Hard Rain

had come at just after eight o'clock,
    while I was reading in my room at the New Otani hotel in
    Akasaka-Mitsuke. The club closed at eight, I knew, so if the jakuza
    was working out there after hours there was a good possibility he'd be
    alone. What I'd been waiting for.
    My workout gear was already in a bag, and I was out the door within
    minutes. I caught a cab a slight distance from the hotel, not wanting
    a doorman to hear or remember where I might be going, and five minutes
    later I exited at the corner of Roppongi-dori and Gaienhigashi-dori in
    Roppongi. I hated to use such a direct route because doing so afforded
    me limited opportunity to ensure that I wasn't being followed, but I
    had only a little time to pull this off the way I'd planned, and I
    decided it was worth the risk.
    I had been watching the jakuza for over a month now, and knew his
    routines. I'd learned that he liked to vary the times of his workouts,
    sometimes arriving at the gym early in the morning, sometimes at night.
    Probably he assumed the resulting unpredictability would make him hard
    to get to.
    He was half right. Unpredictability is the key to being a hard target,
    but the concept applies to both time and place. Half-measures like
    this guy's will protect you from some of the people some of the time,
    but they won't save you for long from someone like me.
    Strange, how people can take adequate, even strong security measures in
    some respects, while leaving them selves vulnerable in others. Like
    double-locking the front door and leaving the windows wide open.
    Sometimes the phenomenon is caused by fear. Fear not so much of the
    requirements, but rather of the consequences of life as a hard target.
    Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with
    society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give
    up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost,
    detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus
    accident, you'd wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just
    another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It's
    natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.
    Other times there's a form of denial at work. Circuitous routes,
    extensive security checks, an ongoing internal dialogue consisting of
    If I were trying to get to me, how would I do it? all require a deep
    acceptance of the notion that there are people out there who have both
    the motive and the means to cut short your time on Earth. This notion
    is innately uncomfortable for the human psyche, so much so that it
    produces enormous stress even for soldiers in battle. A lot of guys,
    the first time they come under close-range fire, they're shocked.
    "Why's he trying to kill me?" they're asking themselves. "What did I
    ever do to him?"
    Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you're
    alone in the house, to ensure that an intruder isn't hiding there? Now,
    if you really believed that the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking
    in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But
    it's more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and
    to act on it only half-heartedly. That's denial.
    Finally, and most obviously, there is laziness. Who has the time or
    energy to inspect the family car for improvised explosive devices
    before every drive? Who can afford a two-hour, roundabout route to get
    to a place that could have been reached directly in ten minutes? Who
    wants to pass up a restaurant or bar just because the only seats
    available face the wall, not the entrance?
    Rhetorical questions, but I know how Crazy Jake would have answered.
    The living, he would have said. And the ones who intend to go on that
    way.
    Which leads to an easy rationalization, one that I'm sure is common to
    people who have taken lives the way I have. If he'd really wanted to
    live, the rationalization goes, I wouldn't have been able to get to
    him. He wouldn't have permitted himself that weakness, the one that
    did him in.
    The jakuza's weakness was his addiction to weights. Who knows what
    fueled it a history of childhood bullying that made him want to appear
    visibly strong afterward, an attempt to overcome a feeling of
    inadequacy born of being naturally slighter of build than Caucasians,
    some suppressed homo eroticism like the one that drove Mishima. Maybe
    some of the same impulses that had led him to become a gangster to
    begin with.
    His