The Devil of Nanking Read Online Free PDF

back to the street and pulled several folded pages from my bag. One of the last things I’d done in London was to photocopy a map of Tokyo. It was on a very big scale: it covered several pages. I stood in the late sunshine with the crowd streaming round me, and inspected the pages. I looked up and down the long thoroughfare I stood on. It seemed like a canyon because the buildings were so dense and precipitous, the crowds and the neon signs and the buildings bristling with shops and business and noise. What was I supposed to do now? I’d given up everything to come here to see Shi Chongming, and now there was nowhere for me to go, nothing more for me to do.
    Eventually when I’d studied the pages for ten minutes and still couldn’t decide what to do, I crumpled them back into the bag, put the strap across my chest, closed my eyes and turned round and round on the spot, counting out loud. When I reached twenty-five I opened my eyes and, ignoring the strange looks from other pedestrians, headed off in the direction I faced.

3
    I walked round Tokyo for hours, amazed by the skyscrapers like glass precipices, the cigarette and drinks advertising boards, the tinselly, mechanical voices that floated down everywhere I went, making me picture asylums up there in the sky. Round and round I went, directionless as a worm, dodging commuters, cyclists, tiny lonely schoolchildren immaculate in sailor suits, their leather backpacks polished like beetles’ wings. I have no idea how far I walked, or where I went. When the light had gone from the city, the sweat had soaked through my clothes, the strap of the holdall had dug a groove across my shoulder and there were blisters on my feet, I stopped. I was standing in the grounds of a temple, surrounded by maples and cypresses, fading camellias spotting the shade. It was cool in there, and silent, only the occasional shiver of hundreds of Buddhist prayer slips tied to the branches rustling as a breeze moved through. Then I saw, lined up in ghostly silence under the trees, rows and rows of stone child effigies. Hundreds of them, each wearing a hand-knitted red bonnet.
    I sat down on a bench with a shocked bump and stared back at them. They stood in neat lines, some holding a windmill or a teddy, some wearing little bibs. Rows and rows of blank, sad faces turned to look at me. They could make you cry, those children and their expressions, so I stood and went to another bench where I didn’t have to look at them. I pulled off my shoes and stripped off my tights. My bare feet felt lovely in the cool – I pushed them out in front of me and wriggled my toes. At the entrance to the shrine there was a bowl of water. It was meant for worshippers to purify their hands, but I went to it and used the bamboo ladle to dribble water over my feet. It was cool and clear, and afterwards I scooped a handful into my mouth. When I had finished and turned back, the stone children seemed to have moved. They seemed to have taken a collective step backwards as if they were shocked by my behaviour in this sacred place. I stared at them for a while. Then I went back to the bench, got a packet of biscuits from my bag and started munching.
    I didn’t have anywhere to go. The night was warm and the park was quiet, the great red and white Tokyo Tower all lit up above me. As the sun went down a lamp came on in the trees, and before long the homeless joined me on the surrounding benches. The vagrants, no matter how down and out, all seemed to have little meals, complete with chopsticks, some in lacquered bento lunch-boxes. I sat on my bench eating my biscuits and watching them. They ate their rice and stared back at me.
    One of the homeless men had brought with him a pile of cardboard, which he placed near the tiled entrance gate and perched on, naked except for a pair of filthy, stained jogging bottoms, dirt on his round belly. He spent a long time looking at me and laughing – a tiny manic Buddha who had been rolled