Free Tokyo by Mo Hayder

sharp breath. The hostesses frowned and Irina put down her drink with a shocked clink. The man next to me was thinking about what I’d said. At length he took a breath and said, ‘What an odd question. Why do you ask?’
    ‘Because,’ I said, in a tiny voice, my heart sinking, ‘because it’s
     
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    what I’ve been studying for nine years. Nine years and seven months and nineteen days.’
    He was silent for a moment, looking at my face, trying to read me. Nobody at the table seemed to breathe: they were all sitting forward, poised on their chair edges, waiting to hear what his response would be. After a long time he lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and rested it carefully, deliberately, in the ashtray.
    ‘My father was in China,’ he said seriously, sitting back and folding his arms. ‘In Manchuria. And as long as he lived he wouldn’t talk about what happened.’ His cigarette smoke moved up to the ceiling in a long, unbroken stream, like a white finger. ‘My schoolbooks had all mention of it removed. I remember sitting in class, all of us holding the paper up to the light, making sure we couldn’t read what was written under the whiteout. Maybe,’ he said, not looking at anyone, but directing the words into the air, ‘maybe you’ll tell me about it.’
    I’d been sitting with my mouth open stupidly, terrified of what he might say. Slowly it dawned on me that he wasn’t angry and the colour came back to my face. I sat forward, excited. ‘Yes,’ I said eagerly. ‘Of course. I can tell you anything you want to know. Anything—’ Suddenly the words were backing up in my throat, wanting to spill out. I pushed my hair behind my ears and put my hands on the table. ‘Now, I think that the most interesting part was what happened in Nanking. No. Actually, not what happened in Nanking itself, but - let me … let me put it a different way. The most interesting thing was what happened while the troops were marching from Shanghai to Nanking. No one ever has really understood what happened, you see, why they changed …’
    And that was how I started talking. I talked and talked into the night. I talked about Manchuria and Shanghai and Unit 731. Most of all, of course, I talked about Nanking. The hostesses sat in boredom, inspecting their nails, or leaning together and whispering to each other, shooting me glances. But the men all sat forward in eerie silence, staring at me, their faces taut with concentration. They didn’t say much more that evening. They left in silence and, at the end of the night, when Mama Strawberry
     
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    clipped over to us with the tips, a sour look on her face, it was me she singled out. The men had left me the biggest tip. More than three times what they’d left anyone else.
     
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    8
     
    Nanking, 1 March 1937
    J^
    The time I spend fretting about my wife! Thinking about our differences! For many of my colleagues this quaint, arranged marriage is anathema to all their ideals and, indeed, I had always expected to make a sensible alliance, maybe with someone from the university, one of those forward thinkers who take time, like our president Chiang Kai-shek, to truly consider China and her future. But, then, I hadn’t bargained for my mother’s hand in the matter.
    How infuriating! To be thinking even today of my mother. I tremble with embarrassment when I consider her, when I consider all my superstitious and backward family. The family that enjoyed wealth, but was never inclined or able to escape the provincial village, to break free of the Poyang summer floods. Maybe I’ll never truly escape either, and maybe this is the worst of the enduring truths about me: the proud young linguist from Jinling University, who is underneath just a boy from a China that doesn’t look forward and doesn’t change - that only stands still and waits for death. I think about that green and yellow countryside, punctuated by white goats and juniper trees, the plains where a man grows only