by Mai Jia
Today, Mr Xin is eighty-nine years old; he has used countless names throughout his career, but the name he goes by now is the one he adopted after the end of the War of Resistance: Xin Chunsheng. He told me that he chose it specifically to honour the memory of Warrior – a way of telling others, and reminding himself, that all the glory he enjoyed today had come to him through her. As for the treasure hidden by his father, old Mr Tan, Mr Xin told me that it still hadn’t been found. He was sure that it was out there somewhere, but he had no idea where; the only thing he could be certain of was that it was nowhere on the Tan Estate.
THREE
1
This chapter is about Hihara: his past, his family and his story. I will explain it in the simplest terms, though at the same time I am very much aware that it will make a long chapter. That’s because he was a far more complicated character than I can really begin to understand or imagine.
To be honest, there’s an enormous difference between what I knew at the outset and the impression I developed later on. I came to fear him, even to hate him, because of the contempt with which he responded to events. In trying to get to grips with this character, I felt as if I were walking into a maze of endless twists and turns, of illusions created by smoke and mirrors. Here my knowledge and intelligence were profoundly tested.
There are many historical records that speak of Hihara; there is more information available about him than all the other characters in this story put together. He’s an important protagonist in the histories of twentieth-century China and Japan, and if you go to any library with a modern Chinese history collection and start reading, you will find references to him all over the place.
The foreign scholar who went to the Tan Estate to look for treasure? That was Hihara. It was he who stayed at the estate some years prior to the events of this book and not only found nothing but also lost his wife to murderous assassins. Twenty years before that, Hihara had been a journalist stationed in Shanghai, working for the Japanese newspaper the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun. Under the pen name ‘Nakahara’ he wrote a travel diary and occasional column introducing Chinese culture and customs to his Japanese readership, and this had a great impact on the intelligentsia at the time.
In fact, Hihara came from a family that had a long and deep interest in Chinese history and culture. This went all the way back to the seventeenth century, when Zhu Shunshui – a Chinese scholar who had failed in his attempts to raise an army and get the deposed Ming dynasty restored to power – was forced to flee to Japan. He became friendly with the Hihara family, who were powerful nobles and were at that time based in the city of Mito. The Hiharas were great admirers of Zhu Shunshui’s scholarship and they invited him to live in their household as a sort of private tutor; he taught them history, literature and the art of classical Chinese poetry and remained there until his death in 1682.
The Hiharas’ passionate interest in Chinese history and culture continued through the generations. In the time of our Hihara’s own great-grandfather, several members of the family visited China for themselves and returned with boatloads of books, paintings and other works of art; they subsequently founded a school in Kyoto that specialized in the Chinese language. The entire family was famous in Japan for their knowledge and understanding of China.
Hihara’s grandfather travelled three times to China and was an eminent authority on Japanese studies of Tang-dynasty poetry. In 1914, he was sailing home to Japan from China when his boat sank, drowning everyone on board. When his friends in the Japanese Concession in Shanghai heard this news, they bought a plot in the cemetery there and erected a tombstone for him. The following year, Hihara’s father took his son to Shanghai to perform a tomb-clearing and soul-summoning ceremony for his grandfather. Although his father subsequently went back home to Japan, the young son was left behind on the banks of the Huangpu River, to comfort the soul of his deceased grandfather. He was only thirteen years old, just an ordinary middle-school student. He lived with the family of one of his late grandfather’s friends, speaking Chinese, reading Chinese, wearing Chinese clothes and learning Chinese poetry; he was more Sinicized than many a Chinese person, to the point where people didn’t realize that he was actually Japanese but thought that he was a Chinese person who had lived for a time in Japan.
In the spring of 1921, just as Hihara was about to graduate from Shanghai’s Fudan University, the famous Japanese short-story writer Akutagawa Ryu¯nosuke arrived in the city as a journalist for the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and Hihara went to pay him a courtesy visit.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan’s attitude towards its vast Chinese neighbour had been quite clear. In 1905, Japan had won the Russo-Japanese War, a victory that had given it an authority and freedom of action in north-east China that would eventually, in 1932, lead to it establishing its puppet regime of Manchukuo in that part of the country. Extreme right-wing ideology was gaining traction across Japan and by the late 1920s its adherents were calling for the country to expand its army and prepare for war. The aim was to incorporate by force China, Korea and other countries into the Japanese realm as part of the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Hihara was violently critical of this fascist movement, and Akutagawa admired his stance enormously. The two of them became friends immediately.
