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A man comes up out of the subway at Sengoku, in the northeast of Tokyo, and walks the last few streets to his apartment. This is Shitamachi, the old downtown, one of the pockets that survived both the great earthquake of 1923 and the firebombing that came twenty-two years later. The little merchant street is painted green and red, so it feels festive even in the early dark of winter. The couple who run the corner five-and-dime look up and call out to him. Not good evening. They call out okaeri nasai, welcome home.
Further along, an old woman fries octopus at a street window in her ancient house, and the children run past whispering warnings about her. There is a video store whose owner sits in it like a small cheerful Buddha, watching her own stock. On warm evenings piano notes drift down from the house of Yamada, the teacher, and mix with the shuffle of slippers as people come back from the public bath.

The man walking up that street kills people for a living and makes it look like natural causes. His name is John Rain. He has spent decades constructing a life in which nobody can find him, and he keeps this apartment anyway, in the one neighbourhood in Tokyo where everyone knows his face. He knows what that costs him professionally. He stays.

That contradiction is the engine of eleven novels.

John Rain: a life built to leave no trace

The facts, assembled across the series, are these. A Japanese father, an American mother. The father killed in the street riots that shook Tokyo when Rain was a boy. The mother took him back to a working-class town in upstate New York, where his face made him the local target and where he learned guerrilla warfare from the children who hunted him in packs. He volunteered for Vietnam as a teenager, partly to prove to people who doubted it that he was American, and stayed three years taking the assignments nobody wanted. He came back to Japan, carried bags of quiet American money to the right politicians, and found that someone would pay fifty thousand dollars to have a problem die of something unremarkable. He has been that man ever since.

The tradecraft is the texture of the books. He never changes trains directly; he surfaces first and runs a surveillance detection route. Buying a CD he actually wants, he buys two he doesn’t, pays cash, and picks the longest line with the most harassed clerk, so that afterwards there is nothing for anyone to remember. He retired his birth name. He had surgery to complete the epicanthic folds that had marked him as a half-breed, and grew his hair out, and put on wire-rimmed glasses, until he looked less like a soldier and more like a mild academic. He is, as one character puts it, less a chameleon than a shape-shifter, because a chameleon only changes colour.

The apartment holds almost nothing. Philosophy, Mishima and Musashi and Nietzsche. A shelf of manuals on surveillance technology, forensics, forged identity and lock-picking, which he reads not to practise but to know what the opposition knows. In the one tatami room, where a family would have set a low heated table to sit around in winter, there is a wooden wing-chun dummy. Twenty-five years of judo at the Kodokan, which is the only routine he ever permits himself, and which he understands perfectly well is therefore the one place in the world he can be found. He drinks single malt slowly. He loves jazz. He is very good at coffee.

And he works to rules. Three of them, stated flatly and enforced without discussion: no women or children, no acts against non-principals, no B-teams. Clients who break them are not fired. They are billed.

What he believes, and what it costs him

The philosophical spine of the series is a phrase a jazz pianist gives him over whisky in the first book. Mono no aware, usually translated as the pathos of things. She prefers the sadness of being human, and describes it as a wise, accepting sadness. Things end, and you consent to that. Rain is honestly moved and honestly unable to manage it. Sad, for him, has always meant bitter.

He returns to it for the rest of his life anyway. He goes at night to Aoyama cemetery, days after the drunken crowds have gone, and walks a path covered in fallen cherry blossom that lies like dark snow under the lamps, to a marker with his father’s name on it. He does not pray. He does not believe the dead can hear anything. He talks to the stone regardless, and argues with a woman who is not there about whether what he does is worse than dropping a bomb from thirty thousand feet on people you never have to look at. He makes the case well. Eisler does not let him win it.

The image he finally settles on comes from swordsmanship. A blade is a killing instrument by design; you can prop a door with it, but that is not what it is for. Its nature is fixed and its morality is not. There is katsujinken, the sword that gives life, and setsuninto, the sword that takes it, and which one you are is decided entirely by what you are used for. Rain’s whole arc is the attempt to become the first kind without lying to himself about being the second.

