RainStorm

Read Online RainStorm by Barry Eisler - Free Book Online

Book: RainStorm by Barry Eisler Read Free Book Online
Authors: Barry Eisler
Tags: Krimis & Thriller
Ads: Link
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 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

Similar Books

Breathe

Sloan Parker

Second Shot

Zoe Sharp

The Lost Boy

Dave Pelzer