Akutagawa needed an interpreter on his assignments in Shanghai and Hihara was the perfect man for the job. They became constant companions, wandering round the city’s sophisticated foreign concessions, visiting the wharves and international trading houses of the waterfront Bund, interviewing people at home and journeying out to the countryside. They also toured scenic spots like Suzhou, with its many lovely formal gardens, and Hangzhou for its West Lake vistas, temples and pavilions. Akutagawa published a series of essays about these journeys after his return to Japan, including My Shanghai Travel Diaries, which contains an account of the young Hihara:
Although not yet twenty, he has the wisdom and experience of a much older man. He is gentle by nature, but when the conversation turned to the strong support shown in Japan for the plans set out by the Imperial Army, he became righteously indignant. For people of his age, righteous indignation is often nothing more than a fit of enthusiasm; they get excited, they tear into the topic, they will say anything to prove their point and don’t care that they cannot justify the position they have adopted. But the young man sitting opposite me was not only emotionally engaged, he also brought his intelligence to bear; he was motivated by affection for his adopted country and by reason.
The breadth of his reading had honed his wits and he was able to quote chapter and verse. He defended his position so strongly that his opponents felt themselves beaten back against the barricades; he spoke fluently and with passion. If our own people were to hear him, they would curse him as a traitor and say that he had lost his Japanese soul.
It was as if he were living in the golden age of the Tang dynasty, and he repeatedly expressed his great admiration for the glories of Chinese civilization. What he said made perfect sense. He acquired and processed new information at speed, weaving it into a web of visible and invisible threads, expertly choosing what to reveal of his learning, and when.
Some Japanese people may feel like cursing him, but we cannot laugh at him for the simple reason that he is not blindly enthusiastic: he has evidence for what he says.
This was just an introduction; it was followed by a whole string of stories and examples, all described in great detail and very enthusiastically. Akutagawa wrote several thousand characters on the subject, unstinting in his praise of Hihara.
The kind of person who would write such things would naturally recommend his protégé to all and sundry. Not long after Akutagawa returned to Japan, Hihara received a letter of appointment from the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun. It could not have come at a better moment. Hihara had just graduated and he needed a job. Akutagawa’s recommendation landed him the position of his dreams; it was the best graduation presen
t he could have imagined, and he never forgot it.
Some years later, on 24 July 1927, Akutagawa committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. When Hihara got the news, he rushed over to Japan to offer his condolences to the family. This was the first time he’d been back home in more than a decade; he’d not even returned when his grandmother had passed away a few years earlier.
But by then Hihara was no longer the person that Akutagawa had known, and by the time he left Japan again, he had changed even more, in much more profound ways. He was now an utterly different person.
When Hihara returned to China after Akutagawa’s funeral, he was no longer just a reporter but a top-level secret agent working for the Imperial Japanese Army. He was part of a secret organization, bound by strict rules and with a clear mission to gather intelligence concerning the Chinese military and blaze a trail for the Imperial Army as they expanded their territory into the heartlands of China. To achieve this he was prepared to risk everything, even his own life.
What a loyal subject of the empire!
It was just as well that Akutagawa was dead by then, because Hihara’s betrayal of all that he stood for would have destroyed him. The change that Hihara underwent from this point onwards was as significant as that which occurs when you move from life to death.
2
Akutagawa’s move from life to death was achieved by two dozen sleeping pills. The changes that Hihara underwent were achieved more gradually, but in many ways they were only made possible by his accreditation as a journalist, which he owed to Akutagawa. Hihara started out living only in the world of books, and that is how Akutagawa found him:
He had a detailed plan for his future studies. He wanted to read one thousand Chinese books before the age of twenty-five, and then he would select the very best of them and devote five more years to studying them. In his thirties he planned to work on translations, while also writing and publishing his own works.
Golden mansions are to be found in books.
Beautiful women are to be found in books.
That was Hihara’s plan, and Akutagawa had nothing but praise for it. But his accreditation as a journalist changed him; he was no longer part of the world of books but found himself in the world of men. Although Shanghai remained his primary base, Hihara began to travel to towns and cities all over the country. Whether he spent just one day in a place or stayed there for weeks or months, he would always make an effort to meet people from all walks of life, trying to get to know them and to listen to their concerns. He really did travel round half of China, and because of this he developed a deep understanding of the political and economic situation and learnt a great deal about the culture. He was told about local customs, about natural disasters and man-made problems, about people’s joys and sorrows, about life and death, yin and yang, bandits and whores, heroes and villains… all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
He wrote reams of notes and worked up this information into a series of articles. He also had a fortnightly column in the Mainichi Shimbun called ‘Travelling Around China’. A complete account of his experiences would fill a fat book.
Having begun his travels, Hihara found that he couldn’t stop. He continued tirelessly, watching, thinking and recording. He became overwhelmed, caught up in an undertaking from which he could not extricate himself, and it was impossible now for him to stick to his reading plan.
He kept on moving.
He kept on observing.
He kept on thinking.
He kept on writing.
He never, ever stopped.
If he were to have given up one aspect of his work, it would have been the newspaper columns. But he didn’t stop writing them, he just changed the publication in which they appeared. From the Mainichi Shimbun he moved to the Asahi Shimbun, then he changed again, and again, moving from one publication to the next, before finally ending up at the Jiji Shimbun. In other words, ‘Travelling Around China’ was like a baton in a relay race, being handed from one periodical or newspaper to another; as soon as one publication dropped it, another picked it up and carried it forwards.
