wall, screeching, and dissolved into a shadow that slid to the floor and flowed out of the window. Shi Chongming’s voice seemed to come out of her as she disappeared:
What will a man do to live for ever? What won’t he eat?

I woke with a start, the duvet tangled round me, my hair sticking to my face. It was five a.m. Outside the window I could hear Tokyo bucking and tossing through the dying moments of a storm and, for a moment, I thought I could still detect the screaming in the undertones of the wind, as if the baby was rocketing through the empty rooms downstairs. I sat very still, the duvet clutched in my hands. The heating was chugging and the ventilation pipes rattling, and the room was full of a strange, grey light. And, now that I thought about it, there was another noise. An odd noise that had nothing to do with my dream and nothing to do with the storm. It was coming from somewhere on the other side of the house.

All knowledge comes with a price. Today Liu Runde and I have learned things we wish we could forget. Pushed up against the wall in the small room at the factory was a low army cot, a filthy blood-stained mattress thrown casually on it. A kerosene lamp, a Chinese make, stood unlit on it, as if someone had used it to light whatever diabolical procedure was performed there – whatever it was that had produced the copious amounts of blood that had congealed on the floor and walls. It seemed the only things not sticky with blood was a pile of belongings stacked against the wall – a pair of split-sole
tabi
overboots and a soldier’s pack made of cow-hide so raw that there was still hair attached. On the small desk, next to the manager’s old abacus, stood a row of small brown medicine bottles sealed with waxed paper, Japanese lettering on the labels; a handful of phials containing a variety of coarse powders; a pestle and mortar, alongside squares of folded apothecary paper. Behind these were arranged three army mess tins and a water canteen with an Imperial chrysanthemum stamped on it. Liu put a finger on one of the mess tins and tilted it. When I leaned over to look inside I saw rags floating in an indescribable mixture of blood and water.

‘Good God.’ Liu set the tin upright. ‘What in heaven’s name happens in here?’

‘He’s ill,’ said the boy, sullenly indicating the medicine bottles. ‘A fever.’

‘I don’t mean the bottles! I mean
this
. The blood. Where is the blood from?’

‘The blood . . . the blood is . . . the boys on the street say that the blood is . . .’

‘What?’ Liu looked at him sternly. ‘What do they say?’

He ran his tongue uncomfortably over his front teeth. He was suddenly pale. ‘No, it must be a mistake.’

‘What do they say?’

‘They’re older than me,’ he said, lowering his eyes. ‘The other boys are much older than I am. I think they must be telling me tales . . .’

‘What do they say?’

His face twisted reluctantly, and when he spoke his voice was very quiet, no more than a whisper. ‘They say that the women . . .’

‘Yes? What about the women?’

‘They say that he . . .’ His voice became almost unintelligible. ‘He takes shavings from them. Shavings of their skin. He scrapes them.’

The food in my stomach rolled and heaved. I sank down to my haunches, my face in my hands, dizzy and sick. Liu took a breath, then gripped the boy by his jacket and drew him away from the room. He led him straight out of the building without another word, and shortly I stumbled out after them, my stomach turning.

I caught up with them about a hundred yards away. Liu had his son in a doorway and was grilling him. ‘Where did you hear this?’

‘The boys on the streets are all talking about it.’

‘Who is he? This
yanwangye
? Who is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He’s a human being – of course he is. And what manner of human being? Japanese?’

‘Yes. A lieutenant.’ The boy gripped his collar where an IJA officer would wear a rank badge. ‘The
yanwangye
in a lieutenant’s uniform.’ He looked at me. ‘Did you hear the motorcycle this morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s him. They say he’ll be hungry for ever because nothing makes him stop. The other boys say he’s on a search that will last for ever.’

I have to pause here as I write this because I am recalling a scene – a vivid scene – a conversation I had with Liu before the invasion. We are cramped in his reception room, some cups and a little dish of shredded Nanking salt duck between us, and he is telling me about bodies he saw in Shanghai, bodies desecrated by the Japanese. I can’t help reliving the scenes he drew for me that night. In Shanghai, apparently, anything was taken as a trophy: an ear, a scalp, a kidney, a breast. The trophy was worn on the belt, or pinned to a cap – soldiers who could show off scalps or genitals had great power. They posed with their trophies, waiting for photographs to be taken by their comrades. Liu had heard rumours of a group of soldiers who had stitched Chinese scalps, shaved into old-fashioned Manchu queues, to the back of their caps as the badge of their unit. Among them moved a soldier from another unit who carried a cine-camera, probably stolen from a journalist, or looted from one of the big houses in the International Zone. The men showed off for him too, laughing and throwing the plaits over their shoulders, aping the walk of the girls in the cabarets on Avenue Edward VII. They were not ashamed of their unnatural behaviour, rather they were proud – eager to show off.