Hard Rain

and if you know that no one is going to report the person dead, or
    even missing, you've got something potentially valuable on your hands.
    If you also know that he's got a good credit history, because you've
    gone on paying bills incurred in his name, you might just have landed
    yourself a winner.
    So yes, I did carry out the contract on the unfortunate Mr. Yamada,
    but I didn't tell the client that. Instead, the subject seemed to have
    gone 'underground," I reported, unable to resist the pun. Perhaps he
    had somehow gotten wind of the fact that a contract had been put out on
    his life? The client hired a PI, who confirmed the presence of all the
    indicia of sudden flight: a closed bank account and other personal
    matters efficiently tied up; mail forwarded to a foreign drop; missing
    clothes and other personal items from the apartment. I, of course, had
    been taking care of all of this. The client let me know that, for his
    purposes, disappearance was as good as death, and that I needn't
    trouble myself tracking Yamada down to complete the contract. I was
    paid for my efforts anyway no one wants someone like me to feel that he
    may have been treated unfairly and that was that. The client himself
    has long since come to his own unfortunate end, and enough time has
    elapsed for me to have resurrected Yamada-san, opening up a small
    consulting operation in his unobtrusive name, paying taxes, securing an
    appropriate postal address, incurring debt and paying it off- all the
    little things that, taken together, add up to existence as a thoroughly
    unremarkable, thoroughly legitimate, member of society.
    All I had to do now was slip into the Yamada identity and begin my new
    life. But first, Taro Yamada had to do some of the things that any guy
    in his position would do after deciding to give up on his failed
    consulting business and move to Brazil to teach third-generation
    Japanese their now forgotten language. He needed a visa, a legitimate
    bank account as opposed to the illegitimate, pseudonymous ones I
    maintain offshore assistance with housing, an office. He would be
    nominally based in Sao Paulo, where almost half of Brazil's ethnic
    Japanese are concentrated, which would make him even more difficult to
    track to Rio. It would have been easier to take care of much of this
    with the assistance of the Japanese consulate in Brasilia, of course,
    but Mr. Yamada preferred less formal, less traceable means.
    While I went about setting Yamada up in Brazil, I read about a string
    of corruption scandals and wondered how they figured in Tatsu's shadow
    war with Yamaoto. Universal Studios Japan, it turned out, had been
    serving food that was nine months past its due date and falsifying
    labels to hide it, while operating a drinking fountain that was pumping
    out untreated industrial water. Mister Donut was in the habit of
    fortifying its wares with meat dumplings containing banned additives.
    Snow Brand Food liked to save a few yen by recycling old milk and
    failing to clean factory pipes.
    Couldn't cover that one up fifteen thousand people were poisoned.
    Mitsubishi Motors and Bridgestone got nailed hard, concealing defects
    in cars and tires to avoid safety recalls. The worst, shocking even by
    Japanese standards, was the news that TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power, had
    been caught submitting falsified nuclear safety reports that went back
    twenty years. The reports failed to list serious problems at eight
    different reactors, including cracks in concrete containment shrouds.
    The amazing thing wasn't the scandals, though. It was how little
    people seemed to care. It must have been frustrating for Tatsu, and I
    wondered what drove him. In other countries, revelations like these
    would have precipitated a revolution. But despite the scandals,
    despite the economy, the Japanese just went right on reelecting the
    same usual Liberal Democratic Party suspects. Christ, half the problem
    Tatsu was fighting comprised his nominal superiors, the people to whom,
    in a sense, he had to salute. How do you keep going, in the face of
    such determined ignorance and relentless hypocrisy? Why did he
    bother?
    I read the news and tried to imagine how Tatsu would interpret it, how,
    indeed, he might even be trying to shape it. Not all. of it was bad,
    I supposed. In fact, there were some developments in the provinces
    that must have encouraged him. Kitagawa Masayasu beat the bureaucrats
    in Mie by simply deciding against a proposed nuclear power