In Paul West's The Tent of Orange Mist (1995), Scald Ibis is a 16-year-old Nanking girl, bred to gentility. When Japanese soldiers, along with their commander Colonel Hayashi, break into her home, they behead her brother, rape and bayonet her mother, and then proceed to rape her. Her life is spared by Colonel Hayashi, who notices her special appeal and develops other plans for her. He converts her home into a local "pleasure house" for Japanese officers that he calls "the Tent of Orange Mist." Able to adjust to the horrors surrounding her, she is eventually elevated from prostitute to geisha, serving high-ranking military figures.

In the meantime her father, who had been serving in the Chinese army, returns to the house disguised as a servant. Seeing his daughter reduced to performing unspeakable acts, he strangles Colonel Hayashi and is himself beheaded and quartered by Japanese troops. Always the survivor, Scald Ibis replaces Hayashi as the manager of the brothel until the end of the war. Having become by this time more Japanese than Chinese, she moves to Japan, where she spends the rest of her life.

Interpolated throughout the novel are excerpts from the journal of a 16th-century, presumably fictional, Jesuit missionary, the relevance of which is obscure at best. There are also some self-indulgent exercises in literary style that come across as authorial showing off. But the novel's strength lies in its depiction of individuals, caught in a vise of historical horror and faced with the choice of being slaughtered or adapting to the point of becoming the enemy. Scald Ibis chooses the latter path. Whether survival is worth the price she pays is left for the reader to determine.

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