Over two thousand years ago, so the legend goes, lived the beautiful Miao-shan, youngest daughter of the king Miao-chuang. She refused to get married, in spite of her father’s wishes, and in his anger he sent her into exile where she lived on a mountain called Xiangshan, the Fragrant Mountain, eating from the trees, drinking from the perfumed streams. But back at the palace her father was growing ill. His skin was diseased and he couldn’t move from his bed. On Fragrant Mountain Miao-shan heard about his illness, and knowing, like every Chinese girl, the importance of filial piety, she didn’t hesitate to pluck out her own eyes, or to instruct her servants to cut off her hands. Her hands and her eyes were sent back to the palace where they were made into medicine and fed to her father who, according to the myth, made a remarkable recovery.
Miao-shan was one of the beautiful links – she was one of the most perfect stitches in the tapestry I was about to unpick.
The Russians thought I was drunk or ill. In the confusion the three of us had got into the first taxi that pulled up outside the apartment block – I’d thrown myself into the corner and I sat all the way home with my head down, my hand clamped to my face. ‘Don’t throw up,’ Irina said. ‘I hate when people throw up.’
The house was freezing. I took off my shoes and went down the corridor to my room. One by one I pulled out the portfolios and stood in the middle of the room, emptying them so that all the notes and sketches floated down like snow and spread out across the floor. Some of them fell right side up, old faces looking at me. I took down all my books and built them into walls round the papers, making a little enclosure in the centre of the room. I put on the electric fire and sat down in the middle, my coat wrapped round me. Here was a sketch of Purple Mountain on fire. A long account of the bridge of corpses over the Jiangdongmen canal. Tomorrow I was going to go back to Fuyuki’s. You can always tell when you’re getting close to the truth – it’s as if the air starts to tingle. I had made up my mind. I was going to be prepared.
The front door opened noisily and someone clattered up the stairs. We’d left Jason at the apartment building. I’d seen him briefly in the smoked-glass lobby, standing silently among the other hostesses, his holdall strapped across his chest. The doorman was struggling to deal with taxis for everyone, four paramedics were pushing in the opposite direction through the crowd, using their bags to get to the lift, but in the confusion Jason seemed very still: his face was an odd, shocked grey colour, and when he raised his eyes and caught mine, for a brief instant he didn’t seem to recognize me. Then he raised his hand woodenly and began to make his way over. I turned, giving him the back of my head, and got into a taxi after the Russians. ‘Hey!’ I heard him call, but before he could reach the front of the crowd the taxi had pulled away.
Now I could hear him in the hallway, coming down the corridor, his footsteps heavy. I got off the futon and went to the door, but before I could touch it, he threw it open and stood in the half-light, swaying. He hadn’t stopped to kick off his shoes or hang up his holdall, he had come straight down to my room. There was sweat on his face and stains on his sleeve.
‘It’s me.’ He put a hand drunkenly on his chest. ‘It’s me.’
‘I know.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘You know something? I had no idea how perfect you are! No idea until tonight. You are perfect!’ He wiped his face clumsily, and licked his lips, looking down at my blouse, at the tight velvet skirt I was wearing. There was a faint dampness to him. I could smell alcohol and his sweat and something else. Something like the saliva of an animal. ‘Weirdo, I take my hat off to you. We’re as bad as each other. As sick as each other. Jigsaw pieces – we’ve both got exactly what the other needs. And I,’ he lifted his hand in the air, ‘I am going to tell you something you’re really going to love.’ He grabbed the hem of my blouse. ‘Take this off and show me your-’
‘Don’t.’ I pushed his hands away. ‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Come on-’
‘ No! ’
He hesitated, caught off-guard.
‘Listen,’ I said, my throat tightening. The blood was coming fast to my face. ‘Listen to me now. I’ve got something important to tell you. You’re wrong when you say we’re the same. We’re not. Absolutely not.’
