The Chinese woman I know

(Chinese Female Spy)

On behalf of a well-known Chinese language publication in South America, we will gradually publicize in this forum, as the situation develops, some of the information obtained by my client in South America. South America has always been inhabited by people of Japanese descent, and for conceivable legal and human reasons, under no circumstances will the provider of the information disclose the real situation of their, and their elders’, authors of the material.

Thus my authorizers are likewise unable to confirm the authenticity of the materials in any way, and this has affected the more effective use of them. But having read the texts, it felt compelled to make them public in every possible way.

The material was translated from Japanese into Spanish and then into Chinese, all about 100,000 words. On the surface it appears to be a record of the recollections of middle and lower ranking officers of the invading Japanese army.

In accordance with the rules of the game on the Internet, we have used the current title of the original article, which was entitled “Chinese female spies”.

××x x is a fool who only knows how to work brutally, although he is very fierce during interrogation and beats the person half to death as soon as he starts to act, if the interrogated person tops the storm-like blitz in front of him, x x starts to get overwhelmed. Usually, he would beat the person to death on the spot in the interrogation room, and in my opinion, the person had no feelings left before he died.

Of course as the subject of the questioning, it might be intimidating to run into a stormy, shouting guy all of a sudden. In any case, Lt. xxx’s record was not bad. He liked to behead prisoners when he executed them, and often went with the car to the site to do it himself. I suspect he’s amassing some sort of record for himself. Also, he never seriously interrogated women.

That morning he had been presiding over the interrogation of a Chinese man. Since a resident had reported that a suspicious man had entered a neighbor’s house during the night, we had taken the husband of that house and his visitor to the gendarmerie. This would have been mostly nonsense, but the problem was that the fellow from the village was tall and had a thick, bushy beard over his broad face, making him look like a bandit anyhow.

By the time I went in at noon to find Lt. xxx, the man’s growing body was stripped bare and bound to his limbs, lying on his back on the iron bed used for torture, with two bricks underneath the end that bound his feet, so as to bring his head down a bit, and make it easier to irrigate him.

The interrogation room was full of water, and it looked like he had been given several rounds of dunking. He lay there with his mouth half-open, staring at the ceiling with a blank stare.

“Let’s eat.” I said to Lt. xxx: “Did he confess?”

“Almost there, almost there.” He said somewhat perfunctorily.

At first the man insisted that he had been asked by the township to bring some produce to a relative’s house in the city, and that he himself had gone into the city to look for a sum of money owed to him for work done at the beginning of the year. Later, he said that he had seen bandits in the village, and then it turned out that he had cotton cloth and two guns hidden in his house, ready to be given to the bandits.

I looked at Lt. xxx and recognized that he too understood that this Chinese man was making up lies.

However, the next day, Lieutenant XX decided to take the prisoner to the countryside with his own men. I do not know what his considerations were, but the probable reason was that there was indeed banditry in that area and he wanted to take an opportunity to terrorize the villagers.

It turned out that something happened halfway down the road, and that truck went down the ditch on the side of the road, and then bounced out of the ditch and rolled over on its side into a field on the other side, and it was later found out that Lt. xxx was dead at the time.

The gendarmes, who had fallen into a heap in the car, were nervous, thinking they had been attacked by bandits. They stumbled out of the car and lay down their rifles on the side of the car, looking around. As it turned out, the only figure they found was the prisoner, who had already taken advantage of the chaos to run 30 or 40 meters, and it was hard to imagine him being able to run so fast while wearing shackles.

Chief XX Cao, who had temporarily assumed command responsibility, shouted, “Target, forty meters to the southwest, shoot!” The man fell after only one shot.

There were four uninjured gendarmes left, and they could have easily recaptured the guy, but they decided that their first priority was to be on the lookout for any bandits that might be lying in ambush, and therefore took such a decisive step. They were not attacked, however, and the truck overturned purely by accident.

After this, I was ordered to act as head of the military police detachment.

I thought at the time that there was a good chance that I would get a formal appointment and worked my way up in the defense area of the unit. I happened to be in Shangling when it happened; the town of Shangling was more than forty kilometers from the provincial capital, the first station where trains from the provincial capital stopped, and an inland wharf for the distribution of agricultural products, which was the focus of the 23rd Coalition’s arming.

A Chinese agent of the White Left Organization put in a call to the duty room of the Union, and he stammered a request for support from the Imperial Army, saying that he was on a secret mission to Shangling and was now at the gate of the Riverbank Inn.

Ensign Noyama found him with two men in plain clothes, and the dry, thin fellow was already frightened. It was said that he had been ordered to follow a young woman from a neighboring province who was thought to be a liaison officer for a hostile organization back to the province; according to the intelligence, the liaison officer was supposed to bring a radio station back to the province, and the White Left organs made preparations in the province according to such a judgment, but no one expected that the girl suddenly got off the bus at Shangling.

For most of the day, White Left’s people have been dripping with cold sweat in the town desperately staring at the girl, almost even the time to call, and then the town’s only a few civilian phones can not reach the provincial capital. Until he confirmed that the object of tracking into the hostel, only crazy crazy run to the train station, with the phone to find the Japanese army unit stationed in the local.

The army’s gendarmes didn’t like the pretentious White Left organs, but we reported to the team site through the army’s communication system anyway.

The Chinese man was sitting in a shabby restaurant across the street from the Riverside Inn and kept muttering, “I’m sure she saw me, I’m sure she saw me.” Looking at his black pants and hat, which looked ridiculous in a small town like Shangling, Nosan had to agree with his judgment.

Just then their target stepped out of the door of the Riverside Inn, a heavy looking suitcase in her hand, and walked a little over two hundred meters down the only major road in town. A 23rd Wing truck drove up on her, the girl waved, it stopped and out climbed a white, student-like kid with a smile like a flower.

The girl showed the driver a slip of paper, which caused the latter to let out a loud laugh, “Get in the car, get in the car.”

He said in rapid succession. The two plainclothes gendarmes following far behind watched them in dumbfounded silence.

After ten seconds of silence, a guy in a Chinese lab coat rushed out of a small hotel a little farther away, waving a pistol in his hand as he shouted in Japanese, “No driving, get her!”

As three men: two gendarmes and a Chinese agent pinned the girl to the side of the car and searched her, Noyama picked the note from the ground, which read crookedly, “Please take me to the outskirts of town to find a toilet.”

We started by cross-examining the White Left kid. The White Left authorities believed that the girl belonged to some foreign (not Chinese) military intelligence organization and was a liaison in charge of transporting goods and information. Of course, she herself was Chinese, and her public job was as a teacher at the xxx Higher National School in the provincial capital, under the name of Chen Huiqin.

That Chinese guy only knows so much.

After about ten minutes of hesitation, I ordered to go back to the province and bring the girl back to our team site.

first day

The provincial gendarmerie detachment occupied a substantial yard on a secluded side street, the original owner of which was said to be a reclusive Chinese officer. We built a row of brick houses for the temporary detention of prisoners in the front, the main room being used by the detachment’s personnel. A couple of rooms against the wall in the back yard, probably originally occupied by servants, served as interrogation rooms, and next door to the yard lived a team of Chinese police officers who cooperated with our operations.

I took two gendarmes directly to the backyard, and asked Ensign Nakagawa to take a younger female prisoner to the so-called “Room 2” next to the interrogation room: “Hang her up, and make her scream twice.” This was to intimidate the female liaison officer during the interrogation.

The young girl was brought in and I sat her down and stared at her for about three minutes. Noyama and the others had handcuffed her when they arrested her on the Upper Ridge, and she put her handcuffed hands flat on her lap and sat upright in the chair.

She wasn’t exactly a beauty, though she had an egg-shaped face, with light eyebrows and thin eyes that looked like a few thin lines drawn across her face. The bridge of her nose was narrow, and her nose was a bit pointed. But her skin was clear and her neck and arms were long.

I started with the most general questions. What is her name, how old is she, where is she from, what does she do, who is in her family… and so on. She answered each one calmly and told the truth. Her name is Chen Huiqin, she’s 23 years old, and she teaches at the xxx National High School… and so on.

Interestingly, she said that such a turn around to a neighboring province in the past two days was due to a fight with her supervisor at school, a gamble to take a leave of absence, and a random place to stay for a few days.

This is a designed answer, because visiting friends and family will require the provision of names and addresses of people who actually exist and will have to say more than can be verified.

Finally I said, “Okay, okay, where did you get the transmitter? Tell us, so we don’t have to waste time.”

The gendarmes had dismantled the suitcase she had brought with her, and there was neither a transmitter nor anything remotely valuable in it.

She pretended to be surprised: “What transmitter? Why do I have a transmitter?”

I paused to continue staring at her, and in the quiet came the woman’s screams from next door.

I persuaded her for a while, stuttering something nasty about the Imperial Army being here to help the Chinamen, and that she was still young enough not to sell her life for some white man in some country. I could speak some Chinese, but it was very unskilled. Chen Huizhen innocently squinted her fine eyes at me.

I sneered and said in Japanese, “I don’t have much time, excuse me.” I waved my hand at the gendarme who had been standing at attention.

They stepped forward and grabbed the placket of her cheongsam, easily ripping it to one side, opening her hands cuffed in front of her body, twisting her arms behind her back in the process, and then pressing her down to kneel on the floor in front of the chair, kicking off the cloth shoes on her feet. In the blink of an eye, all of her clothes, along with her underwear, were ripped off her back and thrown into the corner of the room.

The trained gendarmes threw the half-naked girl back into the chair and re-locked the handcuffs on her wrists, which were clipped behind her back with a click. The two men turned to her and crouched down in front of her, tying her ankles and wrists to each of the chair’s front legs with scrap wire and pulling off the white cloth socks she was still wearing. They used a folding knife to slit what was left of her panties and pulled the rags out from under her buttocks.

The girl didn’t struggle very much and didn’t say anything stupid like “don’t touch me” or “let me take it off myself”.

I turned my face away to look at the paintings on the wall, and one of the two gendarmes, the short, fat Ensign Nakagawa, leaned down to the young girl, who was forced to sit naked with her legs spread apart, and played with one of her nipples with one hand, and with the other stroked her body from top to bottom, stopping at the girl’s legs and tossing them around, and the girl in the middle gave an almost astonished, “ah! “.

Nakagawa pulled his wet middle finger out of it and held it up, there was not much more than a little light red blood on it. Nakagawa paused for two seconds, then burst into laughter as he handed his hand to the girl to look at, saying in half-baked Chinese, “Say it, transmitter, where? Chinaman woman, the Imperial Army greatly loved.”

Chen Huixin, who had cursed “bastard” several times in a not-so-loud voice at the beginning, now closed her eyes and turned her face to the side, but from her cheeks to her formerly white neck, she turned a bright peach color.

Contrary to popular Chinese belief, most of the gendarmes stationed in the larger cities did not often rape female prisoners. Their allowances ensured that they enjoyed a very good life in the Chinese cities, and when needed they could go to good places of entertainment in search of Japanese women, and some of them found a Chinese and rented a house for her in the city. Objectively speaking, it was much more fun to cuddle with a painted Japanese woman than to lie on top of those dirty female prisoners.

Of course, the disorganization of military discipline in the field units at the front when entering hostile territory was well known to all. Sometimes, in order to upset the psychology of the subject of interrogation, the men were also ordered to rape in the interrogation room, but most of the time the gendarmes were not very affectionate  and therefore more often than not, they left it to the Chinese guard units assisting us in the operation.

Now I was a little hesitant to let Nakagawa continue, some women will completely give up their resistance after being raped, asking and answering questions as if they had lost their anchor, but it is also possible that they will become completely silent. From Chen Huiqin’s reaction to being humiliated, I couldn’t tell if she would be in that situation, I stood up and stopped Nakagawa.

“Still won’t be honest? That way they’ll come crawling up to you like boars, and do you want to try and see how many pigs you can entertain in one night? Thirty? Forty?”

She was afraid and said weakly, “You can’t do this to me; I am a good law-abiding citizen.”

I pressed over to her, and for the first time scrutinized her naked body. Like most yellow women, she had two modest hemispherical breasts bulging out of her chest, almost like a young girl who had not yet matured, with nipples and areolas as detailed as rose petals. But her legs, like her neck and arms, were slender and long, and looked attention-grabbing.

“Say! Where is the stuff? Where is it going to be delivered?” Standing a step in front of her, I suddenly yelled loudly.

“I’m a teacher, I didn’t have to give anything away.”

“Asshole, self-inflicted sow.” I pretended to be furious and stormed out of the door, while saying to the gendarme, “Take it next door.”

