Rainfall

Начало книги

THIS NOVEL is for three people who are not here to read it.

For my father, Edgar, who gave me strength.

For my mother, Barbara, who gave me insight.

For my brother, Ian, who helped me climb the mountain, whose memory keeps me climbing still.

In the changing of the times, they were like autumn lightning, a thing out of season, an empty promise of rain that would fall unheeded on fields already bare.

— SHOSABURO ABE, on the Meiji-era samurai

PART ONE

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

— But who is that on the other side of you?

— T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

1

HARRY CUT THROUGH the morning rush-hour crowd like a shark fin through water. I was following from twenty meters back on the opposite side of the street, sweating with everyone else in the unseasonable October Tokyo heat, and I couldn’t help admiring how well the kid had learned what I’d taught him. He was like liquid the way he slipped through a space just before it closed, or drifted to the left to avoid an emerging bottleneck. The changes in Harry’s cadence were accomplished so smoothly that no one would recognize he had altered his pace to narrow the gap on our target, who was now moving almost conspicuously quickly down Dogenzaka toward Shibuya Station.

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