Nightmare Fuel / The Gift of Rain

• Philip and Hayato are having dinner with Saotome when a soldier brings in a young Chinese girl and strips her on the official's orders. The girl's fate afterwards isn't mentioned.
  • Later a man warns Philip to beware of Saotome because he has "very strange tastes". Specifically, he's a sadist.
• Wen Zu's suicide. He cut off his eyelids before cutting his throat.
• Book one is full of subtle nightmare fuel, a sense of steadily-growing impending doom. Book two, on the other hand? Sheer horror.
• Goro and Fujihara try to take over the Huttons' house. Philip tries to make them leave diplomatically. Isabel uses a more direct method and drives them out at gunpoint. Awesome? Yes... but her actions guarantee they'll come back seeking revenge.
• Philip notices the visual similarity between the Japanese propaganda leaflets and the paper money scattered at a Chinese funeral.
  I was witnessing the funerary rites of my country, of my home.
• Peter tells the Huttons that the Japanese army are cycling through the jungle. Philip realises how they knew that was possible: he told Hayato that the locals used bicycles and had their own jungle tracks, and he even gave Hayato a map of the tracks.
• Philip gets caught in one of the bombing raids.
  The road was pocked with craters. Some cars had gone front first into them, their rears sticking up like the sterns of listing ships I had seen at the harbor. Blood was curdling on the tarmac, thick as engine oil. Windows all around had shattered and shards of glass were sprinkled on the torn bodies like crystallized rain.
• The Japanese behead the looters and put their heads on poles along the street. Philip notes that quite a few of the murdered people were innocent and had been denounced by informers with a grudge against them.
• A man gets clubbed with a rifle for forgetting to bow to a soldier. Aunt Mei also doesn't show proper respect to a soldier, and gets beaten black and blue for it.
• "News of rapes and disembowelments reached us almost daily. Families and villagers caught in the path of the troops were raped and bayoneted, sometimes not even in that order."
• Edward and Peter go missing after Kuala Lumpur's surrender. Philip tries to find them, which means going to Saotome. Who propositions Philip, then threatens to rape him or hand him over to the soldiers when he refuses.
• Fujihara requisitions the Thorntons' house. Their fate is never mentioned.

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