In room two Noyama and the others were ready, I still remember the young girl hanging naked at one end of the room, the teacher at their high school was tipped off about anti-Japanese remarks and organizing a book club among the students, so Ensign Noyama went and arrested the teacher along with all the students in his book club and took them to the Kempeitai. The teacher was beaten half to death and sentenced to ten years in prison and sent to a mine or something. Some of the students were bailed out, and the unlucky ones, who were neither sentenced nor released, were kept in the gendarmerie and sometimes used as intimidation material, as they are today.

To create the effect, Noyama tied her hands behind her back and hooked a large iron hook through her jaw from under her jaw to hang from a chain dangling from the ceiling, leaving her feet with only her toes on the ground, making a mess of blood all over her mouth and neck. She tilted her head back miserably, the tip of her chin strangely the highest point of her entire being.

One of the recruits sat in front of her, guarding a small coal stove commonly used in the homes of northern Chinese people, and waited for a while before pulling out a red-hot iron bar and pressing it against the schoolgirl’s body. The schoolgirl’s whole body twisted like a fish, and because she couldn’t quite scream with the hook in her mouth, she just let out a painful whimper from the depths of her throat each time.

I noticed that Chen Huiqin, who had been brought in, turned her face away to avoid the torture scene, but she did not become more cooperative. I sat down on a chair against the wall and ordered, “Let’s do it!”

The gendarmes pushed her next to the charred-smelling schoolgirl, hooked her handcuffs with another dangling hook, dangled her feet off the ground, and then swung their military belts around her body.

After about forty strokes or so I called a halt and lowered her down from the top, where she sat on the ground with her upper body supported by her arms, gasping for breath sharply, the surface of her white skin bulging high with a line of greenish-purple bruises, and her short, formerly neat hair streaked with sweat on her forehead and cheeks.

The whipping at the beginning, like the stripping of the woman’s clothes earlier, is intended to shock the subject’s resolve, to make her realize that there are completely different rules of the road, and to make her wonder if the willpower she has built up beforehand is enough.

The gendarmes pressed the woman to her knees, switched her hands in front of her, and pushed thick square bamboo chopsticks into her fingers one by one. Two burly men held the ends of the chopsticks and pressed them hard with indifferent expressions. In an instant, the four fingers of the woman’s tortured right hand opened up straight and stretched wide in the air, while her kneeling body went limp and wriggled on the floor as if her bones had been taken out of her body. She instinctively jerked her hand back hard in her frenzy, and the gendarmes grabbed the handcuffs and pulled her hand up to the right height and resumed clamping her next two fingers hard, to be replaced later by her left hand.

“Good girl, remember? Where are the things going to be delivered?”

She lay on her side on the ground, a pair of fine eyes staring blankly at me for half a day without a word.

Nakagawa brought a thick wooden board and pressed it on her ankle bone, put the foot wearing military boots on it heavily, the girl let out a painful “ouch”. Nakagawa lifted his foot and stomped on it one by one, finally causing her to scream out in pain, which was the first time she couldn’t help but cry out in pain after the torture.

Nakagawa knelt down by her feet and felt the girl’s skinned and bleeding ankle, probably to see if the bones were broken, but then he took hold of one of the girl’s feet and examined it. The girl’s instep was high and narrow, and her toes looked weak because of their slenderness. With a look like “It’s really worth a try,” Nakagawa picked up the chopsticks that had been thrown on the ground and pushed them between her toes, pressing them hard with his hand.

Dragged her up on her back and bundled on the iron bed, in the foot end of the pad into a few bricks to make her head lower, with a wet towel to block her nose, so she had to open her mouth in order to breathe, Nakagawa then pour cold water down into her mouth constantly. She coughed and choked and struggled under the column of water, Nakagawa is an old hand, a moment of effort to fill her stomach greatly up.

Unhooking it and putting it on the ground and stomping on her stomach, she feebly tried to push Nakagawa’s leather shoes away from her stomach, that of course was useless. Water gushed out of her mouth, nostrils, and anus in streams, leaving her face and body covered in water, and the ground became wet and slippery.

I went to take a call and came back, and the two gendarmes had already moved aside, leaving her lying there alone, her whole body convulsing and vomiting endlessly, by which time she was vomiting out little mouthfuls of pale red blood.

Just hold her down on the floor and give her almost another leaden bucket of water. Watching the slender woman put her cuffed hands together over her big round belly and wriggle her body pathetically, trying to avoid the stomping of her leather boots, that hellish scenario is something everyone has to sympathize with, right? But the call I’d just received was from the team, and with the Lt. Colonel’s roar still ringing in my ears, I wouldn’t have much patience left.

I bent down to the woman on the ground and grabbed her wet hair. At this time, Chen Huixin had completely lost her serious teacher’s appearance, her face was pale, her half-open mouth was full of water, and a burst of heart-breaking dry-heaving made her whole body trembling like a leaf in the wind.

“Please, please… stop pouring… I… I really… I don’t know anything.”

“Ah, is that so?” I smiled grimly. She’s still in denial, but it seems like she’s on the verge of collapsing. “Enlighten her.” I said to Nosan, who spoke Chinese.

Noyama, a merchant who had run a cloth store in China before the war, was proud to show that he would be skillful in the rolled tongue accent of northern China. He crouched down beside the woman and rattled on for half a day, saying something to the effect that no one had ever survived three days in the gendarmerie without speaking, that what we had done to her was only the beginning, and that we were going to do what we were going to do, and that there was still more to be done to the woman.

She whispered, “Kill me.”

So Noyama explained to her that we would never simply kill her, instead we would keep her alive through endless pain, we would even have doctors treat her until she had to tell us everything we wanted to know.

Of course, after that things would be really good. We’ll release her, we’ll give her money, find her something to do somewhere else. This was of course a lie, and very few people who were identified as anti-Japanese were released, whether he or she confessed or not. A subject with an intelligence background such as Chen Huixin would almost certainly be executed after she made a full confession, or would be held for a long time in preparation for what might come of it later.

That wasn’t the immediate problem though, the immediate problem was that I noticed that the girl wasn’t responding at all with her eyes closed under Noyama’s chatter, and I realized that she was just slyly using the opportunity to rest.

Everyone bustled back into activity and the hand-cranked generator was hauled out. The copper wire from the generator’s lead wire was wrapped around both of the girl’s nipples and cranked vigorously, the current knocking her tightly bound naked body up and down like a fish landing on a riverbank. She fainted, so they used smoke to wake her up to do it again, and when she awoke for the second time, they unwound one of the wires wrapped around a copper rod and plunged it deep into the woman’s lower body.

The recruit hid away and mechanically cranked the generator, and the girl’s mouth opened wide in shock and struggled open and closed for nearly ten seconds before she screamed, a horrible, grotesque sound that, in retrospect, was not at all like something that could come from a human mouth. But at the time we didn’t care in the least, and we heard this sound almost every day in Room Two.

Staring at her breasts and tits, one could clearly see the beads of sweat emerging one by one from beneath her skin, where they remained for a few seconds, becoming the size of a soybean, before abruptly rolling down her body. In rhythm with the cranking of the generator, a stream of yellow urine flowed out of the lower part of her body, sometimes sharply, sometimes slowly, and quickly puddled on the floor.

I’m afraid her eyes hadn’t been that round since she was born, and when we saw her black eyes roll up past us we stopped for a moment and waited for her to recover a bit before we shook them again.

It went on like this until seven o’clock in the evening, and surprisingly, there was still no result. The woman’s mouth was coated with bloody saliva, and her voice was already completely mute. It was estimated that she might not be able to withstand this and die, so I decided to stop for the time being and helped the girl, whose face was covered with tears and sweat, up and fed her some salted boiled water.

“Let her rest for three hours and give her something to eat.” I said to Nakagawa: “At eleven o’clock, get some people to stay with her, isn’t it cold for her to lie here alone?” I added: “Don’t call the Chinese. Understand?”

“Understood.”

The whole thing had to be kept a complete secret, and the Chinese police force could not be told, so we had to rely on Nakagawa and the others.

I went to an entertainment center, perhaps called The Moon of xxx, and had planned to spend the night there and return to the gendarmerie in the morning. But I came to my senses in the middle of the night and began to think about the case over and over again. According to what I know about the way this intelligence organization works, it would be useless for that schoolteacher to say anything else as long as it dragged on for two or three days.

I don’t know now when they were scheduled to hand over the items, and it’s clear that when that time passes, no one will be stupid enough to wait there anymore. Perhaps, if I’m lucky enough to have a second point of contact pre-arranged for the eventuality of the first handover failing due to the fluidity of the situation, I’ll have another day or two in that case.

On the other hand, I also had to justify the stupidity of the arrests in Uehring. I have no way of knowing the extent of control the Baizuo authorities had over Chen Huizhen, and therefore no way of judging whether or not I should have shouted like Noyama when faced with the prospect of losing the person I was following.

If we go on like this, there will be an infinite number of what should and should not be done. The only realistic way out was to get the Chen schoolteacher to quickly reveal the details so that I could act on them. As long as there are achievements, no one will hold me accountable whether I did the right thing or wrong thing in the first place, otherwise the White Left Organization will disparage the Army everywhere, and I’m afraid that Lt. Col. xxx of the Military Police Headquarters will have to ask me to disembowel myself.

I returned to Room 2 in the detachment compound at 2:00 a.m. The room was lit with an electric light, and Chen Huiqin was still naked, sitting on her knees against the wall, her hands handcuffed behind her to an iron pipe nailed horizontally at the foot of the wall. Her legs were spread out to the sides, and her head hung low in exhaustion. The three gendarmes in front of her were just as naked as she was, and the small coal stove was sitting next to them.

“It’s been done that way and is being questioned.” They reported, and I sat down to listen.

Nakagawa and the others asked obscene and dirty questions, how many times Nakagawa, how many times Ozaki and so on. If the woman refused to answer, she was tortured with a thin iron bar baking in the stove. Since being branded on the breasts was really painful, she would feel that it was not a secret that she had to fight to the death to keep, and would start answering in a hoarse, broken voice. After asking for a while and then moving on to the important questions, Nakagawa hoped that the young woman would feel that there was no point in resisting any longer when she had even said something as unpleasant as that. This was nothing more than a working tool for them to explore each other’s psyche.

“Get a couple more people from the housekeeping class and work until four or five to let her get some sleep. Don’t scald her too much.” I instructed them before I left, desperately restraining the idea of starting the frenzied torture right away.

the morrow

I slept until a little after eight o’clock in the morning. The gendarmes had spread a ragged threadbare blanket on the floor of the interrogation room for the female prisoner to lie on, it being a cool autumn night, and had taken a quilt so dirty that it could not be seen to be of any color from the detention room in the forecourt to cover her. She was still handcuffed to prevent her possible disruptive behavior, and a pair of five-kilogram shackles, a model that heavy usually used for male prisoners, was locked on her feet. As my orders were not to let her out of sight for a minute, a private was kept on guard in the interrogation room.

I lifted the quilt off of her and bade her to stand up, and it took a great deal of strength and courage for her to stand up straight, holding onto the wall, and as she endeavored to do so, both of her legs kept trembling incessantly. The front of her body had been branded with a number of scars, mostly burned epidermis revealing a small patch of light red muscle underneath where bodily fluids had pooled, as well as a few spots of baked skin scrunched up like crumpled paper. Her fingers and toes had swollen, a few of them particularly bad, looking brightly puddled underneath the epidermis, possibly with broken bones inside.

The private told me that they called in eight more men later, so she had been abused more than a dozen times this night.

“Wasn’t it a virgin yesterday? It must be a very mixed feeling right now, huh? Don’t you want to talk about it?”

She hung her head down and resumed her silly behavior, repeating phrases like “I’m an ordinary teacher, you can’t treat me like this” as if she were playing a phonograph.

“Go, go next door and see what we’ll do to you!” I yelled as I pressed on with my impatience.

She walks slowly, holding onto the wall, barely lifting her feet due to the pain combined with the weight of the shackles, only moving forward with the palms of her feet grazing the ground. She passed me by stopping in the doorway for a moment, perhaps because of the dazzling sunlight outside. Her back and hips looked polished and shapely in the backlight. But I was mad enough to think: if she’s still that stubborn today, I’m going to make this place look like a Chinese dumpling filling.

The sound of chains stopped outside the door, and I followed them out; there was no one else in the yard. The girl was leaning against the doorway of the next room, one hand on the wall, one hand over the small of her back, her eyes closed and she was bent over very deeply.

“Hmph, can’t take it anymore?” I stood coldly watching until she slowly moved back into the door.

“Get to the end of the iron bed!” Someone inside droned.

“Forward, further forward, on your knees by the stove!”

“Just watch the fire no moving.”

“It’ll be warmer, won’t it?”

Several of the guys inside had been there last night, and they described the scene insulting the girl as you described it, one more unconcerned than the other, so much so that I cringed as I listened outside the door.

