Japan recently ignited an international firestorm by using the word "incident" to refer to the events of 1937 in Nanking, China. What happens in Mo Hayder's latest novel, The Devil Of Nanking, is no mere incident; even the conventional term, "massacre," falls short. Hayder sets an unconventional detective on the trail of a lost film rumored to show a particularly nightmarish torture. Her protagonist, a troubled British student named Grey, needs it to confirm a half-remembered book from her teenage years, a few lines everybody thinks she must have imagined. By weaving together Grey's past with the historical records she seeks, Hayder tells a story haunted by the ghosts of two hemispheres, and delivers on the book's audacious promise.
While researching the Rape of Nanking, Grey, a one-time mental patient, becomes convinced that Chongming, a Chinese linguist teaching in Japan, has the film she seeks. Her impulsive trip to Tokyo strands her with no money, so she takes a job as a club hostess and squats in a creepy condemned building. Chongming promises to give her a look at the mysterious film, if she wheedles her way into the good graces of an aging yakuza boss to find out what secret Chinese medicine he takes for immortality. Hayder intersperses Chongming's diary from the Japanese invasion with Grey's increasingly hysterical account of her detective work, building the unimaginable on top of the unthinkable.
The Devil Of Nanking wouldn't work if its climactic revelations were genocidal in scope. Its secret lies in the intimate, unexpected connection between Grey's tragedy and the searing images on Chongming's film. Survivors of horrific crimes can't help but obsess over pathways closed, roads not taken, and generations left behind. Hayder's own checkered past includes a stint as a Tokyo hostess, and given her idiosyncrasies, some autobiographical content to this novel isn't out of the question. Her previous two books have been Thomas Harris-esque serial-killer procedurals, but here, she drops the genre trappings and writes in a more personal voice. Grey wins her self-knowledge the hard way, and her novel is stirred by the restless spirit of uneasy answers.