Evidence of the Purely Leptonic Decay<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:msup><mml:mi>B</mml:mi><mml:mo>−</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:mo>→</mml:mo><mml:msup><mml:mi>τ</mml:mi><mml:mo>−</mml:mo></mml:msup><mml:msub><mml:mover accent="true"><mml:mi>ν</mml:mi><mml:mo>¯</mml:mo></mml:mover><mml:mi>τ</mml:mi></mml:msub></mml:math>

We present the first evidence of the decay B- --> tau- nu(tau), using 414 fb(-1) of data collected at the Upsilon(4S) resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e+ e- collider. Events are tagged by fully reconstructing one of the B mesons in hadronic modes. We detect the signal with a significance of 3.5 standard deviations including systematics and measure the branching fraction to be B(B- --> tau- nu(tau)) = (1.79(-0.49) +0.56(stat)(-0.51) +0.46(syst)) x 10(-4). This implies that fB = 0.229(-0.031) +0.036(stat)(-0.037) +0.034(syst) GeV and is the first direct measurement of this quantity.