Little Aunt Crane Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Geling Yan

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue: The Chinese are Coming!

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In the last days of World War II, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria has collapsed. As the Chinese move in, the elders of the Japanese settler village of Sakito decide to preserve their honour by killing all the villagers in an act of mass suicide. Only 16-year-old Tatsuru escapes.

  But Tatsuru’s trials have just begun. As she flees, she falls into the hands of human traffickers. She is sold to a wealthy Chinese family, where she becomes Duohe – the clandestine second wife to the only son, and the secret bearer of his children. Against all odds, Duohe forms an unlikely friendship with the first wife Xiaohuan, united by the unshakeable bonds of motherhood and family.

  Spanning several tumultuous decades of Mao’s rule, Little Aunt Crane is a novel about love, bravery and survival, and how humanity endures in the most unlikely of circumstances.

  About the Author

  Geling Yan is an award-winning Chinese novelist and screenwriter. Born in Shanghai, she published her first novel in 1985. Since then she has written numerous short stories, essays, scripts and novels including, in English, The Flowers of War, The Uninvited and The Lost Daughter of Happiness. Several of Geling Yan’s works have been adapted for the screen, among them The Flowers of War which was filmed by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou and stars Christian Bale. Geling Yan currently divides her time between Berlin and China.

  Also by Geling Yan in English

  White Snake and Other Stories

  The Lost Daughter of Happiness

  The Uninvited

  The Flowers of War

  To the mothers, wives and daughters who suffer from war.

  Little Aunt Crane

  Geling Yan

  Translated from the Chinese by Esther Tyldesley

  Prologue

  The Chinese are Coming!

  THE SMOKE OF war was rising in several places, in intermittent columns that rose on the mountain slopes that surrounded them on three sides. As the horizon changed from yellow to red, then to a dark reddish purple, the pillars of smoke turned to black, and the fires below burned brighter and brighter. The sky finally darkened completely, and aggressive, wordless bellowing could be heard from the flames: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’

  The sound of the women’s wooden shoes filled the village as they hurried to and fro, backs stooped and knees bent, shouting as they ran: ‘The Chinese are coming!’ Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been flattened by atom bombs, the Chinese often came to fire off a few shots or throw a bomb or two. The women soon became accustomed to running at a crouch. Before losing the war, the men under forty-five had been enlisted in Manchuria’s final recruiting drive; almost all those left behind were women. The women were calling their children home, but the boys of fifteen or sixteen were already at their stations by the wall that protected the village. The wall was a metre and a half thick, with two parallel rows of shooting holes, encircling the entire village. All six Japanese villages in the area had protective walls, built when the settlers first came from Japan; at the time they had thought the commanding officer was making a fuss about nothing: when Chinese met Japanese, the Chinese would hide if they could, and those that could not hide would bow and get out of the way. These days it was different: the people of Sakito village were now wailing ‘The Chinese are coming!’ just as desolately as Chinese all over China had been crying ‘The Japanese are coming!’ not long before.

  Three days earlier, the inhabitants of the six Japanese villages had gathered together and set out for the small railway station. Yantun was the station’s name, it was in the very northernmost part of Manchuria, and it was where they had alighted when they first came from Japan. Their plan was to take the last train for Busan in Korea, then the ferry to Japan, returning east by the same route they had taken when they came to Manchuria. Altogether there were over three thousand people from the six villages, a good many of whom had brought their livestock, for the weak, sick, elderly and young children to ride, or to carry luggage. After waiting at Yantun for a day and a night, a telegram finally arrived from the headquarters, ordering the villagers to return immediately to their homes: a large group of tanks had crossed the border with the Soviet Union, and they might run straight into them. Dr Suzuki from Shironami village leapt aboard the train, telling the villagers to ignore the headquarters’ instructions: advancing and retreating were both a gamble, and true Japanese should choose to advance. The empty train drew away, with Dr Suzuki’s furious, defiant face craning out of one of its open windows, still shouting: ‘Jump aboard! Fools …’

  The smoke drifted, and hung low over the skies of Sakito village, the autumn cold releasing its heavy acridity. The firelight gradually spread across the landscape, multiplying into countless torches that covered the hills and fields. It was like the entire population of China had come. Their howls were even more terrifying than the sound of gunfire: ‘Oh … Oh! … Oh! …’

  A boy lying prone at one of the gunholes fired the first shot. All the youths began to shoot in the direction of the torches, but these points of light were still several kilometres away. The torches were ever increasing in number; a single flame could multiply in an instant into a crowd. Yet the torches did not come close, and the howls and cries remained distant, like muffled thunder rolling at the edge of the sky.

  The headman called the villagers together at the open space in front of the Shinto shrine. It looked like they would have to withdraw, whether they were supposed to be withdrawing or not.

