Occupied City

Sources

The structure of this book was suggested by Rashōmon and In a Grove, two short stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), both of which have been translated into English many times, most recently by Jay Rubin in Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin Classics, 2006). Kurosawa Akira’s 1950 film Rashōmon was also influential, as was the Rutgers University Press book Rashōmon (1987), edited by Donald Richie.

The murders at the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo in January 1948 have been written about in English in Flowering of the Bamboo by William Triplett (Woodbine House, 1985) and in Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan by Mark Schreiber (Yenbooks, 1996). In fiction, the case was also the subject of Averse d’automne by Romain Slocombe (Gallimard, 2003).

The following were also used:

731 by Aoki Fukiko (Shinchosha, 2005)

731-Butai Saikin-sen Shiryō Shusei CD-ROM edited by Kondō Shōji (Kashiwa Shobō, 2003)

Akuma no Hōshoku by Morimura Seiichi (Kadokawa Shoten, 1983)

Asahi Shimbun newspaper for 1947-8

Civilization & Monsters by Gerald Figal (Duke University Press, 1999)

Curlew River by Benjamin Britten, to a libretto by William Plomer; particularly Olivier Py’s production at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2005

The Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol (1835)

Discourses of the Vanishing by Marilyn Ivy (University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Factories of Death by Sheldon H. Harris (Routledge, 1994)

Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural edited by Stephen Addiss (George Braziller, 1985)

Keiji Ichidai: Hiratsuka Hachibei no Shōwa Jiken-shi by Sasaki Yoshinobu (Sankei Shimbunsha; Nisshin-Hōdō Shuppanbu, 1980)

Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army (Foreign Languages Publishing House (Moscow), 1950)

Nippon no Kuroi Kiri by Matsumoto Seicho (Bungei Shunju Shinsha, 1960)

Nippon no Seishin Kantei edited by Fukushima Akira, Nakata Osamu, Ogi Sadataka, Uchimura Yushi and Yoshimasu Shufu (Misuzu Shobo, 1973)

Nippon Times and Mainichi newspapers for 1948

A Plague Upon Humanity by Daniel Barenblatt (HarperCollins, 2005)

Shōsetsu Teigin Jiken by Matsumoto Seicho (Bungei Shunju Shinsha, 1959)

Sumida-gawa by Motomasa Jūrō (c. 1400-32), translated by Royall Tyler in Japanese NO Dramas (Penguin Classics, 1992)

Teigin Jiken by Morikawa Tetsurō (Sanichi Shobō, 1980)

The films and diaries of Andrei Tarkovsky

The plays and texts of Heiner Müller; particularly Elio De Capitani’s production of Waterfront Wasteland Medea Material Landscape with Argonauts at the Teatro dell’Elfo, Milan, in 2006

The poems and prose of Paul Celan

Unit 731 by Peter Williams and David Wallace (The Free Press, 1989)

Unit 731 Testimony by Hal Gold (Yenbooks, 1996)

A Universal History of Iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, in Collected Fictions (Penguin, 1999)

Ware, Shisu-tomo Meimoku-sezu: Hirasawa Sadamichi Gokuchu-ki edited by Hirasawa Takehiko (Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1988)

Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, translated by John Mackendrick, in The Complete Plays edited by Michael Patterson (Methuen, 1987)