Prologue and Acknowledgments

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In the black-and-white photograph, a Chinese man kneels in front of a trench, into which his severed head will fall a moment later. A Japanese soldier behind him prepares to swing a long sword down through his neck. When I first encountered this photograph in the Fake Manchukuo Museum in Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province in Northeast China, I felt not the terror and shock many Japanese tourists told me they had experienced in facing this image, which captured the brutality of Japan’s invasion of China. Rather, I felt a strange sense of familiarity in seeing a scene I had imagined for so many years. My maternal grandparents had shared their experiences in Manchuria with me ever since I was little, and this story was the one they most often recounted.

My grandmother, the more talkative one, used to portray her life with my grandfather in their adopted homeland in great detail, capturing both the mundane and the eventful. As a new college graduate in 1937, my grandfather had taken a job at the headquarters of the South Manchuria Railway Company in Dalian, a port city in Japanese-ruled Northeast China, and my grandmother later joined him as a newlywed. Altogether, they spent nearly a decade in Northeast China until they were repatriated one year after the Japanese defeat in 1945. Over the years, my grandmother recounted again and again the stories that left the deepest marks on her memory: the ornate and festive wedding ceremony of their Chinese neighbor’s charming daughter; how one of my grandfather’s favorite Chinese subordinates, Mr. Li, once knocked on their door in the middle of night to ask for stomach medicine available only to Japanese, and how later in thanks he had brought a large jar of pickled plums—an increasingly scarce Japanese staple that he knew my grandmother longed for; how my grandmother later heard about the brutal killing of Mr. Li, beheaded by a Japanese soldier in front of a trench into which “his head fell like a ball” (kubi ga koron to korogattatoyo); how after the Japanese defeat, their downstairs Chinese neighbors, who owned a tofu store, often gave my grandparents tofu to help my grandmother in nursing my mother; how they hid my grandmother and my mother in their house when the Russians came to look for Japanese, especially young women; how, just before my grandparents’ repatriation to Japan in 1946, a group of Chinese, my grandfather’s former subordinates at the South Manchuria Railway Company, scraped together an elaborate going-away banquet for him and, worrying about his returning to a defeated nation, prepared a large basket filled with grilled sparrows and rice balls for the long trip back to Japan; how my mother contracted dysentery as they waited in a camp for the repatriation ship; how the doctor strongly suggested that my grandparents leave their baby daughter with a Chinese couple rather than have to cast her corpse into the sea en route; and how their daughter miraculously survived the brutal voyage home.

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Prologue and Acknowledgments

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