The Message

by Mai Jia

  His feelings showed clearly on his face, even though he didn’t say anything. As their discussions continued, Matsui finally realized how upset Hihara was about his plan. With a laugh, he asked, ‘Is there a gorgeous girl in Hangzhou that you have your eye on?’

  It was a joke, and Hihara responded in kind. ‘Oh, I think about her day and night.’

  When Matsui heard that, he ordered his staff officer to fetch a 1:3000 military map of Hangzhou and spread it out in front of Hihara. ‘I have the finest air force in the world under my command,’ he said, ‘equipped with the most advanced overhead positioning system. If you can pinpoint the girl’s address, Hihara—’ he chuckled and raised his eyebrows in a humorous manner ‘—specifying such-and-such a house on such-and-such a road, I will tell my men that her home and an area measuring a certain number of metres all around it must be left untouched.’

  Hihara had an inspiration. Since West Lake was more important to him than the most gorgeous of girls could ever be, he took his cue from the long line of the lake’s Su Causeway and drew an irregular circle. ‘This is the home of my beloved.’

  He imagined that Matsui would just take it as a joke and laugh. He was not anticipating that the general would pick up a pen and draw a thick red line following the outline he’d made, and then write his message inside it. From start to finish, Hihara never knew whether Matsui understood what he was doing or not.

  There are many stories about how West Lake came to escape being bombed by the Japanese and I don’t know if this one is true or not. In my opinion, like so many Chinese folk tales, it seems short on plausibility. All I can say is that I personally do not place much faith in any of these stories about the meeting between Hihara and Matsui.

  Anyway, General Matsui gave orders for the bombing of Hangzhou and Hihara visited him at about this time. Since the latter was such an admirer of West Lake, it was able to escape destruction – this seems to be a fact. The Gazetteer of West Lake quotes an article that Hihara wrote about this:

  The Japanese Empire is strong, but China is weak, too weak to withstand the slightest assault; it will collapse at the first nudge. Because of this, it’s possible for us to show mercy, to hold back. Just as when a man beats a woman, if it’s appropriate to show restraint on account of her gentleness and beauty, then he should. The key is to understand that some things should never come under attack. West Lake in Hangzhou is one such example, a place as lovely as the moon descended to the human realm; the softest of beauties. To damage it in any way would be a terrible shame. Let us preserve it, and then in the future we may enjoy it ourselves. Is that not a delightful prospect?

  6

  From the time of their very first meeting, General Matsui had become a second mentor to Hihara; he admired him enormously. He used his great skill as a writer to praise the old general to the skies, and he was always putting in a plug for him, licking his arse, singing paeans to his glory and finding excuses for anything that went wrong. The two of them became close friends.

  One day, the general invited Hihara to join him on a sailing trip along the Huangpu River. The Imperial Japanese Army was celebrating yet another victory and the two men raised their glasses in toast after toast, congratulating each other on their success. Matsui asked an officer to fetch a tourist map of Hangzhou, then informed Hihara that their forces had occupied the entire area the previous night. ‘So you can go back there whenever you choose,’ he said, his eyes twinkling, ‘and reunite with your lovely lady.’ He pointed at the map. ‘We didn’t touch a thing in the blue area, so I’m sure she’s safe and sound.’

  Hihara wondered nervously whether he would now have to tell the general the truth, but to his surprise Matsui didn’t pursue the matter any further; he seemed to be purposely avoiding the subject. References to the ‘lovely lady’ ceased entirely as he instead pointed to a spot on Beishan Road, on the edge of West Lake. The conversation now turned to the Tan Estate.

  Hihara knew it well – it was the site of a famous whorehouse. He’d been a regular visitor up until a few years ago, before he was married. But now Matsui told him something he didn’t know. Specifically: ‘There are ten thousand gold bars hidden on the estate!’

  Hihara could see why Matsui was intrigued by this, but he was surprised that the general hadn’t simply sent in military engineers to dig for the treasure. Why go to the trouble of telling him all about it?

  Because Matsui wanted to keep the gold for himself.

  There were two reasons he chose Hihara to go and get it for him. The first was that Hihara went regularly to Hangzhou and knew the situation on the ground there. The second was that Hihara would be a good decoy. Who would suspect a scholar? He would tell everyone that Hihara was there to collect historical materials about West Lake; that would make a decent enough cover story.

  Victory comes to those who use surprise – in this respect, life is like a battleground. And so it was with the Battle of Shanghai. Fighting had been going on for three months already, involving more than a million combatants and with each side suffering tens of thousands of casualties, but still neither side had managed to seize the advantage. Then General Matsui suddenly pulled a truly unexpected trick: he dispatched a small group of soldiers to circle round and make a surprise attack on the Jinshan Garrison south of Shanghai in the Bay of Hangzhou. Attention was still focused on the front lines further north, so the Chinese forces were not expecting to have to think about what was going on at some insignificant little place behind them. They may not have been thinking about it, but General Matsui was. If someone knifes you in the back, it’s still going to kill you, right? Unless you’ve managed to hide your heart somewhere else.

