Graveyard of Memories

Acknowledgments

Once again, my friends Koichiro Fukasawa and Yukie Kito were invaluable in answering all my questions about Tokyo: new and old; native and foreign; cultured and gehin. They also introduced me to Taihō Chinese Restaurant in Minami Azabu, which I used in the book and which for the food alone would have deserved a grateful acknowledgment. And they were great occasional company while I was otherwise living like a hermit in Tokyo, researching and writing the book.

I’m sure I got any number of things wrong about life for paraplegics, and I look forward to people sharing their thoughts so I can update the “Mistakes” page on my website. Whatever errors I might have made, they were in spite of the excellent information I found on various websites. A few that were particularly helpful were:

10 Correct Ways to Interact with People with Disabilities

http://www.themobilityresource.com/10-correct-ways-to-interact-with-people-with-disabilities/

10 Things to Never Say to a Person in a Wheelchair

http://www.themobilityresource.com/10-things-to-never-say-to-a-person-in-a-wheelchair/

Dating Paraplegics: The Ultimate Guide

http://www.streetsie.com/dating-paraplegics-guide/

Deep Sea Diving in a Wheelchair (Sue Austin)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCWIGN3181U&feature=endscreen&NR=1

How to Push a Wheelchair

http://cripwheels.blogspot.jp/2006/07/how-to-push-wheelchair_31.html

Sex and Paraplegia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TaLQiiFUUY

Cameron Hughes is the guy who urged me to stop acting like the world was made only of walkies and to create a character with disabilities, and Sayaka wouldn’t have come to be without his encouragement. He was also generous in sharing his insights, experiences, and suggestions for further reading. And I’m sure he’ll be the first person to point out my mistakes. ☺

Once again, I’m indebted to Michael Kleindl of Tokyo Food Life, who’s been ferreting out the most offbeat, delicious, out-of-the-way restaurants, bars, and coffeehouses in Tokyo for over twenty years. Mike was kind enough to point me in the direction of a few places that have been around since 1972 or earlier (you can find links on the “Places” page of my website, linked below), and as always his recommendations were a pleasure to research and hugely enriched the book:

http://www.tokyofoodlife.com

http://www.barryeisler.com/photo_places.php

Nobuo Kamioka, Professor of English Language and Cultures, Gakushuin University, kindly recommended several books of photographs of 1960s and 1970s Tokyo that were especially helpful as I tried to imagine the city of forty years ago. More on these in the Author’s Note.

If you want to see your humble author using the kind of circle drag Rain deploys in Ueno, here’s your video. That’s uber-martial artist, teacher, and writer Wim Demeere showing me how to make the drag nastier. If you recognize Wim’s name, it might be because I named a character after him who appeared in several of the Rain books. Rain finally took him out when they met face-to-face, but if it had been the real Demeere, I think Rain might have been in trouble. Check out Wim’s Rain fan fiction on his great self-defense blog:

http://www.wimsblog.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODCfOWTy8po#at=225

While we’re on the subject of combat techniques, as with everything else that appears in the book I’ve tried to convey Rain’s chapter 1 suplay as vividly as possible. But if you want to see the move in the real world as well as in your imagination, here are two nice examples — the first executed by a seven-year-old!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLkUbYTSexs

http://www.flowrestling.org/coverage/249282-Journeymen-Freestyle-Duals/video/632901-Araoz-5pt-Throw-SUPLAY

Also: for more on the Tueller Drill “21 feet” rule, here are two videos. I practiced this kind of drill with Simunition at Peyton Quinn’s Rocky Mountain Combat Applications Training institute, and it is eye-opening. Twenty-one feet is a lot closer than you might think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHYRBNc9r8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL1zX-SrBH0

To the extent I get violence right in my fiction, I have many great instructors to thank, including Massad Ayoob, Tony Blauer, and Rory Miller. Their courses and other materials are superb and I highly recommend them for anyone who wants to be safer in the world, or just to create more realistic violence on the page:

http://www.massadayoobgroup.com

http://www.tonyblauer.com

http://www.chirontraining.com

Rain’s notion of “Don’t insult him, don’t challenge him, don’t threaten him, don’t deny it’s happening, give him a face-saving exit” is courtesy of Peyton Quinn of the Rocky Mountain Combat Applications Training institute. Another great course:

http://www.rmcat.com

The flying triangle strangle in chapter 3 is courtesy of Dave Camarillo’s excellent book Guerilla Jiu-Jitsu: Revolutionizing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a must for any serious grappler:

http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Jiu-Jitsu-Revolutionizing-Brazilian/dp/0977731588/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374452406&sr=1-2

I don’t know much about electricity, but learned a lot from this website on fatal electric shocks:

http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/safety/electrical/TheFatalCurrent.html

MythBusters was hugely helpful in helping me understand that yes, a dropped appliance really can electrocute you in the bathtub. Note, though, that the MythBusters didn’t get everything quite right. In fact, electricity in fresh water can be more dangerous than electricity in salt:

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/appliances-in-the-bath-minimyth.htm

http://www.boatus.com/seaworthy/magazine/2013/july/electric-shock-drowning-explained.asp

Tom Hayses and Dan Levin were generous in sharing their expertise on all matters electrical and helping me tune up the electrocution sequence. I’m not particularly technical and might have gotten something wrong anyway, but not for lack of trying on their part.

For Rain’s thoughts on the effects of proximity in killing, I’m again indebted to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman for his disturbing, original book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society:

http://www.amazon.com/On-Killing-Psychological-Learning-ebook/dp/B003XREUV2/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1375672344&sr=1-1

Dr. Yoshikatsu Eto and Dr. Hiroyuki Ida, both of Tokyo’s Jikei University School of Medicine, were generous in providing a tour of the institution’s facilities and in answering my unusual questions about the disposition of the dead at and through the hospital. Obviously, the shenanigans that occur in the hospital’s morgue in the story are the product only of my (twisted, yes, I know) imagination, and in any event reflect a security posture from an era much more innocent than the current one.

Once again, Jeroen ten Berge and Rob Siders provided terrific cover design and formatting services:

http://jeroentenberge.com

https://52novels.com

Thanks as always to the extraordinarily eclectic group of “foodies with a violence problem” who hang out at Marc “Animal” MacYoung’s and Dianna Gordon’s No Nonsense Self-Defense, for good humor, good fellowship, and a ton of insights, particularly regarding the real costs of violence:

http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com

Thanks to Naomi Andrews, Jeroen ten Berge, Alan Eisler, Koichiro Fukasawa, Dan Gillmor, Montie Guthrie, Tom Hayse, Charlotte Herscher, Mike Killman, Lori Kupfer, Dan Levin, Lara Perkins, Ken Rosenberg, Johanna Rosenbohm, Ted Schlein, and Alan Turkus for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Most of all, thanks to my wife, Laura, for damn near a quarter century of unwavering support, belief, and confidence, in every kind of weather. And awesome editorial, too. Thanks, babe, for everything.