The Devil and Miss Hayder

I’m already on record with my thoughts on Mo Hayder’s latest novel (known to some as TOKYO, others as THE DEVIL OF NANKING) and so I was quite pleased to see Elizabeth Renzetti’s profile of the crime writer in the Globe and Mail, discussing the impetus for her third novel, revisiting her Japanese hostess past and why the book won’t be published in Japan:

In the basement, where Hayder wrote her third novel in longhand, are

her reference books, including the ones on the Nanjing massacre. She

has long been drawn to Nanjing, where Japanese forces raped, tortured

and murdered Chinese civilians in 1937-38 during the Sino-Japanese war.

When she was still a teenager, living with a bunch of bikers in

London, she came across a shocking photo of an execution in one of

their blood-and-guts magazines. Years later, while living in Japan, she

saw the same photo again and learned that it was taken in Nanjing.

“I thought, ‘Bloody hell, how can I have never heard of this

before?’ So the next day I started asking my Japanese friends, and they

all went –.” She mimes a blank stare. “They’d never heard of it.”

Hayder’s novel is dedicated to Iris Chang, the young American author of the controversial 1997 bestseller The Rape of Nanking.

Chang’s book, which explored in depth the atrocities committed in

China, drew heavy criticism in Japan. Chang killed herself last year,

at the age of 36, while researching a book about the 1942 Bataan Death

March, and left behind her husband and two-year-old son. “It was so

hard to understand,” says Hayder, who never met Chang. “I thought, God

she must have been so depressed.”

Although her new novel has received the best notices of Hayder’s

career (in its review, Entertainment Weekly called her “diabolically

gifted”), The Devil of Nanking will not be published in Japan.

Her Japanese publishers called her in when they heard about the subject

matter and told her they might be interested in releasing the book if

she didn’t list the number of Nanjing dead at 300,000, a figure they

disputed as “Chinese propaganda.” To this day, the subject is

contentious: Recent anti-Japanese demonstrations in China were sparked

in part by coy wording about Nanjing and other conflicts in Japanese

textbooks.

It really amazes me that people are so reticent to talk about a horrible tragedy, coming from a culture where our largest atrocity has several museums devoted to it (and deservedly so.)