cold comfort
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2023
I read The Nanjing Massacre by Honda Katsuichi. I like that it dunks on its main competitor right on the cover:
It's made up of eye-witness reports that Honda collected on his travels to China in the eighties, as well as field diaries, memoirs, and interviews with Japanese soldiers, alongside contemporary reporting from Japanese newspapers, tied together with a minimal amount of context. It made me tear up a few times it’s all so horrible. There's some really grotesque scenes that will stick with me, in the vein of "we had chicken and rice for dinner and then we spent an hour machine-gunning the 10.000+ prisoners we rounded up as they climbed up and over one another trying to escape us forming giant human pillars that kept toppling over".
At the same time I started M. John Harrison's Viriconium to have something less disgusting to read before bed, but even the first chapter was a bit rapey and murdery, so I switched to Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees which was a much better choice. It's a fantasy classic from 1926, about a city that starts to see troubling incursions of madness, whimsy, and melancholy. This is believed to be caused by people eating smuggled-in fairy fruit, even though relations with the neighbouring Fairyland had been cut off centuries before. It's by no means as simplistic as that makes it sound though, and it weaves together a lot of different strands. I thought it was really good.
I also liked The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I especially liked how we never get direct access to the eponymous vegetarian's perspective, as the three chapters are narrated by her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister.
I think I'll return to Viriconium now.
It's made up of eye-witness reports that Honda collected on his travels to China in the eighties, as well as field diaries, memoirs, and interviews with Japanese soldiers, alongside contemporary reporting from Japanese newspapers, tied together with a minimal amount of context. It made me tear up a few times it’s all so horrible. There's some really grotesque scenes that will stick with me, in the vein of "we had chicken and rice for dinner and then we spent an hour machine-gunning the 10.000+ prisoners we rounded up as they climbed up and over one another trying to escape us forming giant human pillars that kept toppling over".
The gang rape was treated as a kind of sport. Many years after the Massacre, going through captured stores on Peliliu and Okinawa, I found a quantity of the condoms regularly issued by the army to its soldiers. On the wrapping of each was a picture of a Japanese soldier charging with the bayonet. The caption below read simply Totsugeki-"Charge!" That little piece of paper told a lot about the Rape of Nanjing.
Then they saw a gruesome sight: a nearly fleshless skeleton hanging from a tree in the neighbors' yard. Strips of meat that had clearly been torn at by dogs lay on the ground below. They later learned that the skeleton was that of a peasant youth in his twenties named Li Taidong, a large fellow 186 centimeters tall. The barking dogs that the people had heard the night before had been German shepherds used by the Japanese military, and the screams had come from Li Taidong. The screams had lasted for about thirty minutes, and the barking for about an hour. The villagers later surmised that Li had been strung up naked and that the soldiers had sliced off his flesh to feed to the dogs.
There are many and various accounts from Japanese soldiers themselves of how they committed rape, cut open the bellies of pregnant women, and participated in gang rape and mass murder.
The 4- or 5-meter-wide bridge spanning the canal had been destroyed by the Nationalists before the fall of Nanjing. Swollen bodies had been thrown into the river at the place where the bridge had been. Zuo guesses that they numbered in the tens of thousands, or else they could not have made such a huge pile. Boards and doors had been laid over the bodies, and they had become the foundations of a "corpse bridge" that cars drove over.
The Japanese showed up when the villagers were in the midst of threshing. Although everyone fled immediately, three women, Wu Shanxian's wife, Wu Shenshi, along with Zhong Gaoshi and Li Wangshi, were unable to run very fast because of their bound feet. They were shot as they jumped into a stream.
There were rumors going around that the Japanese had cut off women's bound feet and stacked them up at the Jinlian Bridge, so Ye and three companions set out at six one morning to see if the rumors were true.
The Jinlian Bridge was a fairly large bridge over the canal on the way to the Jinlian Temple, but the rumored pile of bound feet was actually at the Little Jinlian Bridge, a single slab of stone about 1 1/2 meters long and 60 or 70 centimeters wide, laid across a branch of the same canal. The feet were piled up not on the bridge itself, but on the road next to it. The pile was of the same diameter as the road and in a cone shape several dozen centimeters high. The cone had been shaped with remarkable care, with a single foot at its apex. Some feet still wore shoes of many colors or decorated with embroidery, while others were bare, and still others were so covered with blood that it was impossible to tell whether they wore shoes or not. Because of the cold, the flesh had not yet started to decay, and there was little odor. Ye and his companions stood around the pile of feet, terrified, pale, and trembling.