Two smaller wisdoms run alongside. One is about identity. Asked whether he is really Japanese, he answers that he is fully Japanese and also fully something else, and that a person does not have to be part this and part that. The woman he is talking to agrees, and adds that when you acquire a new language you grow a new soul, and the old one is not diminished. The other is about trust, and he learns it embarrassingly late. He used to believe in pre-emptive betrayal, on the theory that there was nothing wrong with treachery except letting the other man get there first. Then a loud, sentimental Marine sniper called Dox walked away from a bag containing five million dollars in order to save his life, and Rain has never entirely recovered from it. He admits, in so many words, that at the time he would not have done the same.

What it costs him is stated without self-pity. In the third book he goes back to Sengoku and finds the neighbourhood almost unchanged and completely untroubled by his absence. He had allowed himself to think that living there meant he belonged. Standing in the street, he understands that this was vanity, and that he is now a kind of ghost in a place he was right to leave and foolish to revisit.

Tokyo, read three ways

Eisler lived in Tokyo, and it shows in a way that cannot be faked. His city is three things at once, and the books hold all three in focus simultaneously.

It is a place with real texture. Shitamachi, the stubborn old east. Ameyoko under the elevated tracks, where hawkers sell spices and dried fish and cheap electronics and the summer air smells of yakitori. Kabukichō, where citizens and sinners walk the same alleys because Tokyo has never believed in zoning. Shin Ōkubo, the Koreatown that feels like a different city entirely once you leave the pachinko glare at the station. Yoshiwara, moribund by day and subdued even at night, still trading in what the woodblock prints called the floating world. Shirokanedai, so hushed and expensive that the money seems to have bought off the noise of the surrounding city and sent it somewhere else. And to the west, the Tokyo that feels exactly like Tokyo and nothing at all like Japan, brash and fast and anonymous, where Rain could disappear if he ever chose to.

It is also a place with specific pleasures, named by someone who actually went. Jazz at Body & Soul in Minami Aoyama, where no seat is far enough from the stage to stop you thanking the band. Coffee at Café de l’Ambre in Ginza, where the proprietor still came in daily to roast his own beans as he approached a hundred. Eight seats in a hidden basement bar in Yurakuchō, and a bartender who will find you the bottling that dissolves, for an hour, whatever it was you came in carrying.

And it is a tactical problem. Rain chose Sengoku partly because it has nowhere anonymous for a stranger to sit and wait, and because the shopkeepers are out on the street all day watching it. He reads every district for sightlines, exits, foot traffic and the density of eyes. This is why the descriptions land. Loving a city and casing it turn out to be the same activity, done with the same attention.

One novel goes back to 1972 and shows the city mid-transformation, when the thirty-storey Kasumigaseki Building had just been the tallest thing in Japan and had already been overtaken twice, with more towers rising and the low, wide-skied Tokyo of Rain’s childhood visibly receding. Later books take him to Rio, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Paris and Seattle. He operates well in all of them. He is never at home in any.

Where to begin

A practical note first. Eisler reacquired the rights to the early novels and retitled several of them, so A Clean Kill in Tokyo and Rain Fall are the same book, as are Redemption Games and Killing Rain, and The Killer Ascendant and Requiem for an Assassin. Buy carefully or you will read one twice.

Unlike Chandler, this is a continuing story, so order matters. Start with A Clean Kill in Tokyo (2002), which gives you Tokyo, the Kodokan, Sengoku, and the two people who will matter most: Tatsu, the incorruptible cop who becomes his conscience and his handler, and Midori, whose father Rain has just killed.

If you would rather see how the man was assembled, Graveyard of Memories (2014) goes back to the Tokyo of 1972 and a twenty-year-old with no rules, no tradecraft and no idea what he is becoming. It works perfectly well as a first book. It is also the one where he is briefly, genuinely happy, which is not a thing that happens twice.

Read them for the tradecraft, which is the most convincing in the genre and comes with pages of source notes at the back, because Eisler was in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations before he was a novelist and is constitutionally unable to make something up when he could go and check it. Stay for the argument the books are actually having, which is about whether a man is his nature or his choices, and whether anything can be set against a career like this one.

And stay for that street in the old downtown, painted green and red so it looks like a festival even in December, where a couple who sell cheap household goods look up from the counter and tell a man who has spent forty years erasing himself that he is home.

He lets them. Every time.