Iris Chang, a journalist whose best-selling book, "The Rape
of Nanking," a chronicle of the atrocities committed in
that city by occupying Japanese forces, helped break a
six-decade-long international silence on the subject,
committed suicide on Tuesday near Los Gatos, Calif. She was
36 and lived in San Jose.

Ms. Chang's literary agent, Susan Rabiner, announced the
death.

Ms. Chang was found in her car on a rural road south of Los
Gatos, dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot
wound, the local authorities told The San Francisco
Chronicle. She had left a suicide note at home that she had
painstakingly written, edited and rewritten, her husband,
Brett Douglas said in a telephone interview yesterday.

"The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War
II" was published by Basic Books in 1997, the 60th
anniversary of the massacre. The book documented the events
in Nanking (now Nanjing) during the second Sino-Japanese
War, in the years leading up to World War II.

In December 1937 Japanese troops entered the city, which
until shortly before the invasion had been the Chinese
capital. In less than two months they murdered more than
300,000 civilians and raped more than 80,000 women. Ms.
Chang's book was the first full-length nonfiction account
of the event.

Reviewing "The Rape of Nanking" in The New York Times Book
Review, Orville Schell called it an "important new book,"
adding that Ms. Chang "recounts the grisly massacre with
understandable outrage."

She had a keen personal interest in the subject. Ms.
Chang's grandparents had fled Nanking just before the
occupation, eventually settling in the United States.
Growing up in the Midwest, she heard family stories of the
massacre, but as an adult she was unable to find much about
it in print. In China and Japan, and even in the West, the
subject had been almost completely lost to history.

"The whole issue had scar tissue growing over it, but it
had never really healed," Mr. Schell, the dean of the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University of
California, Berkeley, and a longtime observer of China,
said in a telephone interview. "She sort of threw the
curtain back on a period that the Chinese Communist Party
and the Japanese hoped was shrouded in official
declarations of a new collaboration. But it turned out
there was a lot of unfinished business."

Fluent in Mandarin, Ms. Chang traveled to China, where she
scoured archives and interviewed elderly survivors. What
she learned would force her to describe the indescribable:

"Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice
off their breasts, nail them alive to walls," Ms. Chang
wrote. "Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and
sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not
only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs
and the roasting of people become routine, but more
diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people
by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their
waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds. So
sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city
were horrified."

"The Rape of Nanking" spent 10 weeks on the New York Times
best-seller list, and close to half a million copies have
been sold, Ms. Rabiner said.

The book drew wide international attention. In Japan it
prompted outrage among conservatives. (A planned Japanese
edition was cancelled in 1999.) Elsewhere it engendered
demands for the Japanese government to make reparations or,
at least, a formal apology, something Ms. Chang to the end
of her life felt had been inadequately done.

"There have been all sorts of little fragments and shards
and bits and pieces," Mr. Schell said. "But no one has done
what Willy Brandt did: got down on his knees in the Warsaw
ghetto and asked forgiveness."

Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born on March 28, 1968, in
Princeton, N.J. She grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.,
where her father, a physicist, and her mother, a
microbiologist, taught at the University of Illinois. Ms.
Chang received a bachelor's degree in journalism from
Illinois in 1989. After working briefly as a reporter for
The Associated Press and The Chicago Tribune, she earned a
master's degree from the writing program of Johns Hopkins
University in 1991.

She published her first book, "Thread of the Silkworm"
(Basic Books, 1995), when she was just 27. It told the
story of Tsien Hsue-shen, a Chinese-born scientist deported
from the United States during the McCarthy era, who
returned to China and founded that country's
intercontinental missile program. Ms. Chang also wrote "The
Chinese in America: A Narrative History," published last
year by Viking.

At the time of her death, she was researching a book on
American soldiers who served in tank units on the Bataan
peninsula before World War II, many of whom were captured
and imprisoned by the Japanese. In the course of her
research several months ago, Ms. Chang became severely
depressed and had to be hospitalized, Ms. Rabiner said.

Besides her husband, Ms. Chang is survived by her parents,
Shau-Jin and Ying-Ying, and a brother, Michael, all of San
Jose; and by a son, Christopher.

In a 1998 interview with The Straits Times of Singapore,
Ms. Chang described her reasons for writing "The Rape of
Nanking":

"I wrote it out of a sense of rage," she said. "I didn't
really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to
me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in
1937."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/arts/12chang.html?ex=1101278589&ei=1&en=1d2d5380553b7f61