RainStorm

faraway calamity.
    After leaving Tatsu in Tokyo, I had finished preparing Yamadasan,
    the ice-cold alter ego I had created as an escape hatch for the
    day my enemies might succeed in tracking me to Japan, as indeed
    they had, for his departure to Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo is home to some
    six hundred thousand of Brazil's approximately one million ethnic
    Japanese; the largest such community outside Japan, and the kind
    of place in which a recent arrival like Yamada-san might easily lose
    himself.
    Yamada found a suitable apartment in Aclimafao, a residential
    neighborhood near Liberdade, Sao Paulo's Japanese district, from
    which he made the necessary arrangements to establish his new
    business of shipping high-quality, low-cost Brazilian judo and jujitsu
    uniforms to Japan--a business which, if conditions were favorable,
    he might one day expand to include additional exportable
    items. Many of his neighbors were of Korean and Chinese extraction,
    which suited Yamada because such Asian faces made it easier
    for him to blend. A more heavily Japanese setting, such as that of
    Liberdade itself, would have conferred the same advantages, but
    could have been problematic, as well, because Japanese neighbors
    would have been more inclined to probe the specifics of his background,
    and to discuss it among themselves afterward. To the extent
    that he did need to share some of his past with his Japanese
    neighbors, Yamada would explain that he was from Tokyo, a simple sarariiman, or salary man, who had suffered the double indignity
    of being laid off by one of Japan's electronics giants and then being
    abandoned by his wife of twenty years, for whom he could no
    longer provide as she expected. It was a sad, although not uncommon
    story in those difficult economic times, and Yamada's neighbors,
    with typical Japanese restraint, would nod sympathetically at
    the telling of his lament and press for no further details.
    Yamada obsessed over the study of Portuguese--tapes, tutors,
    television, music, films, even a series of professional women, because,
    Yamada knew, there is no more natural or productive route
    to the acquisition of a language than the sharing of a pillow. Every
    few weeks, he would leave town to travel, to acquaint himself firsthand
    with his adopted land: the vast cerrado, the central plains, with
    its handful of frontier towns and vanishing Indian tribes, and its
    bizarre, planned city, Brasilia, stuck on the land as though by extraterrestrials
    in imitation of an earthen metropolis; the prehistoric
    enormity of Amazonas, where the scale of everything--the trees,
    the water lilies, and, of course, the river itself--first diminishes and
    then extinguishes the traveler's sense of his own human significance;
    the baroque art and architecture of Minas Gerais, left behind
    like a conflicted apology by the miners who centuries earlier had
    raped the region's land for its diamonds and gold.
    Yamada avoided Bahia and in particular its capital, Salvador.
    Rain knew a woman there, a beautiful half-Brazilian, half-Japanese
    named Naomi, with whom Rain had enjoyed an affair in Tokyo
    and to whom he had made a promise when she was forced to flee
    to Brazil. Yamada wanted to go to her there, but at the same time
    hesitated to do so, finding himself unsure, at some level, of whether
    he was attempting to forestall the inevitable or simply hoping to
    relish the anticipation of its arrival. Occasionally Yamada was troubled
    by such thoughts, but his new surroundings, exotic after so
    many years in familiar Japan, his travels, and his constant study of
    the language, were all strongly diverting.
    Yamada's linguistic progress was excellent, as one might expect
    of a man who already spoke both English and Japanese as a native,
    and after six months he judged himself ready to relocate to Rio;
    more specifically, to Barra da Tijuca, known throughout Rio simply
    as Barra, a middle-and
    upper-middle-class enclave extending
    for some nineteen kilometers along Rio's southern coast. He chose
    a suitable apartment at the corner of the Avenida Belisario Leite de
    Andrade Neto and the Avenida General Guedes da Fontoura. It
    was a good building, with entrances on each of the streets it faced,
    and nothing but other residences all around, therefore offering, had
    Yamada been inclined to reflect on such matters, multiple points of
    egress and no convenient areas from which some third party might
    set up surveillance or an ambush.
    In Barra the