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Summary
Summary
"The Devil of Nanking takes the reader on a literary ride from the decadent hostess bars and palatial apartments of yakuza kingpins in Tokyo, to deep inside the secret history of one of the twentieth century's deadliest, most shameful events - the Nanking Massacre." "Grey has a lot to prove and even more to hide. A young Englishwoman obsessed with a past she cannot understand, she comes to Tokyo seeking a rare piece of film footage that has been lost for decades, showing a specific horrifying incident during the notorious 1937 Nanking Massacre. Some say the film never existed. Only one man can help Grey. A survivor of the massacre, he is now a visiting professor at the university of Todai in Tokyo. Immersed in his textbooks and wary of strangers, he will at first have nothing to do with her." "When Grey accepts a job as a hostess in an upscale nightclub catering to Japanese businessmen and wealthy yakuza, she meets a certain gangster who may be the key to her quest - an old man in a wheelchair surrounded by a terrifying entourage, rumored to rely on a mysterious elixir for his continued health. As the professor pressures Grey to find out more about the elixir, Grey's housemate, a handsome, laconic American dilettante, becomes unnervingly fascinated with her and the troubling past that she has kept concealed from everyone else. Grey is faced with the serious dangers of charming her way into a circle of gangsters, master manipulators, and possible murderers. It's a devil's bargain - but who, really, is the Devil of Nanking?"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Mo Hayder is the pen name for Clare Dunkel, a British Crime novelist. She was born, in 1962. After leaving school at 15, she worked as a barmaid, security guard, filmmaker, hostess in a Tokyo club, and taught English as a foreign language in Asia. Here first novel was Birdman (1999). The books that followed were The Treatment (2001), Tokyo (2004) also published in 2010 as The Devil in Nanking, Pigs Island (2006), Ritual (2008), Skin (2009), Hanging Hill (2011), Gone (2010) won the Edgar Award, Poppet (2013), and Wolf (2014) which is being adapted for the BBC. In 2011, she won the Crime Writers' Association Daggar in the Library award for an outstanding body of work. Clare Dunkel died from motor neurone disease on July 27, 2021. She was 59.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From its start in 1937, as the Japanese overrun the Chinese port of Nanking and massacre hundreds of thousands, to its narrative core in 1990, as a disturbed young British woman who calls herself Grey searches for the hidden truths that made her the mentally fragile person she is, Hayder's third book (after 2002's The Treatment) is a thriller of rare art and gripping excitement. Hayder, one of the rising stars of British crime fiction, teaches at a university in Bath and has worked as a hostess in a Tokyo nightclub. Both experiences add to her book's unusually rich atmosphere. Grey, who lives on the fringes of the academic world, tries to find out in Tokyo whether a piece of 16mm film taken during the Nanking atrocities actually exists-and whether it will ease her pain. When an elderly Chinese professor, a survivor of Nanking, at first refuses to help her, she drifts into a well-paying job as a night club hostess. (Russian twin sisters Irina and Svetlana teach her the tricks of the trade. "You gotta look sophisticated," Svetlana tells her earnestly. "You wanna wear my belt, eh? My belt is gold. Black and gold nice!") Eventually, the story becomes a beautifully paced, three-way duel among an aged Japanese gangster who wants to live forever; the Chinese professor, with secrets too horrible to hide any longer; and Grey, a courageous young woman unlike any other heroine you're likely to find in a thriller. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. (Apr. 30) Forecast: Advance praise from Tess Gerritsen, Harlan Coben, Minette Walters and Val McDermid will alert their fans to this novel's high quality. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Seeking confirmation of an atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers during the 1937 invasion of Nanking, troubled young Englishwoman Grey Hutchins tracks down a Chinese survivor who might have film of the massacre. But when she finds Shi Chongming teaching at a Tokyo university, he offers no help--until Grey takes a job at a hostess club frequented by an old Yakuza don. Chongming, it turns out, needs access to the strange medicine the mobster takes to stave off death. If Grey can deliver the information he needs, Chongming promises, he will show her his secret film. Although the narrative--split between the professor's haunting 1937 diary and Grey's contemporary Tokyo journal--takes a while to pick up steam, it ends up delivering a potent punch. Hayder fancies she is withholding more plot twists than she actually does, but Grey and Chongming's affecting stories of weakness and loss redeemed by their obsessive quests for truth and justice make up for a twinned mystery that's not too difficult to dope out. --Frank Sennett Copyright 2005 Booklist
