The Japanese Sandman

5.  Why The Japanese Sandman?

It is the title of an American popular song released in 1920 and is appropriate to the fate of one of the people in the book, the wife of a brilliant young writer of that era. There are other connotations to the word sandman as someone who puts people to sleep (in this case the long sleep of death).
     Given that the young woman was a dance hostess, I'll be able to use the marvellous (mainly American) popular music of this time period ( that fellow aficionados such as Dr. Greg Leck will enjoy) as a part of the background. These classic popular songs from composers like Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and George Gershwin were widely played in Shanghai and were embraced by some Chinese. The jointly British and American International Settlement of Shanghai received music and films from the United States far sooner than did Europe.
    The Chinese wealthier classes and intelligentsia took a rather complicated and ambiguous attitude to the West, on the one hand naturally striving for full control of their own country and on the other regarding Western ideas, architecture, clothing, magazines and music as the epitome of the modeng or modern way of life to which they aspired. The main protagonist of The Japanese Sandman is the brilliant writer Mu Shiying who loved to dance in the modern Western way and gave his major work the title of Shanghai Foxtrot.

The Japanese Sandman
Prologue
She woke up to the sound of a scuffle by their bed in the pavilion room. Black-clad figures loomed; something flashed down. The door slammed. Her husband was not beside her. As she slid across the bed she could feel the warmth where he had been. What was that smell?
     In the moonlight Shiying’s wife looked down to see the head and decapitated body of her husband on the floor. Supported on one elbow she leaned over. With the sleeve of her nightgown she wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. Then she began to scream.