He started to laugh, shaking his head. ‘Oh, come on.’ He wagged a finger at me. ‘Don’t try and tell me you’re not a bit of a pervert-’
‘ We are not the same,’ I hissed, ‘because ignorance, Jason, ignorance is not the same as insanity. And it never has been.’
He stared at me. Angry pink patches appeared on his face. ‘Are you trying to be clever?’
‘ Ignorance,’ I repeated, my pulse thumping loudly in my temples, ‘is not the same as insanity. It’s not the same as perversion, or evil, or any of the other things you could accuse me of. Some people are crazy and others are sick, and there are others still who are evil or freaky or whatever you call it. But this is very important.’ I took a deep breath. ‘ They are not the same as the ignorant.’
‘I get it,’ he said, breathing hard. His face was flushed and I glimpsed a much older, fleshier Jason waiting in his future – overweight and slack. He leaned back a little, unsteadily, then forward, trying to bring his head to the right distance to focus on the point where the pulse beat in my neck. ‘I get it. You’ve suddenly, out of the blue, started being a bitch.’ He put his foot in the door and leaned into the room, his face close to mine. ‘I’ve been so fucking patient with you. Haven’t I? Even though part of me’s like, “Jason, you fucking asshole, why’re you wasting your time with that little nutjob?” And all I’ve done is be patient. And what do I get in return? You. Being way, way weird with me.’
‘Well, that,’ I said rigidly, ‘must be a direct result… of me… being a weirdo.’
He opened his mouth, then closed it. ‘What’s that? A joke?’
‘No. Not a joke.’ I reached out to slide the door closed. ‘Goodnight.’
‘You bitch,’ he said, in quiet awe. ‘You fucking little-’
I opened the door a few inches and hurtled it back along the rails towards his foot, making him jump back.
‘ Fuck! ’ he shouted. I closed the door and locked it. ‘That does it, you asshole.’ He kicked the door. ‘Shitty little retard.’ I could hear him faltering in the corridor, not certain what to do with his frustration. I expected him to boot the door down. Or to run at it with both fists out. I lit a cigarette and sat among my books, my fingers pressed to my head, and waited until I heard him give up.
He kicked the door once more, a parting shot: ‘You’ve just made a big mistake, shithead. The biggest mistake of your life. You’ll regret this till the day you die.’
Then I heard him stumbling back to his room, muttering to himself, thumping the shutters on the landing as he went.
When he’d gone, and the house was quiet, I sat still for some time. I smoked one cigarette after another, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs, calming myself. At last, when almost half an hour had gone by and I’d calmed down, I got up.
I flattened a piece of paper on the floor and got out my jar of paintbrushes. I sat for a while, surrounded by my books and paints, my hands resting on my ankles, staring up at Mickey Rourke’s light. I was trying to imagine, really imagine, what it would be like to eat another human being. At university I’d been expected to read so much, about so many unimportant things: years of rubbish were lying around in my head. I had to concentrate very, very hard to remember the things I needed now.
After a while I put out my cigarette and mixed together a little yellow ochre, some rose madder and zinc white. I went quickly, letting the paint ridge and pool where it wanted. There was one reason you might eat another human, I thought, one good reason. A face flowed out of the end of my paintbrush, gaunt cheeks, neck like a stalk; below it, the shadowed rack of ribs, a tapering bone of a hand resting on the frozen ground. A starving man.
I understood about starvation. It is one of those cold shadows, like disease, that trail round the globe in the footsteps of war. There had been two great famines in Stalin’s years: hundreds of Russians had had to survive by eating human flesh. At university I’d been to the inaugural lecture of a professor who’d got into the St Petersburg city archives and found evidence that Leningraders in the great Second World War siege had eaten their dead. I dripped on to the paper a long, dry shinbone, the foot growing on the end like an awkward fruit. You’d have to be so hungry, so desperate, to eat another human being. Other uneasy names were coming into my head: the Donner pass, the John Franklin expedition, the Nottingham Galley, the Medusa, the Old Christians’ rugby team in the Andes. And what did the Chinese mean when they said Yi zi er shi: ‘We are hungry enough to eat each other’s children’?
