November 02, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

Living in a dangerous world

by Jennifer Dietz Berry

Before the sun fully rises, Barry Eisler will settle in at Café Barrone in Menlo Park to write the next chapter in his latest thriller. It seems odd at first that Eisler would put himself in the mindset of a cold-blooded assassin, since he comes across as a nice family man leading a safe and comfortable suburban life.

He is happily married to his wife Laura, who is a literary agent and the first reader of his manuscripts. With both of them working from home, their three-bedroom house in Menlo Park which they also share with their daughter Emma can start to feel small, so the café has become their second office. Often times they run into each other at the café situated next to Kepler's, an independent bookstore that Eisler campaigned to save from extinction earlier this year.

Eisler's life is a far cry from that of John Rain, the hero in his book. Rain made his first appearance as an assassin-for-hire in Eisler's debut novel, "Rain Fall." The character reappears in three subsequent novels, including the most recent, "Killing Rain," released last spring. A run-of-the-mill day for Rain involves making a target's untimely death appear as though it were due to natural causes. With the use of remote technology, for instance, a pacemaker might mysteriously malfunction with lethal consequences. Once things heat up, Rain's killing techniques become less delicate, his training in Jiu-Jitsu coming in handy as he strangles his assailants unconscious and snaps their necks with his bare hands.

Rain is a loner. His parents have died, he has few friends that he can really trust, and the women in his life come and go. In the first book, Rain's shot at romance with a jazz singer faltered because she was the daughter of a man he had just murdered on a commuter train.

Beneath the surface there are more similarities between the author and his alter-ego than one might guess.

"Rain does not like bullies," says Eisler, and neither does his creator. "I was not a good athlete, so right there I was in trouble. That's what put me on the whole martial arts path because I never wanted to take s--- again."

Author and character also have a taste for adventure.

After college, Eisler, 41, continued on to law school at Cornell University. Rather than join a law firm after graduation, he signed on for a three-year stint with the CIA. Boot camp for new recruits was a blast, he says, "It's Outward Bound with guns." For seven weeks he lived like James Bond, firing deadly assault rifles, racing across raging waters in a fast boat in the dead of night, and practicing "air drops" on indigenous forces, which in layman's terms, meant kicking packages out the open back hatch of a plane and hoping you didn't fall out along with them.

But after three years, the CIA's promise to send Eisler to Japan still hadn't come to fruition. Eisler was stuck in an office at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., making $29,000 and itching for a new adventure. So he quit his job and took up with a law firm, which -- as it turned out -- happened to be in need of a Japanese-speaking lawyer willing to relocate.

That, Eisler says, was the first big fight he had with his wife, who by then was working on her PhD and not wild about the prospect of moving to Japan. He pitched the job as a great opportunity for career advancement and making new contacts, but the main reason Eisler wanted to go was to train at the renowned Kodakan Judo Institute on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Rather than live in the westernized parts of Tokyo where they might have made friends with other ex-pats, Eisler and his wife stayed in Sengoku, a district at the northeastern end of the city. It was close to the Kodokan, but there were no other Westerners living there and almost nobody spoke English. The small close-knit community grew on both Eisler and his wife. They lived there a year, and not surprisingly, when he needed to give his character John Rain a home, this was the neighborhood he chose.

It was after he was settled in Japan and commuting to work one day that Eisler got an image in his head of two men following another man. He started asking himself questions: Who was the man and why were they following him? He decided the two men were assassins and they were going to kill the other man. He also soon realized that he had just stumbled across the inspiration for his first novel.

Of course, having never seriously considered becoming a novelist and with no formal training in writing fiction, things didn't happen over night. He wonders if it might discourage new writers to know that it took a full eight years from the initial conception to the actual sale of the book. "It didn't really matter if I didn't get published," he said. "What mattered is that if I didn't get published, it wouldn't be my fault. My job is, control the things I can control." Eisler focused his attention on finishing the book, then stood back to see what would happen next.

What happened next was even better than he might have hoped. His agent saw an opportunity with this book to try something new: since Eisler was fluent in Japanese, and the character of John Rain is half-American and half-Japanese, they decided to launch the book in Japan before bringing it to the U.S. and see if they couldn't generate a buzz.

Sure enough, Eisler toured with the book through Japan and gained enough attention to start a bidding war between publishers in the states. The offer he accepted allowed him to quit his job and devote himself to writing full time.

"A lot of people will say that it takes courage to quit your job and write full time," he said. "To me, it took no courage at all. If you're going to commit to a new venture, why would you not go at it 100 percent?"

So far, the gamble has paid off. The Rain series has continued to be successful. Eisler has contracted to write the last two books about John Rain, which should wrap up the series, and a screenplay for the first book is in development. These days, he says, being a writer can be less about writing and more about promoting and selling his product.

But if writing and promoting can be hard work, there are also some pretty good perks. The tax write-offs for "research" being one of them. Eisler often heads off to exotic locales to simulate experiences that John Rain might have in his books.

Given Rain's penchant for adventure, Eisler may find himself flying to Brazil to study with jujitsu masters, spending the night at a five-star hotel, traveling to a remote island off of Thailand, or stopping at one of the jazz clubs Rain would patronize to sample their top-shelf whiskey.

Jennifer Dietz Berry is a freelance contributor and former education reporter for the Weekly. She can be reached at jenberry2@aol.com.

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