Nosan translated with great interest, and as they grew happier and laughed and asked her to perform, the girl’s already sobbing voice obstinately repeated, “No… no… no…” and they began to beat her.

By the time I entered she had been dragged to the center of the room, with someone holding on to her hair. Her face was right in front of the door, and her eyes were as full of despair as a rabbit cornered in a room.

“I’m afraid that won’t do her any good.” Although this was my judgment, and I walked in with the intention of urging them to start as soon as possible, I smiled and waited for a while.

Later still, she was made to lie on her back on the iron bed, pulling her limbs apart and binding her hands and feet tightly.

“The tops have been roasted, and if you don’t get the bottoms they will be uneven.” The palms of the girl’s feet with their deep arches stood erect perpendicular to her flat body, and the gendarmes poured alcohol over the cotton balls and bound them to the soles of her feet with thin wire.

The fire was lit and at first the alcohol smoldered an almost invisible blue fire. She jerked her leg, driving the iron bed all the way up and shaking it, all the while inclining her head to the side to look at her two feet that were emitting greenish smoke.

She clenched her lips and recycled her leg harder and harder one at a time, and for a minute or two she wrestled in silence like that with the rope that fastened her ankle.

Then her stoic demeanor was torn away bit by bit by agony, and a long series of gut-wrenching wails rushed through her tightly closed lips. Her legs turned into scattered convulsions, twisting into all sorts of strange forms as far as they could go. She turned her face toward the sky and cried out, completely out of control, “Mom, I’m in pain…”

The fire went out and asked Chen Huixin. She sobbed for half a day and said nothing.

“Scald her!”

The branding iron was withdrawn from the stove, and the head was pressed with a single, ferocious blow upon the narrow breast between the girl’s breasts. She had indeed gritted her teeth in preparation, but the immense pain must have been far beyond her imagination, and she gave a shriek full of fear as her breasts contracted deeply under the fiery red iron bar.

I burned her breasts several times and then burned her armpits. She was still a little strong at this time, struggling and twisting her body, intermittently issued a “mom ah”, “pain me,” “I really don’t know ah” scream, a more than a sound than a miserable. Miserable.

The gendarmes finally stopped, and Chen Huiqin’s taut body loosened up on the iron bed. Since her entire chest and breasts had been turned into a large piece of black and red, slime-filled, half-cooked barbecue meat, she had thought that the most painful stage had already persisted.

But the principle of torture is to apply constant pressure. When the thin tongs used to pass through the stove had been re-baked to a blazing white, Nosan licked his lips and began to touch the girl’s sensitive areolas and nipples with them, one at a time, not too gently, but not too heavily. He tortured Chen Huiqin very patiently for a long time in this area, making a series of purplish-red blood blisters before poking and tearing them one by one, and by the end of the day driving the agonized girl to the point where she was practically catatonic already.

When she had calmed down a little, the gendarmes plucked her body hair by hand and pressed the branding iron to the lower part of her blood-stained body. Next they would have scalded the mucous membranes inside, but she was shaking so much that the man pressing her ended up burning his hand on the branding iron. So they let go of her, and only flattened the red-hot iron and pressed it downward; then replaced it with a new one drawn from the stove and poked it in; put it up and scratched it hard from top to bottom, and when they came upon a place where they could poke it in, they stuck half the iron in.

She howled as hoarsely as an animal, and her eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and nose were all so horribly altered in shape that they did not resemble a human face. She threw her head wildly against the bars behind her, and though her hands and feet were bound tightly to the frame of the iron bed, she was able to raise her back and hips almost half a foot off the frame. Nakagawa wrestled with her hair in both hands for a while before stopping her and pouring a bucket of water over her head.

In fact even Nakagawa’s face changed a little, and everyone stared at the woman’s face in silence for a moment.

“Where is the transmitter going to be delivered?”

“I, I really, don’t have a transmitter.”

“What’s his name? Where does he live?”

“Ouch… what’s the name?”

“Who sent you?”

“┅┅”

Another person drew the branding iron from the stove, and I stopped him with a gesture of impatience at him. It is true that branding with fire can inflict great pain and a strong psychological blow, but excessive burning does not add consistently to the pain felt by the interrogated person. The most intense pain in the human body is felt when the surface skin is destroyed and the delicate dermal tissue rich in nerve endings underneath is exposed. At this time the injury looks very moist, showing a pink or pinkish-white color, and even the slightest touch can make a person shiver with pain. I have seen people who were drenched all over with boiling water in such pain that they kept banging their heads against the wall all night in the holding cell, and could not stop beating themselves bloody.

If the heat continues to be applied, eventually the entire skin with the fat underneath will be completely charred, and then the injured person will have no pain at all. Of course, he would have a big problem with that area later on, and would be subject to sensory leakage that would rot a hole in it, but it would not be as effective as a shallower burn for immediate questioning.

At the same time, the nipples and pubic area are often chosen as the parts to be branded, not mainly because of lewdness, but because the nerves there are most concentrated and sensitive, and the armpits are also burned for the same reason. Of course, it is also undeniable that the torture of the genital organs gives a huge psychological blow to both male and female prisoners.

I think my gendarmes get it just right whether they use a soldering iron or alcohol and cotton.

The gendarmes grabbed Chen Huixin’s hair and pulled her head up from the iron bed and pressed it forward, bringing her face up to the pair of breasts on her chest so that she could see what her breasts looked like now. After more than an hour of serious work, her breasts looked like two peach peaches that had had their skins torn off in small strips, their light red, flaccid subcutaneous tissues rotten and submerged in sticky yellow bodily fluids.

Holding up the five-centimeter-long steel needle, which was usually used to sew cotton coats, to show her, to terrorize her, and then under the tip of the girl’s nose, she used the tip of the needle to cut into the tender flesh of her burnt skin, and every time she cut, it made her shiver like she was afraid of the cold. Finally, the poor woman stared at the steel needle sticking centimeter by centimeter through the center of her nipple. I’m afraid her feeling would be like sticking in the tip of her heart, she didn’t scream much, and didn’t even manage to pass out, but stared at the peak of her breasts with only a little bit of the end of the needle showing, as if she had been under a spell.

The muscles of the girl’s entire body loomed up piece by piece like a man’s, standing out clearly under her skin. Her thin, limp body was now taut as a straightened bowstring.

Suddenly the right breast, into which the needle had been inserted, as if it had gained an independent life, jumped up and down in Nakagawa’s hand, and with each jump a droplet of blood suddenly sprang out of the wound at the top. In response to it, a large tear welled up in the girl’s fine eyes, which were staring blankly at it.

Nakagawa picked up a second needle and showed it to her again… drawing it across her breasts… and then sticking it in a little below the end of the first needle.

Watching the second needle stuck halfway in, Chen Huiqin tried to close her eyes, and several voices immediately scolded angrily, “Open your eyes and watch properly!” At the same time, they tore her hair even harder.

She opened her eyes again and suddenly said weakly, “Don’t, stop stabbing.” The tone of her voice was special, and everyone stopped their hands when they realized it. She swallowed hard and said, “I, I’ll tell you all.”

The gendarmes put her head back on the iron bed and looked toward me in unison. I looked at my watch, a little after ten. If this was true, there was still time to do something today. I asked, “Where’s the transmitter?”

“At… at the river, the soybean set a hundred meters or so south along the river, maybe, two hundred meters. There’s an adobe house behind it.”

I glanced toward Nosan, who had since spent most of the day working with the white-left Chinese agent, retracing the route that Chen Huixin had taken at Shangling several times. He nodded slightly, meaning she had been there.

“Why did you put it there?”

She was a little surprised: “What for? Let someone come and get it!”

Much to my shame, I had been waiting for this liaison to wander around the small town, and when she finally determined that no one was following her, she cunningly slipped up to the door of a courtyard inhabited by a Chinese man and knocked gently on the door a few times. By the time she came out of it again, the suitcase was no longer in her hand.

So I always thought that if we caught her before she delivered, in two or three days, those who were waiting to receive it might not be warned in time. I’d always imagined leading an ops team into one of the most secretive intelligence organization’s contact points, or even a command center, but not so much now, I should have thought of this “mailbox” delivery method, I must have been stupid from all the years of fighting bandits.

“Ouch, that hurts!” She moaned: “Give me some water.”

I said, “That’s it”, and the gendarmes untied the ropes from her wrists and lifted her upper body from the iron bed. The girl leaned limply into the arms of her torturers, who had been torturing her all day and all night, and greedily drank a full glass of water like a child, and sighed as if satisfied. The ropes around her feet were also untied, having been almost completely embedded in her flesh from her desperate struggles during the torture.

My men helped her to a chair and sat down, more or less as if they were relieved. With the exception of a couple of lunatics like Nakagawa, getting a little girl, even if she was a Chinaman, to this extent left some strange feelings in the minds of these peasants and fishermen of three or five years ago. Of course, if she hadn’t confessed, we’d still have done it without a care in the world, and that was the only right way for us to serve our country and the Emperor in the war. Now the job was sort of done.

Personally, I never doubted that Chen Huixin would eventually collapse; there was no one who could hold out through the Japanese gendarmes’ questioning without making an honest confession. It was only time that made me anxious; there was no point in saying anything more about the prisoner if time dragged on too long. But I didn’t like Chen Huiqin’s behavior this time. Most people would have agreed to confess when they couldn’t stand the extreme pain and were in a state of complete frenzy, and then if they had been given a little time to rest and start questioning, he would have been very cooperative. He would be very cooperative because he was already terrified, and the threat of being given a new trial would be enough to dissuade him from recalcitrance. And Chen Huiqin did not concede defeat when she was closest to breaking down; compared to the coolness of the situation just now, she spoke in a manner that seemed a little too calm.

I swept her over; the girl leaning back in her chair was keeping her head down, gently pressing her hand against her left breast that had two sewing needles stuck into it, puckering her lips and blowing air into it. Her legs were stretched straight out and parted to the sides (it would have hurt more to keep them together), as if no one else was looking directly at the men in front of her. A day and a night’s work had turned what should have been a shy, unmarried woman into this, so maybe she really wasn’t up to it.

I sat down behind the recorder’s desk and flipped open a hard-sided binder. There was nothing in it, of course; the only thing on it was a floor plan of the town of Upper Ridge, with a pencil outline of the route that Chen Huiqin had traveled on the first day.

“Ms. Chen, let’s get started.”

A standard interrogation should allow the subject to speak from the beginning, letting her organize her story step by step, but right now I can’t wait.

“Do you know who the person who went to get it was?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know when he’ll pick it up?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you report to your contacts when something is delivered?”

“I wore a red scarf in three days from Hong Chang Boulevard on Weifang Road to Lok Kee Noodle House, and if I didn’t go, something was wrong.”

“How does your contact get in touch with you?”

“He delivers the mail to the school concierge. If it’s a 5:30 dinner date, I go to the mailbox to pick up instructions or something to deliver.”

“Where’s the mailbox?”

“It’s in a cave in the back of Red Mountain, and there’s a rock crevice in it.”

“The back of Red Mountain… it’s very nice. From which road did you go? It’s the road in front of Li Yi, the one with the stone pagoda?”

“No, it’s this side of Xiaogou.”

So she does know Red Mountain well, and that road in front of the plaque doesn’t go anywhere.

“Where exactly?”

“Not to the top of the hill, turn in on a path to the right. The location is hard to tell like this.”

“Is this where you took the instructions for this trip to xxx city to pick up the radio station as well?”

“Yes.”

“What day?”

“The first three days, no, the day before that again, I think. The twelfth.”

“Nonsense! You lowly woman!” I slammed my hand heavily on the table, startling the recorder beside me: “The Imperial Army’s 27th Squadron is doing mountain combat maneuvers at Red Mountain, and that mountainside has been blocked off for seven or eight days!”

She froze for a moment, her lips twitching a few times without making a sound.

“How dare you deceive the Imperial Army… think about it, think about what you just tasted. They will stab needles into your flesh one by one and will cut off your flesh piece by piece.”

I replaced my smile and walked over to her, touching the brand on her shoulder, four fingers slick with spilled liquid, while feeling her shiver under my hand.

“Little girl, I know you’re in pain, so much pain that you said the wrong thing. Will you start from the beginning again? Where is the transmitter hidden?”

There was no 27th Squadron at all, and there were no combat maneuvers. But if you don’t actually go somewhere at the time you say you did, you have no way of determining whether there was or wasn’t. The problem with being the subject of an interrogation is this: a confession prepared in advance cannot be changed. If you say you’re an ordinary schoolteacher who knows nothing, you know nothing, and there’s no way that a lie that’s been rewritten on the spot is without holes in it.

I think Chen Huiqin certainly knows this in her heart, but she just can’t take it anymore. I think if she wants to open her mouth again now, what she says will mostly be the truth.

