A Clean Kill in Tokyo

titles of the Rain books? Simply because I’ve never thought the titles were right for the stories. The right title matters—if only because the wrong one has the same effect as an inappropriate frame around an otherwise beautiful painting. Not only does the painting not look good in the wrong frame; it will sell for less, as well. And if you’re the artist behind the painting, having to see it in the wrong frame, and having to live with the suboptimal commercial results, is aggravating.
    The sad story of the original Rain titles began with the moniker
Rain Fall
for the first in the series. It was a silly play on the protagonist’s name, and led to an unfortunate and unimaginative sequence of similar such meaningless, interchangeable titles:
Hard Rain, Rain Storm, Killing Rain
(the British titles were better, but still not right:
Blood from Blood
for #2;
Choke Point
for #3;
One Last Kill
for #4). By the fifth book, I was desperate for something different, and persuaded my publisher to go with
The Last Assassin
, instead. In general, I think
The Last Assassin
is a good title, but in fairness it really has nothing to do with the story in the fifth book beyond the fact that there’s an assassin in it. But it was better than more of
Rain This
and
Rain That
. The good news is, the fifth book did very well indeed; the bad news is, the book’s success persuaded my publisher that assassin was a magic word and that what we needed now was to use the word assassin in every title. And so my publisher told me that although they didn’t care for my proposed title for the sixth book—
The Killer Ascendant
—they were pleased to have come up with something far better. The sixth book, they told me proudly, would be known as
The Quiet Assassin
.
    I tried to explain that while not quite as redundant as, say,
The Deadly Assassin
or
The Lethal Assassin
, a title suggesting an assassin might be notable for his quietness was at best uninteresting (as opposed to, say, Margret Atwood’s
The Blind Assassin
, which immediately engages the mind because of the connection of two seemingly contradictory qualities). The publisher was adamant. I told them that if they really were hell-bent on using assassin in a title that otherwise had nothing to do with the book, couldn’t we at least call the book
The Da Vinci Assassin
, or
The Sudoku Assassin
? In the end, we compromised on
Requiem for an Assassin
, a title I think would be good for some other book but is unrelated to the one I wrote—beyond, again, the bare fact of the presence of an assassin in the story.
    Now that I have my rights back and no longer have to make ridiculous compromises about these matters, I’ve given the books the titles I always wanted them to have—titles that actually have something to do with the stories, that capture some essential aspect of the stories, and that act as both vessel and amplifier for what’s most meaningful in the stories. For me, it’s like seeing these books for the first time in the frames they always deserved. It’s exciting, satisfying, and even liberating. Have a look yourself and I hope you’ll enjoy them.

In the changing of the times, they were like autumn lightning, a thing out of season, an empty promise of rain that would fall unheeded on fields already bare.
    —Shosaburo Abe,
master swordsman, on the Meiji era samurai

PART I
    Who is the third who walks always beside you?
    When I count, there are only you and I together
    But when I look ahead up the white road
    There is always another one walking beside you
    Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
    I do not know whether a man or a woman
    —
But who is that on the other side of you?
    —T.S. Eliot,
The Waste Land

CHAPTER 1
    H arry moved through the morning rush-hour crowd like a shark fin cutting through water. I was following twenty meters back on the opposite side of the street, sweating with everyone else in the unseasonable October Tokyo heat, and I couldn’t help admiring how well the kid had learned what I’d taught him. He was like liquid the way he slipped through a space just before it closed, or drifted to the left to avoid an emerging bottleneck. The changes in Harry’s cadence were accomplished so smoothly that no one would recognize he had altered his pace to narrow the gap on our target, who was now moving almost conspicuously quickly down Dogenzaka toward Shibuya Station.
    The target’s name was Yasuhiro Kawamura. He was a career bureaucrat connected