  Dawn was nearly upon them. In the far distance a train hooted once, it might be pulling dozens of wagons full of Soviet soldiers. The village head made an emergency announcement: they would take no luggage with them, nothing but their children. None of them could believe their ears – how were they supposed to evacuate Manchukuo without any luggage? The head was not the kind of person to overlook such an important detail. Besides, for such a big withdrawal they would need to make arrangements for food and lodging en route. There was a strange serenity on the women’s faces, as though they could finally see an end after years of hardship. They had come from their homes in Japan many years before under the banner of the ‘Pioneer Corps’; none of them realised at the time that their government had seized these apparently endless lands from the hands of the Chinese people. Now the Chinese had begun their great reckoning. A villager had been killed on the way to market several days earlier. It had been an ugly death: hair, nose and ears were all missing.

  The fifty-one-year-old village head stood with a dozen elders at his back, waiting in silence for the clatter of wooden shoes to die down. He said that they should not ask each other questions or whisper together. The people did as they were told. He said again: Stand closer. Closer still. The crowd moved quickly to form a neat, orderly square. The babies were sleeping in their mothers’ arms or on their backs, the slightly older children dozing as they leaned against the adults. The village head spoke in a very low voice, his throat dry and hoarse from a night spent smoking cigarettes. He said that he and the other elders had taken a vote and come to a decision
. They must make an end before daybreak. The village head was not a gifted speaker, and when he could not find the words he just bowed over and over again. With an effort he made his meaning clear: the people of the Great Japanese Empire were the loyal subjects of the Sun, and to them the agonising shame of defeat was more painful than death itself. He said that the previous evening Soviet troops had shot three or four Japanese men in a nearby village, gang-raped over a dozen women and had stolen everything, leaving not so much as an ear of wheat or a single farm animal, worse bandits than the bandits themselves. And see the smoke hanging on the mountains! There was no way out. The Chinese might come charging down on them at any moment. As the Chinese themselves might have put it, ‘The songs of the enemy could be heard on all sides.’

  At that moment, a sixteen-year-old girl at the very back of the crowd slipped behind a beech tree, then crouched down and ran like the wind towards Shironami village. The girl had suddenly realised that she was not wearing her earrings. These earrings were made of gold, and she had sneaked them from her mother’s jewellery box out of simple vanity and curiosity. Her mother’s family lived in Sakito village, but her own home was in Shironami village on the other side of the railway. Ten days before, when the world was just starting to go mad, her mother had sent her to Sakito to help look after her grandfather, who was suffering from the after-effects of a stroke. Her grandfather had barely been able to walk, but late one night he had disappeared. The village dogs had found his body, half lying in the river, the rest of his body wedged in a crack in a boulder on the bank. Grandmother did not cry, for she realised how fortunate she was to have a husband who’d showed his care for her by ending his own life in this way.

  Once she had found the earrings, the girl hurried back to the Shinto shrine, feet flying, wooden shoes clutched in her hands.

  And so the girl missed the moment when everything changed. After she had slipped like a shadow into the pre-dawn darkness, the village head had said, speaking for the council of elders, that when they had heard of the vile actions of the Soviet troops, they had made a choice on behalf of the five hundred and thirteen villagers. He said that they had chosen the most dignified, least painful road to retreat from Manchuria. For the women, it was the only way to defend their chastity.

  People were starting to get the feeling that something was wrong. The dozing children sensed that fate had nothing good in store for them, and they raised their heads to look at their elders. Two women clutched involuntarily at each other’s hands. Another woman standing near the outside of the group stole a little bit further towards the edge, pulling her five-or six-year-old boy by the hand. Then she looked around and edged a little further. One more step and they could slip into the new poplar grove they had planted that spring. What did the village head and the elders have in mind for them?

  Stern and grim, the elders stood behind the village head as he announced their decision. He said: ‘We are Japanese, so we will die with dignity beside our fellow Japanese. The elders have done everything in their power to obtain sufficient bullets.’

  Shock descended on the villagers. After a while, one of the slower villagers said: ‘Does that mean killing ourselves together? Why?!’ Some of the women were crying: ‘I want to wait till my husband gets back from the front.’

  The village head’s voice suddenly became venomous and fierce. ‘You would betray the whole village?’

  By now the darkness was starting to fade; with every second the blackness was losing another layer of intensity.

  At that moment, the girl who had just retrieved her earrings was standing ten paces away. She was just in time to hear the words ‘killing ourselves’.

  The village head said: ‘You are proper Japanese, and you will die properly.’ He had determined that one of the elders would do the deed, to give everyone a good death. This elder was a crack shot, he had survived both world wars, but now he would lay down his life for his country, as he had always wished. At this very shrine, where the sacrificial tablets of their ancestors lay, each of them would fall with dignity and honour, dying in their own community.

  The women began to make confused, incoherent excuses, unwilling to accept a ‘good death’. There are people who let the side down in every place, and Sakito village was no exception: these women thanked the village head, but asked him politely not to lead them to their deaths. The children didn’t really understand, but they knew that ‘a good death’ was no good thing, and they opened their mouths wide, stretched out their necks, turned their faces to the sky and bawled.