She didn’t try to defend herself, she knew it was useless and would only get worse. But she bit her lip and simply said nothing.

I turned around and walked back to the table, suppressing my anger and disappointment, and behind me there was a chaotic clatter and the woman’s barely suppressed “oh… oh… oh…”. The gendarmes were holding her down right there on the chair and were stabbing her other nipple with a needle.

I stood at attention in front of the chair, turned backward, walked to her and turned backward again, and walked again. She was now kneeling behind the chair, her spread-eagled hands pressed firmly against the chair’s surface, a needle clamped with pliers into the fingernail crevice of her index finger, and a hammer to hammer it in.

Her body shrugged upward with the hammer blows, throwing her head violently to the sides as another person went up to help hold her down.

“The transmitter, where is it?”

“I… I… I… I…” she gasped and said the word “I” several times, but there was nothing more to say.

Nail another one into your middle finger and ask, “Radio, where is it?”

She passed out once.

The tip of the one that nailed her ring finger went through the second knuckle of the finger and nailed all over the first four fingers of her right hand then one by one her left hand, also. Blood dripped everywhere on the back of her hand and on the surface of the chair.

Ask again: “Where?”

She even had the strength to raise her head and give me a critical look.

“Feet.”

Push the girl down on the floor, make her feet together, the soles of her feet against a thick board, wrap the rope around her haphazardly, toes up vertically, and then nail steel pins into each of her toes one by one. The toes were relatively short, and the steel pins were able to go all the way into the roots of the toes that had been pinched yesterday. What came out of a few swollen and particularly sharp toes was a surprisingly large amount of cloudy, almost bloodless foam.

She passed out for the second time, and it took half a day to wake her up.

“Call the medic, call Yamada. Wake her up and call me.”

It was about two hours before they came to the captain’s room to tell me she was awake, and it was evening.

“Hotter.”

Have her kneel on the ground with her face toward the iron bed and her arms stretched out over the iron bed and bound. Starting at her shoulders, press the red-hot iron bar up for about five seconds, change the bar, move it four or five centimeters down and press it down again. In this order it was branded down to her buttocks and back up again starting at her neck. This time it was almost a section of her spine that was branded, and the young woman’s reaction was strong.

All the way down to her tailbone and then the second shoulder. The whole back could be branded in three rows, and we did that for three rows.

Untying her and dragging her to the torture bed, Chen Huiqin already didn’t even have the strength to struggle, without being tied up she just lay so motionless towards the sky, her two legs hanging helplessly over the side of the bed. The first thing was to not let her pass out, so they got Yamada to inject her with an injection that was said to stimulate the nerves.

“Call a couple more people.” I gave the order. So I went and pulled in a few more men, and there were twelve or thirteen men crammed into room two surrounding Chen Huiqin in the center, and the girl’s female organs had just been scalded from the inside out.

I have indeed vowed to write truthfully and objectively about all that has happened in the past, but I’m afraid I’m getting too old for those two hours that night, and even trying to remember that look on her face under the electric light at that time is more than my heart can bear.

It must be said that in the middle of those two hours, the iron was used at least one more time inside her body in order to “sharpen her sense of Japanese aura”.

Two guys started out cooking chili sauce on a small stove in a copper pot, the kind of red chili peppers that farmers have hanging in bunches everywhere, chopped up and put in a small half pot and simmered over the fire with some water. Then the choking got so bad that everyone couldn’t stand it, so they carried the whole stove outside the house.

When everyone was finished, they brought in the pot, and it was half a pot of red, rotten stuff. He said to the woman, “You’re tired from working so long, aren’t you? Tomorrow it will be pus, let’s disinfect it.” So he opened her thighs, and with his bare hands, he pushed in handfuls of the red chili sauce, and then wiped it away with his fingers. To keep her from interfering with her hands, cuffed both of them behind her back again.

In fact, Chen Huiqin was powerless to interfere at all, she could barely even twist her body to avoid it. She calmly lay there listening to them fooling around down there, occasionally twitching slightly once or twice, and letting out a few short, grunts from the depths of her throat like someone having a nightmare at night. Her breathing gradually became more rapid, though, as the chili peppers took effect inside her.

“There, that must feel warm in your body?” Everyone stood up and watched her as the girl slowly brought her parted legs together in full view of the crowd and worked her way back up to rest one leg on the other. The two legs twisted together and clenched, then turned her body to the side.

It took her a total of three tries to get herself to lay over on her side, a series of movements that were done at a movie slow-release-like sluggish pace. She struggled now to curl her legs to bring her knees up against her stomach, and that still didn’t work. Her narrow nose flared outward and her chest rose and fell halfway up and down before she gathered new strength to spread both legs as far as she could again within the confines of the shackles, sucking cold air into her mouth like a scalded tongue. It didn’t really have anything to do with her burning bottom at all, she just didn’t know what to do.

She mumbled, “Thirsty, give me some water…”

This reminded us that someone had gotten her mouth open with a gentle squeeze, and she stared wide-eyed and intently at the small pot of chili sauce that still had a small amount left up to her lips, her eyes like she was crazy. The crimson paste poured all over her mouth and lips, covering her nostrils, and she now had to suck the stuff into her lungs if she wanted to breathe.

The boys who had only been called in during the night and had not taken part in the earlier torture laughed out loud, while the gendarmes who had been following the work for two days turned and walked to the other end of the room to wash their hands. I thought there was something wrong with their morale and wanted to call on them to reprimand them, but then I felt a strong pang of fatigue myself. Leaving the two gendarmes behind, I dismissed the others from the room.

I stared with disgust at Chen Huiqin, who was coughing and choking, endlessly folding over on the ground. Her entire face had turned a purplish-red color, and her tongue was trailing out of her mouth so long that she hadn’t been able to take a proper breath until now. A whistle-like chirp emanated from her chest, while a messy liquid gushed out from her mouth and nostrils, and her face and disheveled hair were already cascading with this mixture of dark red chunks, indistinguishable from clots of blood or pieces of chili peppers. Then came a series of coughing staffs like she was trying to spit out all her insides.

“It’s not a woman, it’s a night spirit.” I thought angrily, and she did look like a female ghost at this point.

“No one can hold out like that.” It didn’t feel like I was frantically torturing her, but like she had been sent here specifically to torture me. She knew in her heart that she was bound to confess everything eventually, but she was so stubbornly holding on for a minute.

It was a good chance to be appreciated by my superiors, and to break up a hidden enemy intelligence organization, but I let this crazy woman ruin it. That’s how I cursed everyone and everything: the damn Chinese woman! Damn the driver of the military vehicle! Damn the White Left Organization!

The woman finally coughed up most of the ground pepper she had sucked into her windpipe. She whimpered and crawled on the ground, turning her body over so that her back was facing upward, wriggling like a worm, rubbing her skin on the ground in silence. She was hoping that the cool air from the brick floor would seep into the small of her back and slow down the flames burning inside her a bit. Her hands stayed cuffed behind her back, not helping at all.

“Get it for her.”

The two unlucky guys moodily washed the female prisoner’s face, helped her up with some water and porridge, and even had to help her to the toilet. These things were never left to the other prisoners, but Chen Huiqin had not been allowed to touch a Chinese person since she entered this room.

“Put her up on the wall.”

They preferred to do this by pulling the girl up against the wall and wrapping her handcuffed hands behind her back with a rope around a piece of iron pipe fixed to the brick wall. The iron pipe was positioned a little higher than a person’s knees, and the hands were secured at such a height that the prisoner could not straighten her legs when standing up, and could not touch the ground with her heels when crouching.

This is one of the methods used by the police all over the world. A stricter practice would be to fasten the prisoner’s feet to the corner of the wall with a rope as well, which would prevent him from moving his feet outward a little to flatten them, and support a portion of his weight by resting his back against the wall. Another iron pipe at the foot of the wall in cell No. 2 served this purpose, and the shackle chains locked to the woman’s feet were wound several times around the pipe and drawn tight.

Chen Huiqin was already powerless to stand up straight, and as soon as the soles of her fire-damaged feet touched the ground, she even changed her face. She slid down the brick wall, the weight of her body fell on the front several folded over the toes, she was not too loud “ouch”, but her body shook violently, still inserted in the gap between her fingernails of the steel needle is not so far from the ground.

I walked over and stomped my sturdy army boots on her toes, crushing them hard from side to side. I lifted my foot and saw that it was as flat as a bug that had been trampled to death, and that a patch of blood had been squeezed out in front of each toe. The girl huddled underneath barely lifted her face, her eyes bright with tears. Her lips quivered half-heartedly, but not a word came out. I waited a moment and began to stomp her other foot violently.

She’s probably unconscious. “Wake her up.” I ordered coldly, “Watch her, don’t let her fall asleep.”

Chen Huixin spent the night in a half-squat with her arms clipped behind her back and her disabled feet. I don’t know how the two gendarmes who were on duty at night tortured the girl for fun in order to get through the boredom, but I did wonder what she was thinking an hour later when her joints were aching and her every muscle was shaking uncontrollably and violently. I knew that every minute would feel like an entire day, and the burning in her pussy…

There was complete and unending endurance ahead, and did the girl not think for a moment of giving up?

third day

That morning I hid in the captain’s room and looked through the files in a fidgety manner, instead of going to the interrogation room in the bungalow across the street. Nakagawa was in charge there, cutting her flesh with a razor blade and rubbing salt into the wounds, something he did patiently until after ten o’clock.

At twelve-thirty I changed into a gray Chinese jacket and sat down in the small parlor with an ensuite next door to the captain’s room. A four-sided mahjong table was placed in the center of the room, which served as a dining room for the time being, and I had a few dishes delivered from Hongfu House in the center of town.

Over there they put a black blouse and a black skirt on the girl (blood would seep through the light-colored material and it was too ugly), as if they had borrowed them from the woman who was the captain of the police force next door. This was the first time Chen Huixin had been allowed to wear clothes since her arrest, and the last set of clothes she ever wore in her life.

From that afternoon until her secret execution in the basement a month or so later, we never bothered to make her wear anything again, and she spent the whole time naked and naked.

Two gendarmes pinned her across the backyard and placed her across the square table in the chair opposite me, and only then did they remove her handcuffs. No shoes had been borrowed for her, and her twisted and swollen feet probably wouldn’t fit into ordinary shoes, with the shackles still locked around her ankles.

The medic had already given her a shot of morphine or something like that, or she would have shrunk under the table in pain, I’m afraid.

“I personally admire you very, very much, girl, you are a true warrior. I have never met a woman as strong as you. Now that the battle between us is over, it is I who have lost. I hope we can be friends in the future.”

I said in a low voice like a foolish actor, hoping to impress her. Although she was obviously very tired, she gave me a slightly curious look.

I stood up and poured her a kind of Chinese red wine, very sweet, while smiling sweetly.

“Bastard, I didn’t even pour a drink for a woman in Japan!” While thinking this, she shivered as she picked up another cup and went around to Chen Huiqin.

“To the brave girl.”

She still sat with her head bowed, the dark red burns on her neck still visible from behind her tightly buttoned collar. Since she couldn’t bend her fingers at all, she held the glass of wine between her thumb and the edge of her palm. I was wondering if she was going to pour the wine on me, but she slowly drank almost half of it.

My Chinese couldn’t express anything more complex, so I called Noyama in to translate, and then I changed it to Japanese.

“I have studied your files and know that you have rules about delaying confessions for as long as possible after arrest, but after a certain period of time, probably two to three days, if there is a threat of serious injury to life or limb, confessions can be made. Your organization knows as well as I do that once someone is in the hands of the other side, it is simply absurd to expect him or her to be recalcitrant to the end.

Your stuff didn’t arrive. We’ve stripped and looked at that broken hayloft along with the ground around it in a ten-meter radius, inch by inch, and there’s not even a proper place to put a scrap of paper.”

She curved the corners of her mouth upwards, barely showing a smile, and said, “Under that elm tree twelve meters away.”

I closed my eyes and waited for two seconds, like swallowing a fly.

I haven’t told her yet that a dozen or so gendarmes and gendarme supplements plus the Chinese police had been searching that part of Red Hill yesterday afternoon.

“You didn’t deliver the stuff, and there’s no one, top to bottom, of your comrades who doesn’t know that something is wrong with you. If you knew where they lived, they’d surely be out of there by now. And if you were delivering things through a letterbox, there’s no way they’d go back there and look around. Even if I put you out on the street right now, your superior would never come back to you to deliver a note or a bomb of some kind. I’m afraid he’s sitting on whichever train to the harbor he’s on by now, leaving you a little girl all alone in our hands.

For them you simply had an accident and were cut off, the whole organization was not affected, right? Whatever you do anymore has no effect on them and is no longer relevant to them.

We did beat you up and did some, Si, less than polite things. But that’s my responsibility, the same as the one you’re burdened with. It was the only way I could find you out, there was no other way.

