Japanese Auction First for New U.S. Thriller

In a highly unusual move, agent Nat Sobel at Sobel Weber Associates went to Japanese editors first with a new thriller called “Rain Fall,” about a Japanese-American assassin living covertly in Tokyo.

It’s a first novel by Barry Eisler, a young attorney working in the Bay Area for a Japanese company, who is fluent in Japanese and has lived in Tokyo himself. Sobel decided, in view of the book’s subject and the author’s frequent visits to Japan, that he would auction the book there before offering it elsewhere and, working through agent Ken Mori at Tuttle Mori, set up a series of meetings between Eisler and Japanese editors who had read the manuscript in English.

In the end, five publishers bid, and editor Masaru Suzuki at Sony Publishing came up the winner, with an offer worth just under $100,000 for a two-book package from Eisler. It will be translated by Tomoko Ikeda (who also is the Japanese translator for Stephen King) and will be published, with remarkable speed, as early as next January as the lead title on a new Sony list called Village Books.

Meanwhile, Sobel will be sending it out to American editors next week, with a view to an auction that will close the week before the Frankfurt fair. It will also, of course be on offer to other interested world publishers at the fair.