Barry Eisler - Hard Rain

I turned the corner at the end of the street I was looking for. A heavily built Japanese kid with a shaved head, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, was leaning against the wall. I made him as a sentry. Sure enough, at the other end of the street, there was his twin.

I walked past the first guy. After a few steps I turned my head casually to look back at him. He was watching me, speaking into a radio. This was a quiet street and I didn’t look like one of the pensioners who lived in the neighborhood. The call felt routine: somebody’s coming, I don’t know who.

I walked on and found the address-an unremarkable two-story building with a cement façade. The door was old and constructed of thick metal. Three rows of large bolts ran across it horizontally, probably attached to reinforcing bars on the other side. The bolts said Visitors Not Welcome .

I looked around. Across from me was a blue corrugated shed, ramshackle, its windows caved inward like the sunken eyes of a corpse. To the right was a tiny coin laundry, its three washers and three dryers arranged facing each other in neat rows as though set out to be taken away and discarded. The walls were yellowed, decorated with peeling posters. Spilled laundry powder and cigarette butts littered the floor. A vending machine hung tilted from the wall, advertising laundry soap at fifty yen a packet to customers who might as well have been ghosts.

There was a small black button recessed in the mud-colored brick to the right of the building’s door. I pressed it and waited.

A slat opened at head level. A pair of eyes regarded me through wire mesh from the other side. The eyes were slightly bloodshot. They watched me, silent.

“I’m here to train,” I said in curt Japanese.

A moment passed. “No training here,” was the reply.

“I’m judo fourth dan . Your place was recommended by a friend of mine.” I said the dead weightlifter’s name.

The eyes behind the slat narrowed. The slat closed. I waited. A minute went by, then another five. The slat opened again.

“When did Ishihara-san recommend this club?” the owner of a new pair of eyes asked.

“About a month ago.”

“It took you a long time to arrive.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been out of town.”

The eyes watched me. “How is Ishihara-san?”

“Last I saw him, he was fine.”

“Which was when?”

“About a month ago.”

“And your name is?”

“Arai Katsuhiko.”

The eyes didn’t blink. “Ishihara-san never mentioned your name.”

“Was he supposed to?”

Still no blink. “Our club has a custom. If a member mentions the club to a nonmember, he also mentions the nonmember to the club.”

No blink from me, either. “I don’t know your customs. Ishihara-san told me this would be the right kind of place for me. Can I train here or not?”

The eyes dropped down to the gym bag I was carrying. “You want to train now?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

The slat closed again. A moment later the door opened.

There was a small antechamber behind it. Cinder-block construction. Peeling gray paint. The owner of the eyes was giving me the once-over. He didn’t seem impressed. They never do.

“You can train,” he said. He was barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I placed him at five-feet-nine and eighty kilos. Tending toward the burly side. Salt-and-pepper crew cut, age about sixty. Past what I sensed had been a formidable prime, but still a hard-looking guy with no bullshit, no posturing.

“ Sore wa yokatta ,” I replied. Good. Behind the burly guy and to his right was a smaller, wiry specimen, dark-complected for a Japanese, his head shaved to black stubble. I recognized the bloodshot eyes-the same pair that had initially regarded me through the mesh. Though slighter than the first guy, this one radiated something intense and unpredictable.

The smaller guys can be dangerous. Never having been able to rely on their size for intimidation, they have to learn to fight instead. I know because, before filling out in the army, I had been one of them.

The antechamber was adjacent to a rectangular room, about twenty feet by thirty. It smelled of old sweat. The room was dominated by a judo tatami mat. A half-dozen muscular specimens were using it for some kind of randori , or live training. They wore shorts and T-shirts, like the guy who had opened the door, no judogi . On a corner of the mat, someone was practicing elbow and knee drops on a prone, man-shaped dummy. The dummy’s head, neck, and chest were practically mummified with duct tape reinforcements.

In another corner, two heavy bags dangled on thick chains from exposed rafters. Large bags, seventy kilos or more. Man-sized. A couple of thick-necked guys with yakuza -style punch perms were working them, no gloves, no tape, their blows not quick but solid, the whap! whap ! of knuckles on leather reverberating in the enclosed space.

The lack of wrist and finger tape interested me. Boxers wear tape to protect their hands. But you get dependent on the tape, and then you don’t know how to hit someone without it. Even Mike Tyson once broke a hand when he hit another fighter bare-handed in a late night brawl. In a real fight, you break your hand, you just lose the fight. If you were fighting for your life, you just lost that, too.

And no judogi . That was also interesting, especially in tradition-loving Japan. Purists will tell you that training with the judogi is more realistic than without, because after all, people rarely fight naked. But modern attire-a T-shirt, for example-is often more like naked than it is like the reinforced, belted gi . Training exclusively in the gi , therefore, while traditional, is not necessarily the height of realism.

All signs that these were serious people.

“You can change in the locker room,” the salt-and-pepper guy told me. “Warm up and you can do some randori . We’ll see why Ishihara-san thought this would be a good place for you.”

I nodded and headed to the locker room. It was a dank space with a floor of dirty gray carpet. Its half-dozen battered metal lockers were positioned on either side of a solid-looking exterior door, secured with a combination lock. I changed into cotton judo pants and a T-shirt, but left the jacket in the bag. Best to blend.

I returned to the main room and stretched. No one seemed to take particular notice of me-except for the dark-complected guy, who watched me while I warmed up.

After about fifteen minutes he walked over to me. “ Randori ?” he asked, in a tone that was more a challenge than an invitation.

I nodded, averting my eyes from his hard stare. In my mind, our contest was already under way, and I prefer my opponents to underestimate me.

I followed him to the center of the mat, slightly meek, slightly intimidated.

We circled around each other, each looking for an opening. In my peripheral vision I saw that the other men had paused in their workouts and were watching.

I snagged his right arm with my left and dropped under it for a duck-under, a simple and effective entry from my high school wrestling days in America. But he was quick: he dropped his arm, crouched, and cut clockwise, away from my entry. I immediately switched my attack to his left side, but he parried nicely there as well. No problem. I was feinting, feeling for his defenses, not yet showing him what I could do.

I withdrew from attack mode and started to straighten. As I did so, I saw his hips swivel in, caught a blur off the right side of my head. Left hook. Whoa . I shot my right hand into the gap and ducked my head forward. The blow snapped across the back of my head, then instantly retracted.