Aborted about 20% in. My second time trying to stay with the book. I love the author's narration but this wasn't the action-thriller I was expecting, but a book on living in Japan. The author clearly loves Japan and Japanese culture from what little I listened to but that's not the reason why I bought this. It may turn into a real assassin thriller book but I can't wait that long since I'm already familiar with the people and the culture having many Japanese friends and clients.

Excellent book. Great character dialogue and good plots. A true thriller.

Just ok.

It is easy to tell this is a first novel. This book needs to be edited. This is a 175 book stretched to 252 pages.

The lengthy conversations are extremely boring, repetitive and unnecessary.

The story about the main character being hazed for being an American and Japanese mix and his growing up is repeated more than once. The more something is repeated it makes the reader doubt the truth of it. People who Lie tend to go on and on about it. The way this is handled makes it feel like the main character has a huge chip on his shoulder and he is looking for confrontations.

This is an ambitious first novel that suffers as such endeavours often do from wanting to say too much. This is, after all, a thriller (maybe a bit too violent nevertheless) and it is a thriller with a devilishly clever plot and a setting that is fresh and intriguing, strongly conveyed. It earns its four stars.

John Rain, the central character, is a Japanese-Ameriican plying a shadowy, not to say shady, trade in Tokyo. He becomes romantically involved with the daughter of a murder victim (to say more would be unfair). Several high-powered ad equally ruthless bodies are pursuing the same objective, with Rain as the man in the middle. As the genre dictates, he is virtually indestructible, surviving numerous near-lethal assaults.

So far, so conventional. But the book stands apart for the things it wants to say about Japanese politics, about loyalty, about rootlessness, about jazz, about malt whisky, and about the dehumanising experience of war (where would American crime fiction be without Vietnam?).

As the first of a series, it encourages further exploration

It is a successful piece of "men's formula fiction". There is a bit too much exposition of the nefarious plot. The anguished protagonist with a troubled past, but a good heart....hmmm yeah. The surprising twists are not so surprising. [SPOILER ALERT} Did I mention the whole, I killed your father and now take you as my lover thing? How about the way that the damsel in distress drops from public view when she has a semi-public career as a jazz pianist? Doesn't it seem like someone would be looking for her...like her band members or agent?

All that aside, some elements rise above the Jerry Buckheimer airplane novel read. The sense of place in the writing is strong. The cultural elements stand out. And more than once, I was truly caught up in the action.

As a completist, I'm compelled to go onto the next chapter in the saga. However, I need the character arc to have more than standard "mff" before it gets another star.

P.S. I'm a little cantankerous right now because my FB Goodreads connection is no longer connected to my real Goodreads account and I can't get them to send me a password.

Read this book on the plane back from Japan yesterday, on a recommendation from a friend.
It's a quite enjoyable thriller about a Japanese-American ex-Vietnam special forces assassin. Very easy to read and hard to put down. Full of references to a lot of things I like - jazz music, whisky, medicine/anatomy, and most especially - Japan. Reading this book after spending a few days in Tokyo really made it come alive for me as the places where the action took place were fresh in my memory. Would definitely recommend it and look forward to checking out the next volume in the John Rain series.

Good story about a half-Japanese, half-American assassin, who falls for the daughter of one of his targets. Great details about Tokyo.

4 stars, but ultimately not for me.

It’s always nice to find a thriller, or any genre novel for that matter, that’s written with uncommon intelligence and originality.

In this novel I particularly enjoyed Tokyo, jazz, martial arts practice, the man-without-a-country theme, the cultural comparisons, and the unfolding relationship between Rain and the daughter of one of his victims along with the soul searching it provokes.

That said, after finally sampling this series, I know I was right to hesitate to take it on. There is so much full-on grisly physical violence that it eventually overwhelms the positives and becomes the lingering thing I’m left with when I’m finished.

John Rain is a political assassin in Japan. He is half Japanese (his father) and half American (his mother). He sees himself as a perpetual soldier, a samurai, a warrior loyal to his overlord and carrying out his commands, fighting his battles. Personally, I think John Rain is full of s... er, self-delusion. But then maybe we all are to some degree.