Now that I’ve lost, I may be punished for it by being transferred to a unit on the front lines.

Counting from the time you were brought into this courtyard by us, forty-seven hours have passed since then, one hour short of your disciplinary regulations, I believe. I don’t care about that amount of time, I think we’ll have something to eat first, then Ms. Chen can rest for a while in the inner room. In an hour’s time it’ll be here, make some tea and we’ll have a slow chat.

Miss Chen, tell us everything you know, okay?”

Anyone could hear that I was almost pleading with her. She kept silent and finally said, “I want to lie down for a while.”

“Yes, yes, of course, we’ll do it all over again tonight. Miss Chen, drink the wine!”

She took the glass between her thumb and palm again and drained it.

“Ms. Chen, this way.” I move the chair blocking the way for her.

She stared at her bare feet, and I glared at Nosan, who stood at attention before helping the girl up from her chair. Though she rested most of her weight on Nosan’s arm, she groaned lowly as soon as her paws pressed against the ground, two lines of pale red footprints imprinted on the brick floor where she’d walked.

Noyama exited, “Close the door!” He closes the door and I continue to drink without saying a word.

The man who went to check on her an hour later reported that she was asleep, and I waited another half hour and walked into the inner room. The girl was lying on her back on that Chinese wooden couch with her arms wrapped around her chest and her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling. Though she was tired, the painkillers woke her up with pain a little past their effect.

I smiled as kindly as I could and shouted to the outside to make tea.

She had a pained expression and struggled for half a day to let herself sit up on the edge of the couch, holding up the tea cup from the tea  cup. The front of her dress had been plastered to her body, and a patch of water was imprinted on it. Because it was on the black texture couldn’t tell the color, but it could only be blood coming out of her injuries, right?

“Ms. Chen is from a teacher training school, right? Which school is it?”

“It’s xxx Normal School.”

“You didn’t join the organization somewhere, did you?”

“No,” denied a little faster: “I’m not.”

“We’ve made a deal, girl, so where is it?”

I waited a long time.

“No, I can’t say.”

“What! Why?” I jumped: “You still can’t say anything? Radio stations, contacts, superiors?”

“So,” my voice became colder and calmer than it had ever been before, “you realize that they’re still in danger if you tell them now?”

I think she was really scared, the girl sitting facing me dropped her head even lower, but still said, “No, I can not say.” Then she put the cup of tea in her hand gently on the tea .

I was still sitting alone in front of the wooden couch in the inner room long after Nosan and one of the soldiers had brought her back across the room. First, I had not been wrong in persuading Chen Huixin that the fact that she had been missing for two days was enough to set off alarms within her organization, and she and I both knew that was bound to happen. Secondly, Chen Huixin, though very tenacious indeed, was obviously well trained, and there was no reason for her to go on fighting us out of mere gambling or a sense of honor. So thirdly, she must have known that something was wrong at some point, and she couldn’t say it yet. What I was left with was a fourth conclusion: I still had a chance to win.

The reality is that I don’t want to be sent to the North China front or Southeast Asia.

The war between us was extremely painful for Chen Huiqin, while it was boring for the Imperial Army’s gendarmes on this side. When I finally stepped out of the captain’s room into room number two, the scene in the room was exactly what I expected to see.

The woman was re-bound on her hands and feet on that iron bed. In order to prevent her from moving around, a belt had been placed under her armpits, around her waist and at the bend of her knees. She was not allowed to move because the gendarmes were doing a very delicate job: Nakagawa took one man and cut into the woman’s skin with a sharp razor blade at an angle, cutting a slit about four to five centimeters long, and another man used pliers to hold the edge of this piece of flesh and pull it downward to make a slit. Blood spilled from it across her back, in fact most of the woman’s naked back had glistened as if it had been painted red.

Both of Nakagawa’s hands, on which he had put on thin rubber gloves beforehand, were similarly bloody, and his eyes glazed over a little as he cut the blade into the flesh over and over again in a subdued, perhaps numb, manner, each time moving down a little distance.

It was the girl’s buttocks that were now being dealt with. Noyama crouched at the other end, lifting the girl’s head off the iron bed every few dozen seconds to look at her face. If he realized she was losing consciousness, he gestured for the men on this side to stop, and they stopped to let her take a breath. If they found her still conscious, they pressed her like a parrot with annoying questions: “Who is the contact person? Where is the transmitter?”

He smiled curtly at me like a merchant selling outdated goods: “She’s going to die.”

As I stood and bent down next to Nosan, the girl’s scattered eyes looked at us blankly, tightening only when her skin was ripped off by the iron jaws and she sighed almost as if she were sad. Nosan’s barrage of questions seemed to overwhelm her, and she broke off into words that had no connection with each other, such as, “Coco… in the chicken coop… mom… Lao Zhao, the tall man.”

As if on cue, Noyama scribbled these things down with her other hand on some pieces of paper, several of which were already scattered on the floor next to her. I picked one up and glanced at it, quickly realizing that she was saying some of the same things back and forth. This might be useful, if she always answered the same word in response to a particular question; it might not be useful, she might be forcing herself to meditate on a particular scene that happened to come to mind.

Her voice slurred and she began to drift off again.

“Stop for a second.”

They untied her all over, one by one, and rolled her over on her back on the iron bed. Like her back, the girl’s front was covered with thin strips of outwardly turned flesh from just below her collarbone to her knees, looking a bit like the many grinning lips on her breasts, chest and stomach. The bleeding had stopped because it had been repeatedly rinsed with water. This was Nakagawa’s work for one morning.

It was such a body that was covered under her black smock in my captain’s room at noon.

After dousing her face with water and pouring her some Chinese soju like Erguotou, we crowded around her and anxiously asked, “But what?”

“Where’s the chicken coop? Where’s the chicken coop?” And “Where’s Lao Zhao?”

“Chicken nest, what chicken nest?”

“What you just said,” I read, picking up a piece of paper from the ground, “is the question: where is the transmitter? The answer is: chicken coop, chicken coop.”

Chen Huixin very slowly made an expression that was sort of a bitter smile that looked like she was crying : “I fainted from the pain, I don’t know what I said or what it meant.” That was her only explanation for all the problems.

I held the bottle up for her to see: “Do you know what this is? Do you know what it feels like when the contents are poured on your wound?” I told her, with exaggerated objectivity, what the empty bottle could be used for in this room after pouring out all the wine, and that it could be knocked off the bottom and pressed down on the human body: “The flesh would turn out one by one and turn to the side like an ox pulling a plough through a paddy field.”

I like the analogy that if the paddles were on both of your ribs, the ribs underneath would be exposed one by one. You can also look for places that are thick with flesh, let’s say a man’s butt, and press the end of the bottle that was cracked down and turn it around and around again.

“You’re a smart girl and you’ve been with us for two days. Now help me think, if it’s a girl like you, what else would a wine bottle be used for?”

Someone nearby laughed wistfully.

“Tell me, where is the girl most afraid of pain?” I asked more amiably.

She had been crying for a while now, tears silently spilling drop after drop from under her closed eyelids and running down her cheeks.

“Where is it?”

She choked and said, “No, don’t hit me anymore… I, I…”

I stared hopefully at her face with the gendarmes; she paused for a moment, and no one dared to hurry her.

“Stop hitting, stop hitting me…” she repeated in a broken voice, always with her eyes closed.

“Boy, that didn’t work.” I slammed the bottle to the floor in disgust, the sound of glass shattering startling her with a cold shiver. “You hand over all those assholes and then we, me and you, can both go back to sleep.”

As a result we, she and I, didn’t make it home to sleep.

The bottle had broken and we used table salt. Coarse salt with large grains, scooped up with a spoon and sprinkled over her body. Starting with her breasts, Nakagawa carefully rubbed the salt grains into those torn open wounds with his gloved hands. He did it with the same meticulous precision as he had just used a razor blade, dispensing a small pinch of salt to each spot, smoothing it out, and then pressing those sharp little grains hard into the delicate texture of the muscles.

Nosan continued to comfort the frantic Chen Huizhen with his eyes bulging out of their frames: “It’s only on your chest now, but there’s still your stomach and your thighs down there, and Nakagawa will turn you over and then pickle your back and your ass. You’ll have to endure this for a long time… or you can just say it, and we’ll wash it off with water right away, and have the doctor come and put ointment on it, and then you won’t be in pain any time soon.”

An hour later Nakagawa was done with her front. There was a long cycle of spasms that launched from deep inside the woman’s body, slowly passing upward through her abdomen and breasts, and finally reaching her throat and mouth, whereupon her lips and tongue spat out several mouthfuls of yellowish-green, blood-tinged gastric juices in a rush of convulsions. Two or three minutes later, the next wave was launched from her abdomen.

The girl’s lower body seemed to be similarly affected, and after a few convulsions, she was a mess between her legs, so the bucket was brought over to rinse the iron bed.

Asked her again in the middle and informed the girl that she was going to have to turn her over to deal with her back.

I went to dinner alone, leaving Nakagawa and Noyama there. At dinner I first decided to spend the rest of the evening carefully studying the pieces of paper.

It was then that I felt for the first time that this girl might last longer than I had anticipated, and a fear of losing control of the situation arose within me, and for a moment I felt cold and wet on my back. What if, instead of just saying nothing now, she said nothing forever and endlessly like a piece of lifeless rubber what was I to do? If she finally cooperates and explains something, even if it’s a little late and all her comrades up and down the line have run out, I’ll at least get a broken machine and a report on their organizational structure and working methods. After all, this was one of the few times the army had peeked into the corner of that mysterious organization, so maybe a smile would remain on Lt. Col. xxx’s face when he summoned me.

However, if the report I eventually had to hand in contained the following sentence: “After sweating hard, no valuable clues have been obtained, and the suspect is in custody (or dead)”.

Until then, Chen Huixin was just a suspect! I didn’t even know what she really was.

Out of fear and anger, I lost some control. I returned to Room 2, where a few gendarmes were eating behind a table. Chen Huixin was sitting on the ground floor with her knees bent up against the wall, and someone was feeding her congee, and she was honestly opening her mouth.

I told the private to put the thing down, and another man came along to hold her arms and lift her up against the wall and stand her up straight. I twirled around dizzily twice to find a pair of iron pliers and clamped down on the flap of skin at the top of my breast that had been a nipple and now resembled a small, broken up, rotting cauliflower, and I stared intently at it as it turned to red mush running down the side in the steel teeth of the pliers.

The girl slammed over to one side with her entire body and fell to the ground along with the gendarme who had grabbed her right arm.

She clutched her chest and rolled back and forth in the corner of the wall, blood beginning to seep from the wounds all around her again.

I ordered her to be set up as she was, with her arms and legs bound tightly, and as I did so, I thrust the iron poker into the fire. Two more men were added, and she was hauled up and pressed against the wall, her arms drawn into the iron rings fastened to the brick wall, and her ankles and wrists bound to the iron pipe at the foot of the wall.

While they were doing this, I kicked one of the gendarmes in the ass: “Spread it, idiot, spread it!” I told him to spread the girl’s legs a bit.

Chen Huixin was now suspended from the wall. I pulled the fiery red poker out of the stove with a thick cloth wrapped around the handle. She still had her left nipple left, which at first felt a little slippery, like it had been clamped onto a bar of soap, and rose up in foul-smelling fumes, and then took on a firm texture.

I continued to press hard on the handle of the iron pliers, gritting my teeth and ripping it to the side, bringing down a very long strip of flesh.

” She, wake her up.”

Waited a long time to wake her up.

“Scissors.” Someone handed me a pair of scissors.

My nose was almost next to Chen Huixin’s bloody naked body, her sweaty face less than ten centimeters in front of my eyes, and the heavy smell of sweat and intense blood greeted me. My hand fumbled underneath, using scissors to cut a slit across the labia minora.

She spat a mouthful of bloodied saliva in my face, the only time the mild-mannered Chen Huiqin resisted.

“Salt.” I said as someone handed over a salt shaker.

That night I scrutinized the things that Noyama had jotted down on the pieces of paper, grouping the same parts together to see if she had answered the same question with the same phrase, or answered the same question with whether or not it was a similar word, and I even went so far as to count the frequency with which they appeared in response to a particular question. Finally I was convinced that these were all garbage.

fourth day

I personally led a team to the school where Chen Huizhen taught, and Nosan went to the house Chen Huizhen rented on Wushan Road. I ordered the Upper Ridge team to recheck the Riverbank Hotel where Chen Huizhen had stayed and the route that the Chinese agents had followed her through the town that day, and regardless of my own thoughts, I made a list of things to look out for during the inspection, such as “people with the surname Zhao”.

