RainStorm

Yamada identity finally began to feel truly comfortable.
    Partly it was that I'd lived as Yamada for so long at that
    point; partly it was that the Sao Paulo stopover had been only one
    step removed from Japan, and therefore from those enemies who
    were trying to find me there; partly it was the inherent difficulty of
    feeling uncomfortable for long in Rio, its rhythms, indeed its life,
    defined as they are by the culture of its beaches.
    In my new environs I became a Japanese nisei, one of the tens of
    thousands of Brazil's second-generation ethnic Japanese, who had
    decided to retire to Rio from Sao Paulo. My Portuguese was good
    enough to support the story; the accent was off, of course, but this
    was explainable by virtue of having grown up in a Japanese household
    and having spent much of my childhood in Japan.
    I was intrigued at how distant a notion Japan seemed to present
    to my nisei cousins. It seemed that, when they looked in the mirror,
    they saw only a Brazilian. If they thought about it at all, I imagined,
    Japan must have felt like a coincidence, a faraway culture and
    place not much more important than the other such places one
    reads about in books or sees on television, something that meant a
    great deal to their parents or grandparents but that wasn't particularly
    relevant to them. I found myself somewhat envious of the notion
    of forgetting where you had come from and caring only about
    who you are, and liked Brazil for offering a culture that would foster
    such a possibility.
    And Barra offered this culture triple-distilled. My nisei story was
    thin, I knew, but it didn't really matter. Barra, the fastest growing
    part of the city, its skyline increasingly crowded with new high-rises,
    its neighborhoods ceaselessly changing with departures and
    arrivals, is much more focused on the future than it is with anyone's
    particular past. It's the kind of place where, a month after you've
    been there, you're considered an old-timer, and I had no trouble
    fitting in.
    Rio, home to a sports-and
    fitness-mad population, has numerous
    health food outlets, and it was easy for me to indulge my taste
    for protein shakes and acai fruit smoothies. These, along with
    antioxidants, fish oil, and other dietary supplements, enhanced my
    recovery times and enabled me to adhere to a regimen of five hundred
    daily Hindu squats, three hundred inclined sit-ups, three hundred
    Hindu push-ups, and other esoteric body weight calisthenics
    that maintained my strength and flexibility.
    I varied my mornings and evenings training at Gracie Barra, jujitsu's
    modern Mecca, where the fecund Gracie family had taken
    the teachings of a visiting Japanese diplomat and adapted them into
    a system of ground fighting so sophisticated that the art is now
    more firmly established in Brazil than it ever was in Japan. I trained
    frequently and hard, having missed the opportunity to do so during
    the year I had spent underground in Osaka and in Sao Paulo
    thereafter. The academy's young black belts were impressed with
    my skills, but in truth their ground game was stronger than mine-- although certainly less ruthless, if applied in the real world--and I
    relished the opportunity to once again polish and expand my personal
    arsenal.
    In the afternoons I would ride an old ten-speed out to one of
    the city's more isolated beaches--sometimes Grumari, sometimes
    even less accessible slivers of sand, which I reached on foot, where
    only the most determined surfers, and perhaps some nude sunbathers,
    might venture. After a month my skin had become dark,
    like that of a true carioca, or Rio native, and my hair, brown like my
    mother's now that I no longer dyed it black to make myself look
    more Japanese, grew streaked like a surfer's.
    Sometimes I would swim out to one of the nearby islands. I would sit on those deserted outcroppings of gray and green and
    consider the rhythm of waves against rock, the occasional sighing
    of the wind, and my mind would wander. I would think of Midori,
    the jazz pianist I had accidentally met and then deliberately
    spared after killing her father, a man whose posthumous wishes I
    had tried to carry out later, an effort that had perhaps earned ambivalence,
    but that could never lead to forgiveness, from the daughter. I would remember how on that last night she had leaned in
    from astride me and whispered I hate you even as she came, the
    newly acquired certainty of what I had done to her father damning
    the passion she