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Late in the afternoon the lead elements of the General’s army were fighting in the outskirts of the city. Their officers tried to slow the advance. Their battle plans called for regrouping, but the soldiers were no longer under their control. All day they had been ru
The General had not slept for many nights. During that whole last day he had spoken only once, to curse the fires he could see springing up on the horizon.
The radio in his command car crackled and he ignored it. Motorcycle couriers sped beside the car waving dispatch cases, pointing at the insignia they wore, theater command. The General gazed straight ahead and told the corporal to drive faster. Headquarters would tell him to stop, to hold up his advance until the other Japanese armies were in line. But the General was too tired to stop. He wanted to reach the end.
The sun had just set when they passed through the gates of the city. Again the General remarked on the fires, more apparent now because of the darkness. It was several degrees below zero, the wind was rising.
They entered a large square. The General looked around him and said something strange was happening out there. These were Japanese soldiers, the best disciplined in the world. What were they doing?
The staff car had been tightly sealed against the winter weather. They could neither hear nor see clearly what was going on outside. They could only make out scattered movements in the darkness, shadows, faces flaring in the headlights, torches flickering. The General ordered the corporal to stop. He gripped his sword and stepped down into the square.
The corporal moaned, he hid his face in his hands. Mama listened to the snow falling on Tokyo. She turned her teacup in her hands, revolved it three times before she drank. Then she rested her hand on the corporal’s arm again.
Go on, she said. We must hear it all.
The men, moaned the corporal, they weren’t even animals. A soldier speared a baby with a bayonet and threw the baby in the air. A soldier stabbed a woman and ski
The corporal moaned. His head was in his arms. He was crying.
Mama gazed at the rice paper door and saw the frozen fields in the north where she had been born. She saw the poor farmhouses, the barren schoolrooms, the little Japanese boys bent over their books in winter trying to learn a thousand Chinese ideograms so they could read their own history and write their own names. She saw the schoolrooms burn, and the farmhouses, and the pine groves of the temples. She saw the little boys rip up the graceful Chinese characters and shoot them and stab them and defile them, devour them. She saw it all.
He began to shout, whispered the corporal. He was ru
The corporal looked away.
He was naked. Someone had murdered him and pulled off his clothes. His right eye had been ripped from the socket. There was excrement on his epaulets, which lay beside him. His testicles were tied around his neck.
That night, after the corporal left, Mama sat up alone meditating. The next day was New Year’s, her birthday as it was the birthday for everyone of her race.
The cough struck her son a short time afterward, struck him quickly and violently as if the world could no longer tolerate the passage of time. Its course was brief, nothing could be done. She held him and watched his spirit go, one tiny sacrifice to an era where Nanking was but the first act of the far grander circus that was to follow.
She wanted to leave Tokyo and Japan as well. Only one enclave remained on the mainland where a Japanese could still mix with foreigners, Shanghai, an outlaw city where the chaos and despair might equal her own.
She found it all she had expected and more. Among the foreigners who were still there, who had nowhere to go, nothing was left untried. Mama began taking laudanum, the solution of opium in alcohol preferred by many because of its combination of effects.
She spent her time with a group of companions who met nightly to narcotize themselves, to take part in orgies or watch them. Like them she slept during the day and went out only at night. Her nameless companions disappeared regularly, victims of suicides or intrigues, to be replaced by other weary faces who would disappear in turn.
To ease their pain they gave up using each other, or having others used in front of them, and took to watching pornographic movies, a lifeless display of mutilations and fecal sandwiches and tubercular saliva so unreal they could bury themselves in the long nights and dream nothing around them existed.
Of all the people who passed through her life during that period of forgetfulness, only one remained in her memory, the projectionist who showed the movies.
He was a huge man, an American, a giant with a pockmarked face. His body was bloated and his eyes bulged from the quantities of alcohol he consumed. As soon as he arrived in the locked, shuttered room and set up his battered projector there was a sense of relief because the lights could be turned off. The projector whined, the reels rattled, the flickering images crept across the wall as Mama and the others sank into their couches.