Nanking: A Black Hole in History
ADAM DUNN on a book Japan does not want to read
Cobrapost News Features |
Uploaded on 13 February 2006
THE DEVIL OF NANKING
By Mo Hayder
Grove
360 pages
(Author
photo by Jerry Bauer)
When Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking was published in 1997, it garnered critical acclaim, but did not ultimately cause any surprises (like, say, earning an apology or even acknowledgement from the Japanese government for wartime atrocities). Chang’s suicide in 2004 did. How could the 1937 massacre claim another victim 67 years later? By what dark power does this eruption of unspeakable evil persevere, even kill?
Chang’s book was not the first nonfiction account of the Nanking massacre, though it was certainly one of the most thorough. But the wanton slaughter of over 300,000 Chinese civilians by Imperial Japanese Army forces in December 1937 has fired the imagination of novelists through the years (Edward Whittemore’s 1974 novel Quin’s Shanghai Circus comes eerily close to recreating the horrors chronicled in Chang’s book, which was based on survivors’ testimony). So it’s no big surprise to find the black hole of the Nanking massacre pulsing at the center of Mo Hayder’s new novel.
Hayder (who has attracted/repulsed legions of readers with her novels Birdman [1999] and The Treatment [2001], involving lurid accounts of necrophilia and pedophilia, respectively) broke with her own short history in several ways with her third book. Departing from the style of her first two books, Nanking looks at the massacre through the eyes of a teenaged English girl, and an old Chinese survivor. Both are obsessively on the trails of elusive prizes which lead, inexorably, to December 1937, and the narrative is split between both seekers, who must navigate a perilous course through modern Tokyo’s yakuza-controlled nightlife.
It’s not entirely new territory for the author, who worked at a “hostess bar” in Tokyo while trekking around Asia after leaving home as a teenager. To research the novel, she got herself a job at the same hostess bar where Lucie Blackman worked (Blackman was a young British woman brutally murdered by a bar patron in 2000 — a Japanese businessman named Joji Obara was charged with this crime, as well as over 40 rapes), finding Tokyo quite different this time around. “Whereas in the ‘80s making money in a hostess club was like falling off a log (on my first night I was tipped US $1,000 just for sitting and talking to a group of businessmen), now the girls really have to work for their money. That is probably why Lucie was dating one of her customers – to keep her job,” Hayder explained. “Gone were the days of expense accounts and the real estate around the Imperial Palace being worth more than the whole of the state of California. Instead they were in deflation and the clubs that had once been so full of people were quiet.”
One thing that had not changed was the Japanese denial of the Nanking massacre. “Japanese friends I spoke to had never heard of it,” Hayder said. “Of course, as it turns out, the Japanese I spoke to weren’t being obstructive – they had simply never been taught about the massacre in school. This secrecy only piqued my fascination more.” Hayder blames Japan’s political climate for the continued amnesia. “Several articles from IJA [Imperial Japanese Army] veterans were published just after the war – before the right-wing cover up really got started,” she said. “They were heartfelt apologias for what had happened. But in the ‘50s the subject was buried. All references to it were deleted from school textbooks. Most Japanese who write about it tend to live outside the country – Australia, for example. The only Japanese journalist that I am aware of who lives in the country and publishes accounts of the massacre is Katsuichi Honda. He has to live under an assumed name because of death threats from the right wing.”
Neither Hayder nor her new novel sheds any light on the origins of the massacre. “It seems to be an accumulation of factors - exhaustion among the troops, the Japanese ethos that the Chinese were less important than animals, hunger, fear,” Hayder said. “Probably the chief culprit was a break down in the chain of command. General Matsui Iwane was ill with tuberculosis at the time, and in his place a relative of the Emperor was in command. And that may be why the story gets blurry – because after the war the Japanese had a fierce determination to focus blame away from the Imperial family.” (At war’s end, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East prosecuted 25 senior IJA officers. Seven, including Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were executed.)
Hayder’s publishing history seems choppy — her US publisher dropped her over Nanking and it took her more than a year to find a replacement (“The move to Grove Atlantic was because they wanted to publish ‘The Devil’ as a more literary novel”). She shows no signs of moving to lighter fare (“If you’re saying are there any taboos still sacred, then the answer is absolutely not. The taboos of any society are exactly where a writer should be poking his/her nose”). And least surprising of all: despite her first two books being published in Japan, Nanking is not. The reason? “My publishers have declined this book. Their main dispute was that I had misrepresented the casualty figures.”
(Cobrapost News Features)
Previous columns by Adam Dunn
In the Anteroom of Hell
Reinventing
Vachss
Of
Cabs and Capitalism
Come One, Come All
All Together, For
Now
Bad News from Home
Bombay Redux