Ye soon joined up with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. About two years later, a party leaders' training session was held at Tianmu Mountain in Deqing County, about 100 li (50 kilometers) from Changxing, and that was where Ye met a Japanese prisoner of war who had been captured by Nationalist guerrillas. The prisoner had originally been a carpenter, and since he had been a prisoner for a long time, he could speak some Chinese. When Ye asked him about the bound feet, he replied, "Those feet are a novelty in Japan, and we'd never seen them before, so we cut them off. I didn't do that myself, but other people did."
According to the old people who remained in the city, most of the women whose feet were cut off bled to death.
Then they saw a gruesome sight: a nearly fleshless skeleton hanging from a tree in the neighbors' yard. Strips of meat that had clearly been torn at by dogs lay on the ground below. They later learned that the skeleton was that of a peasant youth in his twenties named Li Taidong, a large fellow 186 centimeters tall. The barking dogs that the people had heard the night before had been German shepherds used by the Japanese military, and the screams had come from Li Taidong. The screams had lasted for about thirty minutes, and the barking for about an hour. The villagers later surmised that Li had been strung up naked and that the soldiers had sliced off his flesh to feed to the dogs.
There are many and various accounts from Japanese soldiers themselves of how they committed rape, cut open the bellies of pregnant women, and participated in gang rape and mass murder.
The 4- or 5-meter-wide bridge spanning the canal had been destroyed by the Nationalists before the fall of Nanjing. Swollen bodies had been thrown into the river at the place where the bridge had been. Zuo guesses that they numbered in the tens of thousands, or else they could not have made such a huge pile. Boards and doors had been laid over the bodies, and they had become the foundations of a "corpse bridge" that cars drove over.
The Japanese showed up when the villagers were in the midst of threshing. Although everyone fled immediately, three women, Wu Shanxian's wife, Wu Shenshi, along with Zhong Gaoshi and Li Wangshi, were unable to run very fast because of their bound feet. They were shot as they jumped into a stream.
There were rumors going around that the Japanese had cut off women's bound feet and stacked them up at the Jinlian Bridge, so Ye and three companions set out at six one morning to see if the rumors were true.
The Jinlian Bridge was a fairly large bridge over the canal on the way to the Jinlian Temple, but the rumored pile of bound feet was actually at the Little Jinlian Bridge, a single slab of stone about 1 1/2 meters long and 60 or 70 centimeters wide, laid across a branch of the same canal. The feet were piled up not on the bridge itself, but on the road next to it. The pile was of the same diameter as the road and in a cone shape several dozen centimeters high. The cone had been shaped with remarkable care, with a single foot at its apex. Some feet still wore shoes of many colors or decorated with embroidery, while others were bare, and still others were so covered with blood that it was impossible to tell whether they wore shoes or not. Because of the cold, the flesh had not yet started to decay, and there was little odor. Ye and his companions stood around the pile of feet, terrified, pale, and trembling.
Ye soon joined up with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. About two years later, a party leaders' training session was held at Tianmu Mountain in Deqing County, about 100 li (50 kilometers) from Changxing, and that was where Ye met a Japanese prisoner of war who had been captured by Nationalist guerrillas. The prisoner had originally been a carpenter, and since he had been a prisoner for a long time, he could speak some Chinese. When Ye asked him about the bound feet, he replied, "Those feet are a novelty in Japan, and we'd never seen them before, so we cut them off. I didn't do that myself, but other people did."
According to the old people who remained in the city, most of the women whose feet were cut off bled to death.
At the same time I started M. John Harrison's Viriconium to have something less disgusting to read before bed, but even the first chapter was a bit rapey and murdery, so I switched to Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees which was a much better choice. It's a fantasy classic from 1926, about a city that starts to see troubling incursions of madness, whimsy, and melancholy. This is believed to be caused by people eating smuggled-in fairy fruit, even though relations with the neighbouring Fairyland had been cut off centuries before. It's by no means as simplistic as that makes it sound though, and it weaves together a lot of different strands. I thought it was really good.
I also liked The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I especially liked how we never get direct access to the eponymous vegetarian's perspective, as the three chapters are narrated by her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister.
I think I'll return to Viriconium now.
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