“Nanjing Christ” Akutagawa in brief summary
Sun Jin-hua, a fifteen-year-old prostitute, sits at home and gnaws watermelon seeds. From time to time she looks at a small bronze crucifix hanging on the wall of her wretched little room, and hope appears in her eyes. Jin-hua is a Catholic. She became a prostitute to feed herself and her father’s old man. Jin-hua is sure that “Lord Christ” understands what is in her heart, and her craft will not prevent her from reaching heaven, “otherwise Lord Christ would be like a policeman from a plot in Yaojiakao.” When she talks about this to a Japanese tourist, with whom she spent the night, he smiles and gives her jade earrings as a souvenir.
A month later, Jin-hua becomes ill with syphilis, and no drugs help her. One day her friend says that there is a belief that if a person needs to give the disease as soon as possible, then in two or three days the person will recover. But Jin-hua does not want to infect anyone with a bad disease and does not receive
Stunned by her discovery, Jin-hua forgets everything in the world and gives herself to a foreigner. When she falls asleep, she dreams of a heavenly hail; she sits at a table, lined with food, and behind her in a chair of sandalwood sits a foreigner, and around his head a halo shines. Jin-hua invites him to share a meal with her. The foreigner responds that he, Jesus Christ, does not like Chinese cuisine. He says that if Jin-hua eats a treat, then her illness will pass for the night. When Jin-hua wakes up, there is nobody beside her. She thinks that a foreigner with the face of Christ, she also dreamed, but in the end decides: “No, it was not a dream.” She becomes sad because the person she fell in love with, left without saying goodbye to her without paying the promised ten dollars. And suddenly she feels that, thanks to the miracle that happened in her body, terrible ulcers disappeared without a trace. “So it was Christ,” she decides, and kneels before the crucifix, she prays fervently.
In the spring of next year, a Japanese tourist who once came to Jin-hua again visits her. Jin-hua tells him how Christ, having descended one night to Nanjing, appeared to her and healed him of the disease. The tourist remembers that a certain half-breed named George Merry, a bad man, unworthy, boasted that he had spent the night with a prostitute in Nanjing, and when she fell asleep, she ran away quietly. He also heard that later this man went mad on the basis of syphilis. He guesses that Jin-hua infected George Merry, but does not want to disappoint the devout woman. “And you have not been sick ever since?” asks the Japanese tourist. “No, never,” Jin-hua firmly answers with a clear face, continuing to gnaw watermelon seeds.
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