 The Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is a bestselling 1997 non @-@ fiction book written by Iris Chang about the 1937 – 1938 Nanking Massacre , the massacre and atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after it captured Nanjing , then capital of China , during the Second Sino @-@ Japanese War . It describes the events leading up to the Nanking Massacre and the atrocities that were committed . The book presents the view that the Japanese government has not done enough to redress the atrocities . It is one of the first major English @-@ language books to introduce the Nanking Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike , and has been translated into several languages . 