I painted the kanji for it.
Hunger.
I lit another cigarette and scratched my head. You can’t imagine what you might do if you were starving. But there was more: human beings cannibalize for other reasons. I switched to a calligraphy brush and wetted the pine soot tablet. I loaded the brush with ink and slowly, slowly drew out a single kanji: a little like the character for number nine, but with a backward flick to its tail.
Power.
There had been a research student at university who had been crazy about warlike sects in Africa – I remembered him fly-postering the university for a lecture on the Human Leopard Societies of Sierra Leone, and the Liberian Poro child soldiers. I didn’t go to the lecture, but I’d overheard people talking about it afterwards: ‘ Believe me, what he was saying was as freaky as ’parently they cut up their enemies and eat them. If it’s someone they’ve defeated it’s supposed to make them stronger.’ Some of the Nanking testimonies recalled corpses on the street with hearts and livers missing. The whispers were that they’d been taken by the Japanese soldiers. To make them more potent in combat.
I looked at the symbol for ‘power’, then refilled my brush and under it drew out two more characters: ‘Chinese’ and ‘method’. Kampo. Chinese medicine.
Healing.
What did I remember from the reading I’d done? I pulled out all the books from Kinokuniya and sat, some of them cracked open over my knee, some resting on top of the paintings. I kept one finger holding a place in one book while I leafed through another, the paintbrush between my teeth. Mickey Rourke’s gold light shone in squares on the tatami.
It was amazing. It was all there. I’d been reading it for weeks, over and over again, and I still hadn’t seen it. But now, with my new eyes, I was seeing it all. First I found Miao-chuang, eating his daughter’s eyes and hands. Why? To cure himself. Then I found, in the translation of a sixteenth-century medical compendium, the Ben Cao Gang Mu, treatments made from thirty-five different human body parts. Bread soaked in human blood for pneumonia and impotence, human bile dripped into alcohol and used to treat rheumatism. The flesh of executed criminals to treat eating disorders. There were Lu Xun’s outrageous tales of human meat eaten in Wolf Cub Village, and his genuine account of his friend Xu Xilin’s liver and heart being eaten by En Ming’s bodyguards. In a textbook about the Cultural Revolution there was a long description of the outdated tradition of ko ku – the pinnacle of filial piety, the act of boiling a piece of one’s flesh into soup to rescue a beloved parent from sickness.
I picked up the three sheets of kanji – hunger, power, healing – went to the wall, pinned them on to the Tokyo skyline and looked at them thoughtfully. Japan ’s history was all coiled around China ’s: so many things had been transferred, why not this? If human flesh could be a medicine in China, then why not here in Japan? I returned to my textbooks. There had been something. I had a vague, vague recollection of something… Something I’d read in a module at university.
I pulled out a study of post-war Japan. Somewhere in it were transcripts of the Tokyo war trials. I quickly lit a cigarette, sat down cross-legged on the floor and leafed through it. I found what I was looking for two-thirds of the way through: the testimony of a young Japanese woman employed during the war by the notorious 731 unit. I sat there in the dim light, my hands and feet suddenly terribly cold, and read the chapter: ‘Dubbed “maruta” (logs), allied servicemen POWs were subjected to vivisection and human experimentation.’
There was a picture of the assistant who had given evidence. She was young, pretty, and I could imagine the chill and absolute silence in the great military training auditorium, no one in the court moving – or even breathing – as she described in a small, clear voice the day she had eaten the liver of an American serviceman. ‘ For my health.’
I sat there for a long time, staring at the picture of this beautiful young cannibal. In 1944 at least one person in Japan had thought that cannibalism could help their health. It was time to take Fuyuki much more seriously than I ever could have imagined.