Guardian Review
The Nanking massacre of 1937 is an unlikely starting point for a modern thriller, but with two successful books already ( Birdman and The Treatment ), Mo Hayder is established enough to go her own way, which in the trammelled world of genre fiction is to be applauded. Although a departure, Tokyo continues the confrontation with horror of her previous work, asserting her place in the new tough school of female writing that depends on successive trumpings in nastiness. And what could be nastier than a massacre? The rapes, the killing competitions and worse are rumoured to exist on a lost film. Further titillation is provided by the tease of a brutality beyond imagination, cruelty elevated to an art form. Hayder's implicit challenge is: how much can you take? She splits the search for the Nanking film, in 1990 Tokyo, with the journal of a Chinese resident, Shi Chongming, covering the Japanese invasion and massacre. This well-researched documentary account is propelled by the simple mechanism of impending disaster. By 1990 Shi Chongming is a visiting professor at Todai University. Grey, a young female academic from the University of London studying war atrocities, arrives in search of the film. Shi Chongming sees her as a harbinger of a past he is unwilling to confront. None of the impulses that drives the search is particularly believable, but skilful care is taken to hide the fact. Hayder teases with a flirtatious con-struction, releasing information piecemeal about her heroine's damaged past. Part of her inheritance is the horror film, in which characters are disposable; and hers hover uneasily, supported by a cast of comic grotesques that provide the book's liveliness, while Grey, self-proclaimed ghost, is obedient to her author's demands. In an awkward transition, an enigmatic American, Jason, introduces Grey to the world of bar-hostessing and gives her a room in a large, deserted house. Grey's city is defined by an erotic tension, symbolised by the overgrown luxuriance of the house's wild garden, which, like the world in which she finds herself, is coded and arcane. At its best, the novel achieves a semi-magical suspension, a sense of lives in the balance, and at these times Hayder's prose is at its most focused and dreamlike, alert to a febrile sexuality. With the introduction of the yakuza, and an elixir of life, the story reverts to the traditional suspense of woman-in-jeopardy: we have a 90-year-old gangster in a wheelchair; his fearsome "nurse", whose party trick is literally turning people inside out; and Grey prowling hostile space on behalf of Shi Chongming, in exchange for a look at his atrocity film. What had seemed delicately suspended takes on the determined character of a Brian De Palma movie. Page- turning momentum is sustained by the author's glancing prose and askance observations, but look back and the book falls apart, especially in areas of motivation, including whether Grey's obsession amounts to anything more than a narrative hook or a slice of the History Channel. The Nanking material, deferential in the face of historical atrocity, is no match for Ballard's Shanghai in Empire of the Sun ; nor does it add to history in the way of, say, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time There are signs that Hayder might be ambivalent towards the extremes of her material and its power to degrade. Jason is shown to be a victim of such extremes, and part of Hayder seems to be saying, who but freaks would want to inhabit this world? It's part of the contract with the reader, however, that these misgivings remain coded. More arresting is what she smuggles in beneath the surface: the emotional tugs of loss, for example. It is in these depths, rather than in the breaking of taboos, that she is most interesting. The taboo tackled in Tokyo is routinely grotesque and adds nothing to our understanding of cruelty, while elsewhere Hayder's observant prose works hard to convey the small defining moments that make up life. It makes her more rewarding than the tough, forensic women whose routine work dominates the world of crime-thrillers. I liked sections of the book very much, without being much bothered with the scaffolding of the story or believing in or caring about the characters. I enjoyed the psychological and geographical spaces they inhabited, and the way Hayder nails what she sees. It was a brave choice, too, to situate her story in a complex cultural context. The writer she reminded me of most was Derek Raymond in The Devil's Home on Leave ; there is a shared metaphysical quality, making Hayder quite Jacobean in that her true subject is death and its constant presence in life. What she does best is damage, much of it self- inflicted, and this is the book's strongest theme: the ways in which we haunt ourselves. Chris Petit's thriller The Human Pool is published by Scribner. To order Tokyo