Her agent, Susan Rabiner, said Chang had suffered from "classical clinical depression" and had been hospitalized earlier this year. She said Chang left a note to her family asking that she be remembered as she was before her illness.

The release of her best-selling book came on the 60th anniversary of the Japanese capture of the Chinese capital of Nanking. She wrote graphically of the result in a book her agent said sold about half a million copies.

"An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped," Chang wrote. "Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. 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."

Japan has been slow to acknowledge the scale of the atrocities, and her account sparked anger from conservative Japanese. In 1998 Japan's ambassador to the United States created a diplomatic stir by calling Chang's book misleading.

The Reuters story is here.