For a whole day that middle school was in a state of total fear, and the only question my gendarmes asked around was who they had seen hanging out with Chen Huiqin. Teachers and students who made allegations were taken into detention in the classrooms that were set aside. My assumption was that with any luck one of Chen Huizhen’s associates was in the school, and then we might have hope of sweeping him into the net. However, this was highly unlikely, and what was more likely to be helpful was that those who were closer to Chen Huizhen would provide information about various aspects of Chen Huizhen, from which useful clues could then be found. Since we can’t break through from the center for a while, sweeping the periphery first is the only option.

Nosan was doing the same over on Wushan Road. Until then it had been sending people to monitor this house rented by Chen Huixin, but nothing meaningful had been found.

The serious problem with this is: if my analysis yesterday was correct, that the news of Chen Huizhen’s arrest for some reason did not get out, then what we are doing now is to inform the whole city about it. This dilemma was the main reason for my anger and fear yesterday. But in any case I could not let the matter drag on without end, and pin my only hope on the crazy girl opening her mouth and confessing everything. That was the conclusion I finally came to last night.

In the end we returned to the gendarmerie with about a dozen men. By the way, we found nothing in Chen Huixin’s school or residence that matched the so-called chicken coop. However, two of the people we arrested were surnamed Zhao: one was a male math teacher, who some people said seemed to be on good terms with Chen, and who was relatively tall. The other was an old man who was the school janitor, in addition to his surname Zhao, because I remember Chen Huixin’s false statement the next day that the instructions were sent to the school janitorial, people tend to add the real plot when they make up lies.

Have all the gendarmes take one Chinese policeman each for surprise interrogation, I’ve already made a list of questions needed last night, all they have to do is read from it, and I’ll let Noyama deal with the records later.

I dealt with Mr. Zhao Liansong, the teacher surnamed Zhao, by myself. After tediously asking his name and age, I asked him to tell me about his relationship with Chen Huizhen. He said he had no special relationship with Mr. Chen. Well, it didn’t matter. I wanted him to recall, one at a time, on which day, or roughly on which day, if he had come across Chen Huixin, what he had said, whether anyone had seen him at the time, and how he had ended up, etc. This should have been the work of the criminal police, and could have been compared in this way. This is supposed to be the work of the criminal police, and it can be compared in this way to find out who lied and under what circumstances.

The military police did not carry out this type of detailed work in the Sino-Japanese War, and we had always taken the approach of the former detachment chiefs, which was a bit of a handicap when it came to a well-organized system like that of Chen Huizhen. However, in the military-controlled area, we did not need to go through the prosecution and trial process, so perhaps the secret war was like that.

In fact, I myself quickly returned to familiar avenues, and I yelled at Zhao Lian Song in a stern voice, “Now, tell us about your participation in the Resistance!”

“I’ve never been anti-Japanese, I just teach well, the Imperial Army got it wrong.”

“How did you command Chen Huixin?”

“Who do you command yourself?”

“What is your mission?”

He defended himself like a bookworm, dwelling on many details, trying to be as objective as possible, thinking that would make it reasonably clear that he couldn’t have done what I accused him of.

“Hmph, are you refusing to be honest?”

He was not too stupid, although he was already very nervous and white with fear, but he finally stopped chattering about trivial things and answered my threats with a simple “no” and “no” as if he had made up his mind, and he must have been thinking that there was no reasoning with these Japanese soldiers. He must have been thinking that there was no reasoning with these Japanese soldiers.

“Go and see the next room.” We took him to the next room, room number two, full of blood that hadn’t been properly rinsed off, fresh from Chen Huiqin’s blood, especially the iron bed.

I frightened him with these things, but he still insisted on answering with “no” and “no”. So I stripped him naked and tied his hands and hung him up, and I told someone to take a wooden stick and stand on one side, and when he opened his mouth to deny it, I beat him, and he screamed so loudly that he had to simply close his eyes and stop talking.

“Hmph, pretending to be dead and not answering, think you can get away with that?” So even if he didn’t talk, he hit him hard with a wooden stick.

Thus engaged in the evening, Zhao Liansong body bruises a piece of purple, half of the face swollen like a hornet’s nest, an eye completely open, he actually still managed to hold on to the denials, did not follow our questions down all over the fabrication, but also counted on the tenacity, I think he is not the person we want to look for.

“Do you know why we’re looking for you? It was Chen Huixin who confessed. You commanded her to carry out anti-Japanese activities and deliver things to the bandits in the countryside.”

Although Zhao Liansong, who was hanging naked from the roof, was already a bit groggy, he was still truly taken aback: “Chen Huixin? This, this won’t be.”

“Put him down. Go and bring Chen Huiqin.”

A few minutes later, the sluggish sound of chains sounded outside, and the gendarme on night duty helped the naked young girl into the house. She hadn’t been beaten since the morning when they handed her over to Dr. Yamada, the military doctor, and I think Yamada had probably just washed her wounds with saline, so at least she wasn’t pasted with blood anymore, but she looked very unrecognizable from top to bottom.

She hung her head down so feebly that I’m afraid she didn’t even notice Zhao Liansong. They got her to kneel in front of the table where I was sitting, facing Zhao Liansong. She couldn’t quite kneel and crouched to the ground with her cuffed hands for support, so they yanked her up by her hair again.

“Take a good look at it, never had a chance like this in two years of working together!”

Zhao Liansong sat facing me, his frightened face gradually showing an expression of anger that he himself had not had when he had been beaten half to death. From me I could only see Chen Huiqin’s naked back hanging with broken skin and flesh, but I heard her give a low cry of great surprise.

Now Jo Ryunsong turned his gaze to my face: “You, how could you…”

“This is what happens when you rebel against the Imperial Army!” I got up and stepped around the table to intervene between them: “She has confessed that her leader is you! Ms. Zhao, come clean and give your subordinate some face. What you’ve just tasted is a small beginning,” I held out a pinky finger: “In two days you’ll be like her, and then you’ll be able to say whatever you’re asked.”

He did look a little confused. The girl who was kneeling on the ground seemed to be just beginning to realize what was happening, and she said sharply, “Cho Ryunsong, I didn’t…” The Kempeitai standing beside her hit her hard on the cheek, knocking her head to one side, and cut off her words, “Don’t say anything! “

“Hit him.”

Pull Zhao Liansong’s hands and legs apart and fix them to the wall, and use the branding iron to brand his chest and abdomen ten times, so hot that he squealed like killing a pig. Let Chen Huiqin kneel under him and look up, if she closed her eyes, then screw her injured breasts. She stammered, “It’s not him… I didn’t say that… I don’t know him…”

“Ha, don’t you recognize him?” She received another blow to the face. I pulled out a piece of paper and read, “Three days ago in the corridor, when there happened to be no one there, Zhao Lian Song caught up with me from behind and said that there was an important thing to be delivered to so and so. Wait for me at seven o’clock in the evening at so-and-so. Isn’t that the truth?”

“Mr. Zhao, did you hear that? She’s made it so clear, doesn’t it hurt to say it?”

Looking at the girl’s pained expression, “To increase the pressure,” I thought, “to show her something special.”

The gendarme put on one of those medical gloves he’d gotten from Yamada and found a wire to poke Zhao Lian Song’s urethra. He took his penis in his hand and spun it around to stab it in all directions.

He screamed “ah, ah, ah,” the muscles of his abdomen twitching violently beneath his skin as if he were holding a herd of small animals, his bound feet bouncing around on the ground.

“Not him. No, it’s not, you guys are mistaken.” Chen Huixian mumbled and whispered, looking up at me, looking very flustered and helpless.

“Really, it’s not him? Then who is it?”

She suddenly choked as if she had swallowed something dry and hard.

The wire was pulled out and a small amount of blood was shed.

“Do it again!”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t tie it again…” Cho Lian Sung stared at the piece of wire in dismay.

Instead, our attention was on Chen Huiqin: “Tell us who you are under the command of, and we will let him go.

Won’t talk, we’ll find a way to make him talk.”

Zhao Lian Song whimpered and screamed again from the sidelines as the wire lodged itself a second time.

The little girl struggled a little in the gendarme’s hands and said bravely, “Zhao Lian Song has nothing to do with what I’ve done, so you beasts come and beat me.” No one paid any attention to her.

Zhao Lian Song collapsed in extreme pain: “Pull it out, ouch, don’t stab it… I admit it, I’ll say it all.”

The poor guy made up nonsense along with our questions. Yes, he did instruct Chen Hui-Chen to take something to the countryside and give it to the bandits. What was it? What was it… Yes, it was medicine, western medicine.

Who went to buy the drugs? How did he know who to give it to? Who told him to do that? Zhao Song wants to claim all this as his own.

We went the extra mile here and in fact poked him a few more times and provided him with a few more names. He ended up implicating their Chinese principal, his fellow teachers, and the students in his class all in the conspiracy.

“Hahaha… Ms. Chen, you have many comrades! Think about it, are there any who were missed by Mr. Chiu? I’ll bring them all here and show you how we carefully interrogated them one by one.”

As I have already said, Chen Huiqin is a very strong woman, and this does not refer only to her behavior while enduring torture, but also in many other ways. She did panic a bit at the beginning of tonight due to being caught off guard, but this farce had played out to the point where she seemed to have made up her mind and decided that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it herself. She glared forward, but the focus of her eyes wasn’t on Zhao Lian Song at all, it seemed to be somewhere distant behind the male teacher, and she was equally indifferent to my threats.

“Zhao Liansong, you still intentionally forget two people, right?” I said to Zhao Lian Song, who had already been lowered from the wall and was slumped in a chair, “Doesn’t your wife keep a list of all the people in your organization? I remember, your eldest daughter is thirteen years old, you also asked her to do something, right?”

By now, Zhao Liansong would not fail to understand that this was just a cruel game performed for Chen Huizhen to see, and he was just a prop. He suddenly flung himself in front of Chen Huiqin: “Teacher Chen, Huiqin, Huiqin, please tell them all.” He cried out in pain in front of the girl’s knees, and Chen Huiqin didn’t even move her eyes again.

It was almost dawn, I needed a quiet place to read the records of those interrogations in the front yard, and on my way out, I just instructed them to “Keep asking that woman, and leave this kid alone.”

Later on, someone did suggest to me that Zhao Liansong’s wife and daughter should also be arrested, and he received a slap on my face: “Bastard, is this what you are thinking about?”

In the first place, the great raids on the high schools failed to find subjects worthy of special attention, and some of them confessed in fear and under severe beatings, as Zhao Liansong did, that he himself was an anti-Japanese, or made wild accusations against other people, and this sort of foolishness was left to others.

It seems that Chen Huixin gave her colleagues the same impression of quietness and honesty that she gave us in the interrogation room. She didn’t socialize much at school, and often disappeared as soon as she left class. No, there were not many people from outside who came to see her, and the principal of the school even considered her sloppy in her classes, complaining that in the present situation it was difficult to find a suitable candidate, otherwise he might have dismissed her.

At my request, I recorded many details of the interviewees’ dealings with Chen Huizhen: Who went to her home?

Who hasn’t been there? Who ran into her somewhere? Talked to her about anything, etc. Right now it’s the only thing we can get our hands on.

Of some value is the fact that some of Mr. Chen Huixin’s letters were indeed delivered to the school’s concierge, and the interrogator had the concierge’s old man, Zhao, give a careful description of the frequent messenger, which may indicate that part of Chen Huixin’s confession on the day after her arrest concerning her method of contact was true.

The landlord and neighbors of Chen Huixin’s rented house were also detained in the detention room of the gendarmerie compound, and they were desperately asked to recall who had come to see Chen Huixin. What did they look like? What time of day was it? Was there a pattern?

Note: It has been found that during the period of Japanese occupation, the so-called National Higher Schools in certain areas of northern China were equivalent to junior high schools and high schools.

final month

Early every morning, the gendarme on night duty went to haul her up when he came off duty, as it was thought that prisoners should follow the rules. When she got up, she was made to stand in front of a wooden fence and her hands were handcuffed to the bars at a level with her own face. She was then given about ten strokes with a belt, the exact number and severity of which depended on the gendarme’s mood at the time.

Every few days, two gendarmes would go down and interrogate her in the basement until noon. Whether or not she answered the questions, the interrogation would continue for almost three hours, varying the methods used to torture her throughout the morning. The manner of interrogation was at the discretion of the person whose turn it was that day; if he wanted to pour water into her, he would pour a bucket of water into her; if he preferred to use electricity, he would connect a wire to her body somewhere and electrify her intermittently; he could also drench her body in boiling water, press a wooden stick against the crook of her knee, or whatever he imagined would cause pain. The only rule was that it was “better” not to injure her so badly that she could not recover, and certainly not to kill her at once.

