The invasion of Nanjing, China, by Japanese troops in late December 1937, and what those troops did afterward, belong among the worst six weeks in the bloody history of our species. Never mind the numbers of dead, hotly contested on political and historical grounds (but 200,000 seems a judicious guess). For six weeks, Japanese troops went on a spree of rape, theft, murder, and destruction. Emperor Hirohito had lifted international legal restrictions on the conduct of soldiers. Local commanders formally ordered troops to kill masses of Chinese, while informally allowing them the most perverted extremes of sexual terrorism to degrade and terrify, including unspeakable violence against women and children.
Documentaries and novels have pawed at the horror, but to my thinking, the definitive evocation hasn't been achieved and may never be. Ha Jin, rightly, has decided not to try for the all-embracing epic; he chooses a subset of suffering and allows it to stand for the whole.
The tragic heroine of Nanjing Requiem is Minnie Vautrin, master of studies at Jinling Girls' College. Jinling was a Christian college founded by five U.S. missionary groups and a core of visionary women in 1913 to educate Chinese women. It lay within the so-called Safety Zone of the city, supposedly off-limits to Japanese troops. Ha Jin interlards true and fictional events and characters (historical Vautrin, her fictional assistant Anling Gao) to sharpen the issues.