for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-hayder.1 There are signs that [Hayder] might be ambivalent towards the extremes of her material and its power to degrade. Jason is shown to be a victim of such extremes, and part of Hayder seems to be saying, who but freaks would want to inhabit this world? It's part of the contract with the reader, however, that these misgivings remain coded. More arresting is what she smuggles in beneath the surface: the emotional tugs of loss, for example. It is in these depths, rather than in the breaking of taboos, that she is most interesting. The taboo tackled in Tokyo is routinely grotesque and adds nothing to our understanding of cruelty, while elsewhere Hayder's observant prose works hard to convey the small defining moments that make up life. It makes her more rewarding than the tough, forensic women whose routine work dominates the world of crime-thrillers. I liked sections of the book very much, without being much bothered with the scaffolding of the story or believing in or caring about the characters. I enjoyed the psychological and geographical spaces they inhabited, and the way Hayder nails what she sees. It was a brave choice, too, to situate her story in a complex cultural context. The writer she reminded me of most was Derek Raymond in The Devil's Home on Leave ; there is a shared metaphysical quality, making Hayder quite Jacobean in that her true subject is death and its constant presence in life. What she does best is damage, much of it self- inflicted, and this is the book's strongest theme: the ways in which we haunt ourselves. - Chris Petit.
Kirkus Review
A superb third thriller from Hayder (The Treatment, 2001, etc.), who sends a troubled young Englishwoman to Tokyo in search of evidence about a half-century-old war crime. For reasons she initially only hints at, Grey is obsessed with the 1937 Nanking massacre, a monthlong orgy of atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese army on Chinese civilians. Learning that a Chinese man who witnessed those atrocities possesses filmed footage of one particularly monstrous event, she sets out to confront Shi Chongming in Tokyo, where he is a visiting professor of sociology. The story alternates between Grey's odyssey in Tokyo's darker corners and Shi Chongming's bitter diary of the ten months leading up to the Nanking massacre. Grey hooks up with Jason, a creepy American expat with a morbid sexual interest in violence, who gets her a job as a hostess at a nightclub. There, she meets Fuyuki, an elderly, ailing gangster whose terrifying "Nurse" fortifies him with a mysterious medicine. It turns out Shi Chongming desperately wants to know what this medicine is; he promises to show Grey the film if she finds out, but warns her that Fuyuki and his Nurse are exceedingly dangerous. Hayder ratchets up the tension as Grey gets closer to the gruesome secret of Fuyuki's medicine, and as Shi Chongming's diary chronicles his ordeal in Nanking. But this isn't just a nail-biter; her heroine is a damaged woman whose emotional and physical scars are gradually revealed to have grim links to the ultimate atrocity Shi Chongming witnesses in Nanking. As the narrative bloodily approaches a final, horrific pair of revelations, you realize that finding out what happened doesn't answer the real question here. What Grey and Shi Chongming, who have both ignorantly precipitated unspeakable tragedies, desperately need to know is: Is there any difference between ignorance and evil if the consequences are the same? The answer brings scant comfort to either of them. Served up with explicit gore that is not for the faint-hearted, but even more haunting than it is shocking as the author urgently addresses basic, agonizing existential issues. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Although Hayder departs from her popular series featuring DI Jack Caffery tracking down serial killers (Birdman), her latest novel-first published in Great Britain under the title Tokyo-is another powerfully written, haunting thriller. Grey Hutchins, a young Englishwoman who had been the victim of a traumatic rape and institutionalization, becomes obsessed with the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking in 1937. Traveling to Tokyo, she tracks down an elderly Chinese scholar who survived the massacre and who may have a film of the event. Grey tries to gain his trust; rebuffed, she takes a job as a hostess and meets a powerful gangster, an old man in a wheelchair rumored to use a strange elixir to maintain his health. Flashing back and forth between Grey's present-day quest (as recorded in her journal) to the Japanese invasion of Nanking (as recorded in the survivor's diary), Hayder's novel moves beyond the mystery and suspense angles into larger issues of history, memory, and power. Although horrific events are described, this work is not forensically gory like Hayder's Caffery series. Recommended for most fiction collections.-Beth Lindsay, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.