  A single shot rang out, and they saw the village head fall to the ground. Everything had been arranged in advance: the head would take the lead in being a good Japanese. His wife sobbed loudly, just as she had cried to her mother the night before she married the village head. Now she slowly laid herself down, weeping, beside her husband’s corpse from which the blood was gushing, just as she had laid herself, weeping, on her marriage bed on her wedding night. In all the days of her life, no thought of defying her husband’s will had ever crossed her mind. The women all began to wail: since the village head’s wife had shown them such an example, where could they hope to flee? There was a second shot, and the head and his wife laid down their lives side by side.

  The seventy-year-old elder lowered his gun, and looked down at where the village head and his wife had fallen together. All their children had died in the war, and now they were hastening to be reunited with them at last. Next came the village elders. They were very orderly, they came one after another, as they had done to receive their rice ball rations after Japan’s defeat.The elders stood in line, backs unbent; one old man of eighty had a line of saliva dangling from his mouth, but his dignity was undiminished. A few minutes later, their descendants gathered next to their seniors, huddled together in a series of eternal family portraits. A strange calm fell over the crowd.

  Every family came together, with the old people at the centre. The children were still bemused, but they felt a peculiar sense of security. The babies, who had been crying themselves hoarse, sensed this and quietened down, sucking their fingers, heads twisting slowly to and fro. Just then a voice cried out: ‘Tatsuru! Tatsuru!’

  Sixteen-year-old Tatsuru was watching the scene with horror-struck eyes. She saw her grandmother standing there all alone. The only thing any of them was afraid of was dying alone, with none of their own warm flesh and blood to cling to as they fell and to grow cold together. Tatsuru decided then and there that she wanted no part in these bonds of affection, families huddled in each other’s arms, not even bullets parting them. By now the elder with the gun no longer looked human, his face and hands dripping with fresh blood. His training as a sniper had proved very useful; occasionally someone would mutiny against the collective out of sheer fright and attempt to flee the square, but his bullets pursued them with ease. After a time he perfected his strategy: first get the people down any old way, and once they were on the ground the thing was easy. He had prepared plenty of bullets, enough to dole out death to each person twice over.

  The girl named Tatsuru saw the gunman come to a stop. She heard an odd noise close by; she was too overcome to recognise the sound of her own teeth chattering. The marksman looked around him for a while, then pulled out the samurai sword he wore at his waist. His marksmanship had not been perfect, and his targets had been less than exemplary, so he had to go over his work again to make sure, this time using the sword. Once he had finished, he examined the sword, ran a finger along the edge of the blade, and laid it down beside his body. Hot blood had soaked deep into the blade, blunting it. He sat down, unfastened a shoelace and tied one end to the trigger of the gun, the other to a rock. He took off his shoes, so sodden with blood that they must have weighed at least five kilos, to reveal socks that were also red. His bloodstained feet gripped the stone attached to the trigger, and kicked out.

  ‘Crack! Crack! Crack!’

  Days later, the ‘crack’ of the gun was still echoing in Tatsuru’
s brain.

  When the heads of the five other villages heard Tatsuru’s confused, incoherent account, their knees gave way and they sat down hard on the ground, their heads silhouetted against the stubbly skyline of the newly harvested fields, on a level with the rising sun.

  After sitting still for ten minutes, the head of Shironami village rose to his feet. The other village heads stood up with him. Nobody made any attempt to dust themselves down. They had to go to the village to see if there was anything they could do – to close staring eyes, to straighten dishevelled clothing, perhaps one or two might need help to end their twitching and moaning, to put them out of their misery.

  Seen through the leaves and branches of the trees, the five hundred and thirteen men and women, young and old, looked like they were camping out in the open, lying all together in a heap. The earth was dyed black from the blood that had been shed. The blood had poured out extravagantly, spattering the leaves and branches of the trees. There was one family whom the bullets had not separated, and their blood had flowed into a single stream, which had spilled from between two boulders to pool slightly lower down. It had coagulated into an enormous ball of blood beside the stones, bright red, extremely dense, congealed but not solid, like a jelly.

  Tatsuru trailed along behind her own village head. The stench of blood filled her nose and throat, choking her. She had hoped to find her grandmother, but she very soon gave up on that notion: most people had been shot in the back and fallen face down, and she did not have the strength or courage to turn them over and identify them one by one.

  The village heads had been on their way to Sakito to discuss their route to withdraw from Manchuria, but now they understood the final message of Sakito village. Sakito had always taken the lead among the Japanese villages in the locality, because they had been the first settlers to come here from Japan. Suddenly, the Shironami village head covered Tatsuru’s eyes with his hand. In front of him was the corpse of the old man with the gun. The village head had known this sharpshooter and veteran of two world wars very well. The man was leaning against a tree, the gun still cradled in his arms, though the stone tied to the trigger had fallen from the shoelace. The bullet had entered through his lower jaw, and his head had become an empty sacrificial vessel, pointing at the sky.