If one views evil as something purely within the mythological and religious realms, and if the only depiction of the ‘devil’ comes from horror films that draw demons as physically grotesque aberrations of the angelic or human presence, Mo Hayder’s THE DEVIL OF NANKING will radically alter all such preconceptions with a picture of evil so abhorrent, so vile, so genuine you will know you have come as close to touching it as you will ever want – if you ever manage to make your way to the book’s end at all.
The beginning of the story takes one to China in late December of 1937. One man is vigorously pursing another through the snow. The second man is carrying a film camera the first man wants. What is on the film, or who the two men are, is unknown.
Fast forward in time a generation plus. The year is 1990. The setting is Japan. A young Englishwoman named Grey is seeking out a renowned professor, Shi Chongming. She believes he is the owner of a film purported to hold evidence of a massacre that happened when the Japanese invaded Nanking China prior to the start of World War II.
Grey learned of this from an orange book that disappeared; and now everyone thinks she’s crazy – especially after the incident with the five boys in the back of the van.
Therefore to prove to herself she was not crazy, she sells all she has to travel to Japan and find Chongming. He receives her warmly; but when she mentions the film, he angrily rebukes the notion and throws her out.
So what does a young woman do, alone on the streets of a foreign country, little money to her pocket and no place to rest her head?
She meets a handsome young American, fascinated with how “weird” she is. She moves into a mammoth-sized old house, rooms-a-plenty and condition rundown. She takes a job as a hostess, alongside her two Russian housemates, at a popular Japanese nightclub. She encounters the underbelly of Japan’s mafia through the patronage of Junzo Fuyuki, one of Japan’s most notorious gangsters. She even begins working for Shi Chongming, helping him in his quest to discover the nature of the mysterious elixir Fuyuki consumes to ensure long life.
None of which makes any sense to Grey – least of all culling secrets out of a gangster; but as she makes herself available, and she sees Fuyuki’s home, the deadly road to evil lures her onward. It is never a road from which one can depart to retreat into any direction from whence one came. It is impossible to do anything else but tread its harrowing path to the end.
Such is, perhaps, one of the most admirable qualities to THE DEVIL OF NANKING. Though Grey is horribly unqualified for this work Chongming has put to her (she stands on the brink of losing her own self), the woman pursues such a treacherous route with diligence, not allowing the fear that would consume anyone else in her same position, to overwhelm.
This is a flawed woman, and because of those sins she readily ponders, anyone can relate to her struggle. The difference between Grey and other characters is she never applauds those things she succumbs to, the things that have wrecked her life up to that point. She ponders them, and she grows from them, and she overcomes them to stand on surer footing in the end.
It is her story, and it is also Shi Chongming’s story, the two being told parallel to one another until both meet at the book’s end. I was able to figure out some of what the mystery was, how the two stories connected, but I was in no ways prepared for the actual ending that put a sum on the entire experience of these two people.
Was this the full extent of German atrocities being visited upon the Jews? Was it Joseph Stalin’s horrid treatment of his own Russian people? Such is too unfathomable to accept as anything beyond the embellishments of a writer’s Hollywood imagination cheaply attempting to titillate. What Hayder details as happening to the Chinese people at the hand of the Japanese army left me dumbstruck – absent any words to speak.
I assumed what I was reading was a product of Hayder’s imagination. Then I learned it was true. What happened at Nanking in 1937 actually occurred. THE DEVIL OF NANKING is a factual event told through fictional lives. It is a marvelous teaching of history, and it is a fully-charged thriller, dramatically telling the story of one woman seeking the sanity her life has denied her, through one of the most insane examples of man’s inhumanity to man, and encountering one of the most ideally-frightening villains ever.
Fuyuki’s nurse is a monster of one’s nightmares. She is a freak-of-nature. No one knows whether she’s a woman, or a man, a little bit of both, or something altogether unheard of. But as Shi Chongming tells Grey, she is a killer with medical knowledge necessary to inflict as much abhorrent pain upon a human body before death comes to offer relief.
Pick up a copy of THE DEVIL OF NANKING and be glad you don’t live in a time when one people did to another people whatever they wanted – simply because they could.
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