In a few days the girl was tortured in all sorts of bizarre ways. Two holes were made through her collarbone with red-hot iron bars, and during interrogations someone liked to tie her to the wall behind her with a rope through here; someone experimented with stabbing her urethra with a wire as if it were a man’s penis; and once she had her lips sewn together for a whole day with a large sewing-needle: “Well, is it still like that, without talking? If you sew it up, you don’t have to say anything.”

The cruelty escalated later, and the girl was burned through a hole in each of her left palm and left foot, showing white bone inside. Someone came to ask if they could cut off a few of her fingers, and when they got an affirmative answer, they used red-hot pincers to tear the flesh off the woman’s picked toe or finger, one by one, before finally pinching and crushing the exposed toe bones. But all this was in the last few days.

At the end of such an interrogation, no matter how much pain she was in, she was still, without exception, handcuffed to a wooden rail and stood until, or if she could not stand, hung like a pocket from a wooden post until nightfall.

Every day after dinner she was escorted to the front yard and made to stay in the guard room next to the five holding cells, from which the male prisoners were then brought out one by one.

Most of the male prisoners had been frightened by the gendarmes, and would honestly do whatever they were told to do, and for those who were a little more tenacious, their method was not to beat the men, but to go and beat the women who were lying on their sides.

“Ah, you love your fellow man, don’t you?” Torture the girl with a stick: “See, that’s what happens when you don’t fuck her.”

The first few days were spent sending Chen Huixin over to the police reserve, and then complaints were rumored to have been circulated that it was like holding a piece of raw pork that had just been let off the hook. Indeed, she had never broken a fresh torture wound on her body, and as her lower body had become completely indescribable, prisoners were used instead.

Although this was all in accordance with my orders, I had never personally taken her over to the detention room. There were naturally people on the team who were particularly interested in this matter, and although they didn’t have to make a formal report to me on the details of what had happened, from the way the guys were muttering with evil smiles as they ate, they could also think of the kind of treatment they were going to subject Chen Huiqin to over there. One of the guys used pliers to pull out several teeth from the front and back of the girl’s mouth when it was his turn to interrogate her.

Every night at ten o’clock or so, sitting alone in the captain’s room, I would hear a monotonous sound of chains ringing from one end of the yard to the other, accompanied by the heavy footsteps of a pair of military boots, which gradually faded into the basement. Down there, the gendarme who escorted her would give her ten more lashes with his belt, and only after this was the girl allowed to lie flat on the ragged blanket spread on the ground floor. But for her, the day was far from over.

Most of the soldiers on night duty would stride down the steps after midnight: “Get up, dirty sow, get up, get up!”

The temperature difference between morning and evening in the area was so great that it was already quite cold late at night in that month, and the sentries would often simply put on their military coats while on night duty. But since it never snowed, we thought we needed to intensify the effect, so we would bring Chen Huixin to the yard in the middle of the night when it was the coldest part of the day, prepare a bucket of cold water for her, and force her to use a large wooden spoon to scoop up the water and pour it down over her head.

“Aren’t you a girl who likes to be clean? Take a nice bath.”

“Will a spoonful like that wash it? Water it again!”

The back turned into a complete prank as soldiers wrapped in cotton coats stood by with training bamboo swords.

“Is bathing that easy? Slow down, scrub your whole body!” Or just say, “Wash it again!”

If you are not satisfied, you will swing your bamboo sword and hit it with a snap.

The naked girl was forced to perform the whole process of bathing slowly in the open air, drenching herself over and over again, frozen in the freezing air and shaking as violently as a running engine. Then she was told to stand up and circle around the courtyard wall, so she barely covered her watery chest with her handcuffed hands, shivering and dragging her heavy shackles step by step as she dawdled forward.

It was always necessary to freeze her like this for an hour every day, I think, and if the guy on night duty felt particularly tedious on any given day of his turn, there were occasional occasions when he went to get the female prisoner around the yard a few times every two hours throughout the night.

Although a stove had been built in the basement, after she had been sent back down, the girl with whom she had been confined had to cry and hug her cold body for half a day to revive her. Since that hunger strike this schoolgirl had been allowed to live with Chen Hui-Qin, and since Chen Hui-Qin was bound to the side of the wooden cage almost all day long, and was unable to lead a normal life, this girl was allowed to stay behind to help her, and in fact she fed Chen Hui-Qin her two meals each day. The two girls were said to be very close, and it was later reported that the girl was seen lying on all fours on the ground so that Chen Huichen, who was handcuffed to the bars, could sit on her back and rest for a while.

On the second day after the discovery of this problem, the interrogator let Chen Huixin lie on the ground, with a red-hot iron thousand poke her buttocks, on both sides of the poke a few one or two centimeters deep holes: “so probably please you do not dare to sit, right?”

By this time we had at least completely screwed her up, as her stomach had been repeatedly filled with so much cold water that her digestion was completely disrupted and vomiting became her daily neurological response. Pretty much every time we went down into the basement, we always saw her with her head on a wooden post, both elbows pressed dead tightly against her upper abdomen in a burst of desperate attempts to throw up something more.

We took advantage of this without mercy by giving her harder, rougher food, leaving the chaff-laced cornmeal dumplings supplied to the inmates in the front yard outside the house for two days, freezing them until they were dry, hard, and cracked, before throwing them into wooden cages for the schoolgirls to feed to Chen Huizhen. Nakagawa’s threats continued to be effective, and she beat the student when she didn’t eat.

In fact, because each of them had only two nests barely the size of a duck’s egg a day, the girls were really hungry, and with tears in their eyes they swallowed hard, and in a moment Chen Huixin’s stomach began to ache. What was even more frightening was that at that very moment she began to cough up her staff again, because also damaged by the water were her lungs, the two reactions together, Chen Huixin’s expression of agony was beyond description.

Cao Chang, whose turn it was to interrogate this day, paced impatiently outside the wooden fence for more than ten minutes before he uncuffed the girl, who was still gasping for breath and hiccupping with a straight neck. Chen Huiqin wiped the sewage around her mouth and nose with the back of her hand, staggered to the other end of the basement, and automatically knelt facing the table: this was the rule for every interrogation, and she had long since gotten used to it.

At first there were coiled up chains to be padded in under her knees, then she was dispensed with as she grew weaker, and also allowed to sit back on her heels.

The recruits who followed Cao Chang placed the bucket of water used to bathe her every night heavily in front of her, full of water, with the wooden spoon floating on it, and Cao Chang, who smiled smugly, sat behind the table: “Drink it obediently, dirty beast!”

Without a word, the girl scooped up the water and drank it slowly. She drank it carefully, afraid that if she didn’t pay attention she would start another endless vomiting. When she had finished her fourth spoonful she looked up at the sergeant, the Japanese was still grinning, and the recruit had turned behind her, snapping his belt in the air.

She lowers her head for a fifth spoonful of water, then spits it out with a “wow”, and then vomits for a long time like she did earlier in her life, after which she just slumps to the floor.

“Finished? The bucket is in front of you, start over and drink again!”

This went back and forth two or three times before the question was formally asked, “Think about it, and tell me about the three days you went to get the radio station from the beginning!”

By this time I have no great interest in Chen Huixin, perhaps she will still name some places and people, but to this day, I’m afraid it’s like an empty bird’s nest in the fork of a tree, the birds have already flown all over the sky.

But there are still things that need to be clarified: first of all, the whereabouts of the radio station. Ever since she recognized the address of the radio station in Shangling, Chen Huixin had been insisting that she had sent the transmitter to that place, but we didn’t believe her. The Chinese from the White Left Organization had been watching her, and she didn’t have the time to deliver it.

“Nonsense!” Poking her in the thighs with an iron swing: “We’ve been following you all along.”

“Only a man in a hat followed me, and he was lost to me for a while. Go ahead and ask him, he’s afraid to tell.” She didn’t take the bait this time, and it seemed that the stalker had actually been spotted at the time.

There was something wrong here, but I decided not to pursue it any further, at least it sort of gave us an excuse to put this on the head of the White Left Org.

Chen Huixin confessed that she was recruited by the owner of the bookstore when she went there to read during her school days, and therefore she refused to tell us where she joined the organization when she was first arrested. Apart from the bookstore, she did not know anything else about the owner.

For what little hope we still have is to find out something extra from her work process, her overly frequent trips to the bookstore are out of the ordinary, as well as the disparity with the number of appearances at Upper Ridge Radio.

So I beat and questioned her again. I found a thick wooden stick with a four-sided belt and tortured the woman with it repeatedly, exceptionally until the afternoon that day.

“Maybe, it’s just that no one else saw me.” The girl clutching her stomach and shivering remained so until the end.

She provided the late bus she usually took to Upper Ridge, catching that bus after class, arriving at the station when it was indeed night and the local farmers would have gone to bed, and then leaving early the next morning.

“So what are you doing running to the bookstore all day, are you going for tea and conversation?”

She struggled to explain that she did start going to the bookstore a lot, but then it was really just to flip through the books.

After that, he went less often, only to receive instructions when a note was delivered to the school concierge.

Comparing the man seen delivering the note on the school side with the young fellow employed at the bookstore, the descriptions on both sides do seem somewhat similar. So, is it true that Chen Huixin doesn’t know the mysterious woman who went to the bookstore?

I don’t know how many times this question has been asked, but every interrogation this month has been the same thing over and over again, and if there is any inconsistency, she is beaten to death. Although I was able to determine that she was telling the truth in this way, I’m afraid I have to admit that I was in the mood to “punish such a woman severely”. Although few people would admit it nowadays, it is true that prisoners were beaten up for fun or to vent their anger.

He pulled the stick, already red with blood, out of her and used a knife to cut barbs out of the corners, smiling at the girl. When they resumed crouching beside her, she threw her arms around the legs of one of them, shaking desperately: “I told you everything, I told you everything…” They just pulled her hands away.

The girl, who was in extreme pain, babbled: what was the woman’s name? She was the mistress of a pro-Japanese Chinese government official and lived in a hostel on a certain street. But when asked again, she blurted out a new name.

This also led us to inquire around many times, and we had to deal with the problem simply by handcuffing Chen Huixin to a wooden fence and letting her stand there for four days and nights in a row, without giving her any water or food, and not untying her for a minute, except for interrogation.

The girl’s wrists had almost half a circle of skin rubbed off by the handcuffs, and the irons were stuck directly on the bare bones of her wrists. She screamed miserably in the middle of the night, and by then she knew us interrogators well enough to call out Yamada’s or Noyama’s name in Japanese: “Come and put me down, I’m willing to talk!” Then she looked pitifully at the gendarmerie officer hurrying down the steps and said, “I want to relieve myself…”, which made people laugh and cry.

“Asshole! When have I ever turned you loose to do such a thing?” After a few times, the gullible gendarme didn’t even think of punishing her anymore.

We hadn’t made any more progress in this matter by the end of the day, so maybe Chen Huizhen was telling the truth. But according to my feeling, there’s always something hidden here, we just haven’t asked in the right place yet.

One morning, during a routine interrogation, Chen Huixin was tied down with her feet on the ground, the soles of her feet facing upwards, and then a red-hot iron was poked into the center of her feet, stabbing and scalding her for a long time, making a hole in the middle of her foot. It was only after lifting her off the ground that she realized she had bitten her tongue with the remaining teeth on the side of her mouth.

Now she could neither walk nor speak any more, and I was annoyed. In the evening someone came and asked for instructions as to whether they should still get the woman to the prisoners’ side today, “Carry her, carry her even to the front.” They went and forced her to stand up, which they could not do at all, but instead of lifting her, they beat her so that she got up on her knees and crawled on all fours over and back again, and she screamed all the way through as she was whipped with an army belt.

I’m not sure if it was before or after that, but a senior who had been taking care of me called me and told me that a decision had been made to transfer me to a division in the south, and that the official order would be issued within a few days. Then he asked, as if in passing, “Is the matter of the schoolteacher still unresolved?” He paused for a moment: “It’s been over a month, is she still alive? Keiichi, you have some compassion for women, don’t you? Hahaha!”

I think this was a hint to me. The White Left Org had already launched several attacks, either softly or hard, and I had made a report at the Military Police Headquarters in response to the Chen Huixin case, and the lieutenant colonel had embarrassed me, but I hadn’t expected such a result.

The last few days became a completely pointless mutilation, prying her mouth open with a stick, sticking a sicilian knife in to cut her tongue, and churning it up and down in her mouth.

“Wouldn’t that be easier than biting it with your teeth?” Throwing a pen at her side, he said, “If you can’t take it anymore, write it out!” But the next day even her left hand was branded through a hole.