Each time the column was dropped, it was a goodbye. A goodbye to that newspaper. A goodbye to those readers. A goodbye to the old Hihara from the new one. His first paper, the Mainichi Shimbun, was the most left-wing in Japan; the very last paper he wrote for, the Jiji Shimbun, was its most right-wing – in the 1920s it was quite notorious for the way it beat the drum for an invasion of China. Hihara was becoming more and more right-wing and extreme in his views. In the end, none of his old friends recognized him any more. He didn’t recognize himself.
For his first column in the Jiji Shimbun he wrote:
The Chinese today are a worthless race, but perhaps this is because in the past they were so impressive. China now is nothing but a toothless tiger, a phoenix plucked of all its feathers, and all that is left is an empty reputation. Fundamentally, these weakly superstitious and pitifully obedient people deserve neither our love nor our hatred; this place will collapse at the first nudge.
It is only by destroying it and then establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that these people can be reborn as worthy heirs to five thousand years of history.
This was quite different from the kind of thing he’d been writing a few years earlier, in the Mainichi Shimbun. In fact, it could hardly have been more different. His earliest columns had been pure travel diaries, and he hadn’t held back in expressing his admiration for China or his contempt for the handful of small islands that made up the Japanese archipelago:
After Penglangji you arrive in Pengze County. It is located on the south bank of the Yangtze River, amid high peaks and steep cliffs. Between the mountains and the river, reed beds flower as far as the eye can see – all along the course of this great river you have islands and sandbanks where the reeds grow thick. It is a wonderful sight.
It was the first month of winter and willow-floss was everywhere, like frost or snow, creating a beautiful scene. Sometimes I could look into the distance and see the clouds dancing in the treetops; sometimes the water and the sky seemed to blend and become one.
Such majestic scenery can only be found in the heartlands of China, and those of us familiar only with the refined and exquisite landscapes of Japan will find them impossible to picture; we can only look up at the sky and sigh.
The longevity of China rests in its vastness, its grandeur, its vigour, its sturdiness, its adaptability, its quiescence, and we savour it in the way we might a piece of sugar cane, allowing the full flavour to gradually burst on our palate. The landscapes in our own country are indeed lovely and elegant, but the experience of seeing them is like tasting molasses: your whole mouth is overwhelmed with the sugariness of it all. To my mind, molasses is just too sweet; when you continue eating it, you get nothing from it. It may be very refined, but it lacks the sensory depth that you find in raw nature, and the sheer sense of enjoyment.
Now, just a few years later, on another trip through central China, his tone was quite different:
If you look ahead, you see the bare mountains and muddy rivers, with clusters of hovels and huts here and there; it is just one eyesore after another. There is a constant stream of refugees along the road, and beggars are everywhere, you cannot take your eyes off them. Every face is shrouded in the shadows of tragedy and hopelessness, as if an appalling famine has struck. And yet hidden behind high walls, in the mansions of the rich, you have bevies of wives and concubines, with crowds of maids in attendance, and pampered pet cats and dogs, and they gorge themselves on the finest delicacies. Here the rats can eat their fill until they are a match for any cat outside.
Even worse, officials here care only about holding on to their positions and do no real work; they merely quarrel over the vast profits from corruption. The military does not concern itself with training soldiers to defend the nation, and they consider that the funding they receive puts them under no obligation to protect the civilian population. So v
arious generals have carved out territories, with the result that civil war has now spread throughout this land and those in power abuse everyone else, showing themselves to be no different from gangsters.
In an even greater tragedy, the intelligentsia have proved foolish and ignorant, thinking only of what will benefit them, showing themselves to be without the slightest social conscience.
The glory days of China under the Han and Tang dynasties are long past and yet these people have failed to advance; they have isolated themselves and become stick-in-the-muds, indescribably arrogant and yet also sycophantic, obsessed with the past, greedy for pleasure, unchanging over the centuries, and all the same. As a result, their vitality has withered away, corruption increases day by day, and the whole system is rotten: it is a society without cohesion.
Some readers complained about the contradiction, since the things that had been described so positively before were criticized so severely now, and they didn’t think they could trust his account. He responded with a confession:
When I was a scholar, I was steeped in literature from dawn till dusk and I judged real life by what I had read in books, thinking that they were one and the same. However, they are in fact two quite separate realms, as different from each other as black is from white.
Recently I have begun to regret having left the world of books. If I had not come to understand what is really going on, I could have remained happily muddle-headed, enjoying my books, appreciating their superlative literary qualities, loving every minute spent amid their pages. That would probably have been best for me. So I do regret that my gaining accreditation as a journalist has resulted in my having travelled widely and seen the world for what it really is.