HIT MAN IN TOKYO'S UNDERBELLY
                                              By Alix Schwartz
        artssf.com, the independent observer of Northern California books
                                                                 Weeks starting Sept. 1,  2002
                                                                  Vol. 5, No. 6
        When I read "Rain Fall" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2002, 306 pages, $24.95), I felt like one of the victims of main character John Rain, a hit man who specializes in death by seemingly natural causes. The parallels are irresistible: Barry Eisler's stunning first novel took me by surprise, stole my breath away, slayed me.
        The parallels between Bay Area author Eisler and his creation, John Rain, are even harder to resist. Rain is stylish: he knows the best place in Tokyo to drink single-malt whiskey, for instance, and he doesn't need a reservation at the hippest jazz club. Eisler, too, is stylish: his book oozes with style, from the blue notes of his prose to the very way the words are laid out on the page.
        John Rain is uncompromising: like many fictional killers, he lives and works by a strict code of ethics. Eisler too is uncompromising, but in his case it's a rarer quality: not many thrillers are written by people whose writerly integrity shines through in every sentence.
        Rain is a precision killer by trade, and Eisler's cool, precise prose captures him perfectly, but neither man is cold and unfeeling. When Rain is forced by circumstances to make an unplanned kill, we are privy to the effects of his adrenal system: "The thudding of my heart was loud enough to block out sound. I could feel the air flowing cleanly in and out of my nostrils, the blood pumping through the veins in my arm." There's no attempt to pretend that any of this is no big deal.
        At the same time, neither Rain nor Eisler engages in sentimentalizing or apology, even when Rain falls in love with the woman whose father he has killed in the opening scene. It's a hell of a predicament, and Eisler plays it out in all its rich and tortured complexity.
        The main thing that separates Eisler from the run-of-the-mill writers of thrillers is character development. If you've ever read a novel or watched a film featuring a hired gun, you may have wondered what makes a man kill other men for money. Eisler gives John Rain such a deep history that his choices seem utterly plausible.
        By the time Eisler has spelled out how it feels to be half Japanese and half American, fully accepted in neither country, you will have no trouble understanding how a man can become an absolute loner. And by the time you have read about Rain's experiences in the Special Forces in Cambodia, you will wonder only why the streets are not full of hit men.
        Needless to say, the plot of this thriller is, well, thrilling. When you come to understand a character, it's easy to get wrapped up in what happens to him. And the twists and turns, while sometimes as hard to follow as a Tokyo subway map, do take the reader on a wild ride.
        I also like the book for its dark insider's view of Tokyo, all its neighborhoods, from the love hotels of Shibuya to the hostess bars of Roppongi. In this way Eisler puts me in mind of Michael Dibdin, one of my favorite detective novelists, who reveals the dark underbelly of Venice, Rome, Sicily--the side of Italy that tourists never see, much to their relief.
        Eisler's novel also provides a pitch-perfect account of how a hit man plies his trade, complete with enough advice about how to trail people, make their deaths appear natural, and avoid detection, for the reader to set up shop right here at home.
        Now that I have finished reading "Rain Fall," the only suspense plaguing me is wondering when Eisler's second novel featuring John Rain will hit the shelves. If you have yet to read the first novel, a far higher order of suspense awaits you.
        © Alix Schwartz 2002
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        Alix Schwartz is a book-review contributor to www.artssf.com.
   These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) focus on book reviews (by authors of the region), plus theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists as well.
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