On those days Nakagawa was interrogating a Chinese government official suspected of having links with the bandits; he first suspended Chen Huixin with her back against the wall, and then made the official kneel with his face raised between the girl’s parted legs from morning until afternoon. In the afternoon Nakagawa rushed in with an ordinary kitchen knife; he asked no questions, pressed the girl’s feet against the wall, and cut off two of her toes in only three or five strokes. He picked up the severed toes from the floor and smiled at the kneeling official and shoved them all into the woman’s mouth, the guy was so shocked he couldn’t speak a coherent sentence for days.

final day

The first light snowfall of that fall fell in the evening. After these last few days of miserable treatment, Chen Huiqin could no longer even kneel, but was still dragged up to the yard from the basement and bundled onto a telephone pole by the yard wall.

Noyama told me that she could still talk, and just now, down there, she was slurring her words and begging him to kill himself quietly.

“Huh?” I’ve been drinking intermittently for a couple nights now at that place called something called Nozuki after I got that call. Not for that woman, of course, but for myself, to the point where I’m still a little lightheaded even now.

I lifted a military flashlight toward the back wall of the yard, and tiny snowflakes glistened in the halo of the torch. The temperature wasn’t cold enough for them to accumulate on the ground, though, and the ground was dripping wet. The flakes of snow that stained her bare skin melted into clear water in the blink of an eye as if they had landed on the wet ground. She shivered more than a little like a chicken chick fresh out of the water as the beam of light from the torch slowly swept from her face down over her entire body.

Frankly speaking, at this time, Chen Huiqin, despite being naked without a stitch of clothing, no longer had the slightest female attraction at all; in fact, it was no longer considered a young woman’s body.

Her face was shrouded in a corpse-like greenish-gray, her cheeks sunk deeply inward on either side, and her lips, which had been pursed together as if they had been small, without the support of the teeth behind them, were spread flaccidly like an old man’s, and torn in a gaping hole at the corner of her mouth. From her shoulders to her arms, she was almost a skeleton, with her dirty, rough skin wrapped around it like a garment on a hanger, wrinkled and flabby, and her shoulder blades were really only as narrow as a carp’s backbone. Can make a woman proud of the rich and soft subcutaneous fat in her body has long been gone, even the breasts are thin and shriveled as hanging there as two empty bags, the girl’s bare chest is like a fifty-year-old woman.

Nevertheless, they were still the places where the abuse had been most severe, and the wounds there, even in the first few days after her arrest, had scarcely had a chance to heal, and had always been cruelly torn or scorched again just as soon as a thin scab had been laid on them. Likewise, below them, on both ribs, not only did a single rib protrude from the withered body, but, as a cracked glass bottle had indeed scratched across it, the ghastly white bones were simply exposed under the bloomed epidermis and coagulated clots of blood there.

Both of her hands were missing a total of three and a half fingers, the middle finger of her left hand had been chopped off from the middle joint, and her right hand had had a pinky finger snapped off hard, leaving the others in place supposedly so that she could write a confession, but by now that was of little significance. Her hands, tied behind her back, could not be seen from the front, but like her bare feet, which were also missing several toes, they had festered so badly that it was difficult to recognize the original shape of the limbs, which were almost nothing more than four purple-black lumps of flesh.

Because she had been forced to stand on the ground for a long period of time for dozens of days, the woman’s large and small legs were swollen to a sharp point, the flesh at her ankles bulged high up to encase the shackle’s iron hoops in the middle, and on the inner side of her legs from the root of her thighs dried up a few dark-colored trails of water stretching all the way down to the edge of her feet, and the murky liquid had been flowing intermittently from inside her body for many days now.

Her eyes were half-closed like a sickly fowl’s, and she occasionally strained her coughing staff a few times, with difficulty pushing the bloody mucus outward from between her lips, and her lungs had probably built up quite a bit of water in them as well. Thinking she hadn’t even noticed me standing in front of her for so long, I dropped the torch in my hand and stabbed her heavily in the soft upper abdomen just below her heart.

She opened her eyes a little, gradually focusing them on my face.

“Little girl, you are very disobedient, the Imperial Army is very unhappy, and the Imperial Army cannot afford to waste any more time.”

“Tonight is your last night, think it over. I’ll ask them to give you Cong you, I’m asking myself there’s melancholy in your eyes and I can’t escape it

You’re not beautiful, but you’re cute as hell.

Oh, Cinderella, my Cinderella.

I always break your heart. I’m always cruel.

I don’t want you to take it seriously. It’s a dream you’ll wake up from.

You’re so beautiful, and you’re so cute.

Cinderella, my Cinderella…”

That singer sings ordinary, but this song has deeply touched me, years ago, I have been like this, in a bar to another person pouring out the voice of his heart, at that time I was as simple and brilliant as the sunshine, a glimpse, and a long time in the years time flies, but can no longer remember how the romance and innocence is disappearing, the excitement and the passion is how to retreat, since when we make love just because of the need, since when we no longer believe in any love began to play the game of life. Since when do we make love just because we need to, since when do we no longer believe in any love and start to play life? Under the dark moonlight, who can say that the four years of acquaintance of the old friends, is how in the graduation of many years after a banquet in a cup of wine, the heartfelt parting, and how in the memory of the wheel of the years gradually fuzzy with the wind, the plot of life, as you wish, I finally learned to cheat and fall, at this time after all the hijacking of our smiles are so similar, how can we say that in the end, who is who is negative who?

Liu Fang, Leng Jia and Li He were chatting, Su Ya was silent, and I sipped my wine faintly, deeply feeling that life is impermanent and the feast will be broken up.

“It was you who made me give my true love, but then you left my side…” The singer finished his song, said thank you and left, and a few old songs played softly in the bar, making people feel nostalgic.

I for Changsha, always a guest, when I am in a foreign country, I never miss this city, in my life, the most beautiful section is not here, romance and reality in time and space shuttle back and forth, in fact, the good and the evil is often only in the thought, sometimes I don’t know what kind of a person I am in the end.

Years like a knife, carefully carved you and me, the river of time is long and far-reaching, I crossed from the crowd, fate let me make a life and death friendship at the time of youth, and let us after graduation from different sides of the liver and guts, and embarked on the community after the North and South, people in the spring and autumn in the floating and sinking, when the old days of the engraved in the heart of the story has become a story for people to commemorate, you can ask me to go to how the persistent and free, I am still busy, from here to there, in all levels of society, experience and struggle, just the desire to survive has long been cocooned in the heart, so that people instinctively numb and cold. I am still busy, from here to there, in all levels of society to experience the struggle, but the desire to survive has long been in the heart of the cocoon, so that people instinctively numb and cold.

“I like the feeling of depravity.”

“What?” Sua asked, turning back to me.

“I said, I like the feeling of depravity.” I yelled into her ear.

“Do you think you’re degenerate?”

“I don’t know,” I said seriously, “sometimes they say I’m like an angel.”

“Fuck you.” Sua picked up the bottle of wine and clinked it with me, there wasn’t much left in the bottle, we both looked at each other and laughed as we drank it down.

There was a table next door with a boy and a girl, and the girl had a birthday, and the boy had bought a cake and presents and was lighting the candles that were stuck in the cake, and while the girl was blowing out the candles, a few of us sang Happy Birthday.

That girl was so happy that she couldn’t speak, that little boy was very understanding, brought us cakes, quite delicious, to be honest, I don’t envy them, I know that they are bound to go through this sweet time, and then go their own way, and then continue to fall in love and go to bed with different people separately, until they consume their innocent feelings, and only then will they be considered grown-ups, and they will be able to know how to come to this kind of place to play when they are so young! In the future will certainly be this set of journey, only those who have never played and never moved to true love, will use their lives to adhere to chastity, this kind of people either do not have the conditions, or their own ugly stupid, I hate to be one of these two kinds of people.

“Sua, why aren’t you married yet? Don’t wait for me, I’m hopeless.” I got drunk and started talking nonsense to Suya.

“Damn, I’m not interested in men now, none of them are good.” Suya seemed to be drunk as well, and actually talked to me in a serious way.

“Isn’t Shen Xiangdong treating you quite well?”

“He is too small,” Suya drank a mouthful of wine: “In fact, I used to have a boyfriend, at that time in the National Defense University of Science and Technology, the family environment is also quite good, his father seems to be the province of a director of what he always wears a military uniform, quite handsome, at that time, I still open a cafe, but also a little money, all day long! Play together.”

“Then he graduated, opened his own company, have some money, play outside, I love him very much, he find other girls I do not care, as long as he is still with me on the line. Then later he picked up Changsha a quite famous girl, very beautiful, but people are wrapped by a quite powerful man, that man knows, has been trying to find an opportunity to clean up his.”

Sua spoke slowly, expressionless, and I felt so much more awake.

“He was because of business, often chartered to run down, driving that driver drug use, their own money all sucked no, little by little to drag him down, first to give him the kind of smoke or something, and so he is a bit addicted, often sell some to him, earn some money themselves also smoke. Once he and the girl is in the hotel, was arrested by the public security, first said he was on drugs, and then forced him to admit to prostitution, in fact, is the people in the whole him.”

“He was locked up in the drug rehabilitation center in those months, I went to see him every day, the tens of thousands of dollars earned at that time were all spent on saving him, and then, fortunately, I and the cadres of the correctional officers are particularly familiar with the care of him, and did not suffer much. Those fucking correctional officers were also quite funny. Once I went to the office, I heard a cadre scolding another cadre: ‘I told you not to let those female prisoners work in the fields, and look, after they left, the cucumbers in the fields are all gone.'”

Sua said and laughed and I couldn’t help but laugh too.

“It’s the end of your life if you get into drugs,” I said. “Have you gotten over it?”

“Quit, he actually only sucked a month, not very strong,” Suya lit a cigarette: “After he came out, he went to the field, we also broke up, a few years ago, and then heard that he came back to Changsha, but also did not contact.”

“If it really quit, then the one who fixed him is not harming him, but saving him,” I said objectively: “But I heard that as soon as you get into the poison, less difficult to understand the place. She refused to give us the radio station is ridiculous, everyone knows that this is the most insignificant thing, you can dig a big pit and bury ten transmitters in it, they are not as valuable as a valuable informant. We’re frantically trying to find it, just to have something tangible to dazzle with, but it’s not a dazzle to Chen Huixin, and I don’t know for what reason.

I sometimes wonder if the whole thing makes sense the other way around, if Chen Huiqin went to the bookstore not to receive instructions, but rather the other way around, to meet with intelligence agents under her control. I now think that she wasn’t simply a liaison to pass on documents, it’s possible that she had a direct source of intelligence herself, and that what she was trying so desperately to protect might have had something to do with it.

The first question on our side is how the White Left authorities identified the female teachers.

This in itself is a very valuable piece of information, and I have made formal inquiries through the gendarmerie, but have never received a decent response. Perhaps the source of the information was too sensitive; perhaps the source was so simple and accidental that it was not worth mentioning; perhaps they just did not want to tell the gendarmes.

The second question is: Why did the army end up disposing of the female teacher and closing the case?

I could try to guess some of the reasons, but I’ll never know which one is true. On the one hand, it was preserved forever by the strong young girl in her mangled and broken body. On the other hand, after the Emperor’s Jade Edict was issued in Showa 20, all the Japanese archives in China should have been largely destroyed, and I’m afraid that those involved began to die in battle one by one before then, and even fewer survived to the present day. As for the other side or sides in the war that corresponded to ours, no archives of this kind have ever been seriously made public.

I visited China after the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and China, and did some research as far as a foreigner could permit. I will list below some of the names that I have recorded as being genuine. For many reasons, both ours and each other’s, I will not say whether or not Chen Huiqin is among them.

Chen Huixin is one of the few names used in this article that are not real for the same reason. As you can see they were both young women and were arrested by the Japanese before they were killed. As a military police officer who experienced that era first hand, it is easy for me to think of what they had suffered before their deaths.

(list omitted)

For their own people, they were mothers, daughters, wives, lovers, sisters, relatives, friends or neighbors; for people like me, they were then something else entirely.

[End]

Translation.

The author of this article mentions Chen Huiqin as one of the few names used in the text, and it is true that Nozan, Nakagawa, etc. were added in translation for ease of reading; the original text reads A Ensign, B Ensign, C Corpsman, etc.

The whole thing is over as of today, at least for Ms. Chen Huixin.

Over the course of three months, this article has been reposted to many Chinese language websites around the world, under a variety of titles. But it doesn’t matter, thanks to all of you, I think the name of Chen Huizhen will be around the web for a while.

Thanks to a certain gentleman  lady, who, as far as I can see,  has not carried on what was started, at least until today. It is somewhat of a relief to me that I have been rewarded for making a mere appeal to my conscience.

Totally different feelings thank you Zimmermann, and I should probably let you know that one of the most shocking moments of the last three months was when I opened my mailbox and read the last sentence of your letter: “At that moment, I was inexplicably reminded of Chen Huiqin.”

Even if I’m a bit cynical, sometimes I’m in danger of getting teary-eyed, and I never imagined that what I was doing would get such an echo from the hearts of strangers.

Putongren770516