I have a few problems with this book. First of these is, what is the time frame? If we were ever explicitly told, it must have been in a part that I rapidly skimmed over. (There were several such parts.) It is written, though, as if it were a contemporary story and since the book was published in 2002, that would mean 21st century. Now, John Rain is described as a veteran of the Vietnam War trained by the U.S. Special Forces. He was in Vietnam, we are told, for three years. He had lied about his age to join the military when he was 17, but any way you add it up, by 2002, John Rain would be getting a bit long in the tooth for some of the activities described here.

Secondly, Rain is a killer who has spent twenty-five years killing people on assignment for his employer who he thinks is the ruling political party in Japan. He's presented as almost preternaturally intuitive and smart, but he never suspects who is actually behind his orders? Plus, his specialty is killing people in a manner that will make the deaths appear like "natural causes." Judging by the death toll in this one book, over twenty-five years, he must have killed hundreds if not thousands of people, usually with his bare hands, and he never left a trace or a clue? A major suspension of disbelief is required here.

As we meet Rain, he is about to kill again. His target is a man on a crowded subway car. He accomplishes his assigned task, making it look like a heart attack, but soon things begin to get complicated for him. He inadvertently meets the beautiful jazz musician daughter of the man he killed and he finds himself drawn to her. Then he finds that his victim may have been trying to expose corruption in the Japanese government, that he may, in fact, have been one of the "good guys." To complicate things further, he discovers that someone is after the daughter, apparently believing that she may be in possession of the material that the now dead maybe good guy was going to use to prove corruption. Rain is drawn into the daughter's world and seeks to protect her from the bad guys - who are probably his employers! And then it looks like people are trying to kill him, too. Oh, it does get complicated.

Did I mention that the action takes place in Tokyo? There is rather mind-boggling detail of the streets and the mass transit systems in that city. As Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said, "For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like." I'm sure there are people who thrive on intricate details about the subway system and that it adds a lot to the story for them. Those people will probably love this book.

I didn't love it. I didn't hate it either. It was just okay. It was the first in a series and Eisler has published several more in the series since then, but I doubt that I'll be picking them up.

Barry Eisler published this book under other names, which to me were irrelevant other than to provide some insight into what authors have to go through getting their works in front of saps like me. And I only mention that because it was the current title, "A Clean Kill in Tokyo," that got me reading the first book in Eisler's supremely engaging John Rain series. Not that death and destruction are my thing. Then again, they are. I like reading this strong hero stuff. But John Rain is against type. He's basically a hit man. He gets paid to put people down. He has a code. No women, no children. And he assumes he's offing nefarious types. But he's not sure. Eisler slowly unveils Rain's back story, which is a trip. He said in notes that he updated the book from 95 technology references, and that Rain's kind of an old guy because he's a Vietnam vet. Didn't bother me in the slightest. Eisler's detail and reporting go deep, making this story quite fascinating whether he's taking the reader through a fight scene or explaining the details behind a war massacre in which women and children were murdered because some officer ordered it, even when told it was unlikely a village had harbored the enemy. I ordered another Rain novel. They're a bit tough to read at times. Rain isn't the most uplifting guy. He's a killer. But he has a moral code. And that makes him worth reading about.

I read this book because Amazon Prime First Reads gave me a choice of 6 books to read for free and I chose #10 in this series without realizing it was part of a series... This book was very hard for me to get into but thankfully it picked up about halfway through. I don't know why the author thought he had to put so much Japanese and translations of the Japanese into the book as it was really quite annoying and unnecessary. If you want to learn about Japan and learn some Japanese words/phrases, you might value that kind of thing but I don't feel it added to the story at all. Personally, if I hadn't already accidentally read half of Book 10, I probably wouldn't continue with this series, but I will just so Book 10 will make better sense as it seems to be a decent story.

Gostei do livro. É literalmente o típico filme de ação que se vê na televisão ahahah. Mas o livro em si é bom e divertido e é fascinante ler uma obra na perspectiva de um assassino.