A Lonely Resurrection

anachronistic pager or two, I think on balance
A Lonely Resurrection
has proven itself not only stalwart, but indeed not-so-surprisingly ahead of its time. See for yourself—and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

A NOTE ON THE NEW TITLES
    W hy have I changed the 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.

 
    Evening cherry blossoms:
    I slip the inkstone back into my kimono
    this one last time.
    —death poem of the poet Kaisho, 1914

PART I
    Had I not known
    that I was dead
    already
    I would have mourned
    my loss of life.
    —last words of Ota Dokan,
scholar of military arts and poet, 1486

CHAPTER 1
    O nce you get past the overall irony of the situation, you realize that killing a guy in the middle of his own health club has a lot to recommend it.
    The target was a yakuza, an iron freak named Ishihara who worked out every day in a gym he owned in Roppongi, one of Tokyo’s entertainment districts. Tatsu had told me the hit had to look like natural causes, like they always do, so I was glad to be working in a venue where it was far from unthinkable that someone might keel over from a fatal aneurism induced by exertion, or suffer an unlucky fall onto a steel bar, or undergo some other tragic mishap while using one of the complicated exercise machines.
    One of these eventualities might even be immortalized in the warnings corporate lawyers would insist on placing on the next