  Sending Hihara to the Tan Estate was done on the same principle. He wasn’t the obvious choice and that meant he was the best choice. And he wouldn’t be too greedy, so he counted as cheap labour.

  Just as the general had anticipated, Hihara didn’t demand his fair share; in fact, he said he’d do it for nothing. All the gold would go to General Matsui. Hihara merely asked that if possible he’d like to be given an official position afterwards. He seemed tired of his life as a mole; it was time for him to come out into the open and get some credit for the work he did.

  What was wrong with that? Nothing! Matsui was happy to promise him everything he wanted and even said that when he got his hands on the gold they would split it eighty-twenty. They looked like two honest, upright gentlemen coming to a mutually acceptable agreement. But the thing that they were agreeing on was filthy, a robbery, a crime that needed to be kept secret and must never see the light of day.

  As we know, the gold was never found. Not only did Hihara not get anything out of it, he also lost his wife. He’d expected the mission to be perfectly straightforward, but it turned into one damn thing after another. He came to feel that the mission had been a complete nightmare. And that nightmare had ended with another nightmare.

  In fact, Hihara was very lucky that his wife was murdered, because otherwise he would never have been able to get out of there, not without finding ten thousand gold bars first. He’d have had to keep looking. And if he still hadn’t found them, would they have let him go? Would General Matsui have believed him? When it comes to money, morality goes out of the window, and here we’re talking about ten thousand gold bars.

  To put it bluntly, everything that Hihara went on to acquire – his good reputation, his freedom of movement, his official position and the power this gave him over others – he owed to his wife’s untimely demise. That being the case, how could he forget her? Of course he couldn’t. He would remember her forever. Her shadow followed him wherever he went. He sometimes seemed to see her in broad daylight and he often encountered her in his dreams. Sometimes she came drifting in on the wind, at other times she seemed to emerge from the bowels of the earth; an object might call her to mind, or she might appear out of nowhere. In a word, he was haunted by her.

  When it comes to matters of the dead, you can’t find the an
swer in books; not even Hihara, the number two man in Japan’s secret police, could find a solution to this haunting. The only option was to find a religious expert, someone who could mediate between this world and the next, who could communicate with ghosts and stave off disaster.

  Eventually, Hihara found a pro-Japanese Taoist master at the Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang and had him perform a ceremony to summon the soul of his late wife and direct it on the right path. The master said that the reason her soul couldn’t rest in peace was that her body and blood had been separated. For her to find peace, the best plan would be to reunite the two. However, it was now more than six months since the murder, and the body had already been cremated and sent back to Japan for burial. Reuniting it with her blood would be impossible, harder even than trying to bring the dead back to life. Or to put it another way, when his wife’s body was cremated, the best plan went up in smoke too.

  So they turned to Plan B. That was quite simple and straightforward. Hihara was advised to go back to the scene of his wife’s murder and pile up the earth where her blood had been spilt into a tomb mound, to comfort the soul of the deceased woman. This is exactly what he did, on the shore beside West Lake. Every year thereafter, at the Qingming tomb-sweeping festival of the ancestors, and in Ghost Month, when the deceased return to visit the living, he made a special trip to the tomb mound to perform the traditional memorial ceremony, offering prayers, lighting incense and burning ritual spirit money. And when he found himself back in Hangzhou or its environs for other reasons, it was like coming home – he could go and tend the tomb, walk round it, remember his late wife and light a candle for her.

  To return to our story, that evening when Police Chief Wang Tianxiang accompanied Hihara to the lake and watched him hold a memorial ceremony by a tomb, it was the grave of his late wife, Yoshiko. The fact that his wife had been murdered by the Chinese was not something to be proud of, so naturally Hihara didn’t go into that.

  I think that the reason Hihara was so eager to take charge of the investigations into the ECCC officers at the Tan Estate (he received his orders in the morning and arrived that afternoon), quite apart from his love of West Lake itself, was bound up with his complex feelings towards his dead wife. That assignment allowed him to mourn her at public expense.

  Even after the investigations into Ghost were closed down, Hihara continued to take every opportunity to visit Hangzhou, walk round the lake and hold a memorial ceremony for his late wife. Which was all to the good, because when Gu Xiaomeng bought his life with four gold bars, his killers knew exactly where to find him.

  7

  This isn’t some story that I’ve just made up; you can find reports about it in the newspapers of the day, with photographs too.

  According to all accounts, on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1942, Hihara, together with his new wife, their baby daughter and a maid, boarded a skiff with the intention of sailing out across West Lake to drink some wine and enjoy their moon-viewing from the water. They did not come back. By the time they returned to shore, all four of them were dead. The skiff was ruined too, since it had been sunk to the bottom of the lake and then had to be raised.

