“Grandma,” he mumbled, a little worm of wrinkles on his forehead.
I squatted down and hugged and kissed him. He even smelled like his father. “Do you go to school?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“In what grade?”
He didn’t get the question, but Mitsuko put in, “Second.”
“When’s your birthday?”
His mother answered, “December fourth.”
“I will remember that, Shin,” I said, and kissed him between the eyes.
The hearing was to resume at one thirty, just a few minutes away. A Chinese official came out of the foyer and beckoned me to enter the court. What should I do? By no means could I let others know I was meeting my family members here. I was representing all the Nanjing women brutalized by the Japanese army and couldn’t possibly acknowledge Mitsuko and Shin overtly now. That would have amounted to inviting disaster. On the spur of the moment, I took off the gold bangle from my wrist and handed it to Mitsuko. “Haowen wanted you to have this,” I said, clasping her hand with both of mine. “Please don’t come to this place again. It’s not safe.”
Without waiting for her response, I veered and headed for the courthouse, my legs shaking. I had no clue where exactly we were staying, because all the Chinese eyewitnesses were semiquarantined, traveling as a group between the courthouse and the hotel, a wooden villa on the Sumida River. Otherwise I would have let Mitsuko know where we might meet again.
Several American missionaries were in Tokyo for the war crimes trials as welclass="underline" Searle, Reverend Magee, Dr. Wilson, and Holly Thornton. I was happy to see them, though I was gloomy after meeting Mitsuko and Shin.
“What’s wrong?” Holly asked me one evening. “You look so blue.”
“I’m kind of under the weather,” I said. “This humidity really gets to me.”
“The hearings must’ve gotten to you a lot too.”
“I can’t sleep well these days.”
I dared not confide in Holly, whose eyes crinkled up at the corners as she observed me. Unlike Minnie, she might not be that discreet in spite of her good nature.
The Chinese side had little material evidence to support our charges because during the war nobody had expected to face these criminals at such a trial. But thanks to the conscientiousness of the Americans — particularly the Safety Zone Committee’s paperwork kept by Searle, the photographs shot by Magee, and the medical records filed by Wilson — and also thanks to some secret reports about the Nanjing atrocities that the German embassy had dispatched to the Nazi government, the court could make a fair assessment of the crimes perpetrated by the Imperial Army. Magee disclosed to me that he’d brought along the footage he’d shot, but the court wouldn’t accept the films as evidence. In truth, the U.S. government meant to downplay the trial and avoid antagonizing the Japanese populace so that Japan would become a staunch anticommunist country. Among the twenty-five major war criminals on trial, only seven received the death penalty.
When the judge asked Iwane Matsui whether he was guilty, he muttered that he was not. Still, the moment the death sentence was announced, the top general, skeletal and bespectacled now, sobbed and collapsed in his seat, unable to stand up. His bald head was bobbing. Two tall guards wearing white helmets and “MP” armbands stepped forward, pulled him up, and hauled him out of the courtroom.
We left Tokyo on a balmy morning in late August. As we walked out of the hotel and headed for the sedans that were taking us to the airport, I caught sight of Mitsuko and Shin again. They stood at the side of the gate, she wearing an apple-green cheongsam that set off her curvaceous figure, while he had on a white shirt and navy blue shorts. Behind them was a large bonsai in a stone planter, and beyond them seagulls were sailing above the turquoise river, letting out cries. Mother and son waved at me almost timidly while my colleagues and the officials turned to watch. There was no way I could go up to Mitsuko and Shin, so I just nodded at them. Slowly I climbed into a car. As we pulled away, I covered my face with both hands.
That was the last time I saw them.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. For the information, facts, and historical details, I relied on numerous publications and am indebted to their authors, editors, and translators.
In addition to the electronic version of Minnie Vautrin’s Diary (1937–1940) provided by Yale Divinity School Library, I found the following publications very useful in creating this noveclass="underline" Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937–38 (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and They Were in Nanjing: The Nanjing Massacre Witnessed by American and British Nationals (Hong Kong University Press, 2004), both edited by Suping Lu; Hua-ling Hu’s American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, ed. Erwin Wickert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing, ed. Zhang Kaiyuan (M. E. Sharpe, 2001); Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (Basic Books, 1997); Honda Katsuichi’s The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, trans. Karen Sandness and ed. Frank Gibney (M. E. Sharpe, 1999); Documents on the Rape of Nanking, ed. Timothy Brook (University of Michigan Press, 1999); Mary Bosworth Treudley’s This Stinging Exultation (Taipei: The Orient Cultural Service, 1972); Ginling College, coauthored by Mrs. Lawrence Thurston and Miss Ruth M. Chester (New York: United Board for Christian Colleges in China, 1955); The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs, coauthored by Shi Young and James Yin (Chicago and San Francisco: Innovative Publishing Group, 1997); Qin hua rijun nanjing da tusha riji [Diaries by the Japanese Soldiers in the Nanjing Massacre], ed. Guangyi Wu (Beijing: Sociological Documents Press, 2005); Zhaiwei Sun’s Chengqing lishi [Clarifying History: Studies and Reflections on the Nanjing Massacre] (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press, 2005); Tamaki Matsuoka’s Nankin-sen tozasareta kioku o tazunete [Battle of Nanking: Searching for the Closed Memories — Witnesses of 102 Japanese Soldiers in China], translated into Chinese by Meiying Quan and Jianyun Li, and edited by Weifan Shen, Zhaoqi Cheng, and Chengsha Zhu (Shanghai Reference Books Press, 2002); Nanjing da tusha shiliao ji (7: Dongjing shenpan) [Historical Materials of Nanjing Massacre (vol. 7: The Tokyo Trials)], ed. Xiaming Yang (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press, 2005); Nanjing da tusha shiliao ji (28: lishi tuxiang) [Historical Materials of Nanjing Massacre (vol. 28: Historical Photographs and Graphics)], ed. Bihong Cao et al. (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press, 2006); and In the Name of the Emperor [documentary], directed by Nancy Tong and Christine Choy (Hong Kong, 1995).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My heartfelt thanks to my editor, Dan Frank, for upholding a rigorous standard; to Deb Garrison for her invaluable comments; to my agent, Lane Zachary, for her patience and unflagging enthusiasm; to Suping Lu for allowing me to reprint the map of Jinling Women’s College; to Rong Cai and Changsheng Li for helping me get some details right; to Aimin Chen and Yuen Ying Chan for sending me needed materials; and to Lisha and Wen for their constant love and support.