  The rescuers did the best they could by the light of the moon but managed to salvage only three bodies. The wife, the baby and the maid were there, but there was no Hihara. Once it got light, a passer-by discovered Hihara’s dismembered corpse dumped by the entrance to the Temple of General Yue Fei.

  It surprised those who saw the bodies that all four corpses looked just as the corpse of the cuckold Wu Dalang did in the classic historical novel The Water Margin: their faces had turned completely black. It was obvious that they’d been poisoned. When the skiff was brought ashore, the police discovered that a hole the size of a fist had been carefully bored through the bottom of the boat in advance – it could not have been accidental.

  All the evidence indicated that these murders had been planned and carried out most carefully. The killers had put poison into the wine, the snacks and the sweet-bean mooncakes provided by whoever had rented Hihara the skiff, in order that the four would die immediately they consumed them. The murderers then swam across the lake under cover of darkness and removed the bung in the hole they had bored earlier, which caused the skiff to sink. Their swimming skills were clearly quite as exceptional as those of the Ruan brothers in The Water Margin, since they were able not only to clean the scene of the crime by sinking the boat but also to drag Hihara’s corpse through the water and up onto the shore.

  According to one of the investigating officers, a line of footprints stretched for some seventy metres along the shallow lake bed. The footprints had made deep impressions because the killers would have been manhandling the dead weight of a corpse as they headed for Beishan Road. Once they reached dry land, the footprints disappeared.

  Because the prints had been made in soft mud, they were of little evidential use and did not help crack the case. The investigative team eventually gave up. As to who the murderers were or what they looked like, probably only West Lake could tell you.

  Given that Hihara had saved West Lake from destruction, I don’t know if the lake was sad when Hihara was poisoned and had his body chopped into pieces. But I think I can say that there was poetic justice in Hihara ending up the victim in an unsolved murder; after all, there were plenty of people that he’d had killed but where the crime was never laid at his door. The mills of the gods may grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. As the saying goes, he who lives by the sword will die by the sword. There is a mysterious logic in all things: as you use your right hand to gouge out your enemy’s left eye, your enemy uses his left hand to put out your right eye. That is how the world is, though cause and effect are never so direct or so obvious. They are like an elusive perfume or a fleeting shadow, like deeds carried out under cover of darkness, for this is a private, underground world.

  First draft completed in Chengdu: 31.7.2007

  Final revisions completed in Hangzhou: 10.11.2013

  A Selective Chronology

  1911–1912:

  The Revolution of 1911 results in the founding of the Republic of China under Nationalist Party leader Sun Yat-sen and the abdication of the last Qing emperor.

  1921:

  The Chinese Communist Party is formed; its leaders include Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

  1925–1935:

  Chiang Kai-shek takes over as leader of the Nationalist Party, moves the capital from Beijing to Nanjing, and breaks with the Communist Party. Civil war breaks out as Communist uprisings are suppressed by Nationalist forces. Mao leads a 10,000-kilometre retreat of Communists in a ‘Long March’ to the new Communist Party base in Yan’an in northern China.

  1931–1932:

  Japanese forces invade Manchuria, north-east China, which becomes a puppet state, Manchukuo. Japanese forces bomb Shanghai, then station troops in the city.

  1937:

  The Nationalist and Communist parties nominally agree to suspend the civil war and unite in a War of Resistance against the Japanese occupation.

  July 1937:

  The Imperial Japanese Army invades northern China, including Beijing and Tianjin. The Second Sino-Japanese War begins.

  August–December 1937:

  During the Battle of Shanghai, the Japanese army carries out extensive bombing of eastern China, including Hangzhou, resulting in the occupation of Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou. Chiang Kai-shek relocates the Nationalist Party headquarters to its wartime capital, Chongqing, in the unoccupied south-west.

  March 1940:

  The Japanese install Chinese politician Wang Jingwei as the head of their puppet government in the capital Nanjing.

  January 1941:

  In the Wannan Incident, Communist and Nationalist forces clash in southern Anhui province, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Communist soldiers and the fracturing of the united front against the Japanese occupation.

  August 1945:

  Japanese forces
surrender, bringing an end to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the War of Resistance against the Japanese occupation.

  1949:

  The civil war ends in victory for Communist Party forces across mainland China. The People’s Republic of China is founded under Chairman Mao, with Beijing as the new capital. Chiang Kai-shek retreats to Taiwan and establishes a Nationalist Party government there.

  About the author

  Mai Jia’s first novel in English, Decoded, was published by Penguin Classics in 2002, and has been translated into over twenty languages. His novels have sold over 10 million copies and Mai Jia has won the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the highest literary honour in China. The Message was first published in 2007 and has sold over a million copies in China. Mai Jia was born in 1964 and spent many years in the Chinese intelligence services.

  About the Translator

  Olivia Milburn is professor of Chinese language and Literature at Seoul National University, South Korea, specializing in the cultural history of early China. Her award-winning translations of modern Chinese literature include two of Mai Jia’s earlier works, Decoded and In the Dark (with co-translator Christopher Payne).

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