Capítulo 4
Lessons in Life and Death: Wisdom from Two Masters
Late in the war, General Kishikawa made his final visit, arriving unannounced to invite Nicholai to view cherry blossoms along the Kajikawa River. Their journey took them through devastated landscapes-evidence of the March 9th firebombing that had turned sixteen square miles of Tokyo into an inferno.
During their conversations among falling cherry blossoms, the General offered profound wisdom about culture and race. "Race is nothing, culture is everything," he explained, cautioning that mixing cultures always results in a blend of the worst elements. While acknowledging American brutality, he counseled Nicholai against simple hatred: "You must seek to understand him, if only to avoid being harmed by him."
On their final evening together, the General revealed he had been transferred to Manchukuo and intended to perform seppuku rather than face capture by Russians. "A discredited, defeated old soldier would be no shield for you," he explained, asking Nicholai's permission to depart. Nicholai responded with simple dignity: "Your guidance, your affection will always be with me. In that way, you can never leave me."
As Otake-san's stomach cancer worsened, he summoned Nicholai for a final private conversation. Speaking in terms of Go, as was his habit for important matters, he offered both praise and criticism. "You are a brilliant player," he acknowledged, "but there is something distressing in your play... something abstract and unkind. It has the beauty of a crystal, but lacks the beauty of a blossom."
The dying teacher identified Nicholai's greatest flaw: his disdain for mediocrity. "Your defeats will not come from those more brilliant than you. They will come from the patient, the plodding, the mediocre." Echoing Kishikawa's warnings, he cautioned: "We are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring-but inevitably victorious."
His advice was simple: "Avoid contact with them. Camouflage yourself with politeness. Live apart and study shibumi." After sharing this wisdom and a small personal secret about his mint drops, Otake-san concluded their final lesson.
After Otake-san's cremation, his family and students dispersed. Nicholai, now over twenty though looking much younger, received money General Kishikawa had left for him and experienced "that thrilling social vertigo that accompanies total freedom in a context of pointlessness." On August 3, 1945, the Otake household gathered at the train platform with their belongings. Nicholai promised Mariko he would visit her once he established himself in Tokyo, looking forward to seeing her in her home city of Hiroshima.
Capítulo 5
The Birth of an Assassin: From Survivor to Killer
Post-war Japan was in shambles while American occupiers focused on spreading democracy rather than addressing physical suffering. Nicholai, now destitute, joined the masses of homeless wandering Tokyo's streets. His money worthless from inflation, he failed to find work with Japanese laborers who mistrusted him, and had no country to claim assistance from.
Through a chance encounter with an Australian officer, Nicholai secured a position as a translator for the occupation forces. His facility with languages-he spoke seven fluently-made him valuable in diplomatic settings, where he learned that "in diplomacy, the principal function of communication is to mask meaning." He later transferred to the cryptography section after impressing them by decoding a message that baffled their machines-one written in Russian with Chinese word order.
During this period, Nicholai developed his understanding of Americans, reaching an "emotional truce" with them despite never truly liking them. He found them culturally immature, materialistic, historically myopic, and tiresome, yet good-hearted and hospitable. His key insight was that all Americans were essentially merchants-their core genius was buying and selling. They sold democracy like hucksters, their wars were exercises in production, their government a series of contracts, their marriages emotional deals easily broken. Honor for them meant fair trading, and their only real class was mercantile, with the elite distinguished merely by wealth.
Monthly letters with Otake-san's widow confirmed Mariko's death at Hiroshima. Though initially filled with hatred toward the Americans he worked with, Nicholai purged himself of these emotions, spending a day wandering the streets remembering Mariko-their intimacy, jokes, and unions-before gently saying goodbye.
His life took a dramatic turn when he discovered while decoding routine Soviet messages that General Kishikawa was being flown to Tokyo by the Russians to face trial as a Class A War Criminal. After a nightmarish week battling bureaucracy and red tape, Nicholai secured a brief interview with the General at Sugamo Prison. Using Go terminology as code, he explained his intention to free the General through death-a "sabaki" or quick flexible solution. With gentle words about cherry blossoms and memories, Nicholai guided Kishikawa to turn toward the window. As the General nodded his acceptance, Nicholai struck with a pencil, killing him instantly.
Arrested immediately, Nicholai was brutally beaten during interrogation by American intelligence officers. Three years later, a CIA agent approached him with an offer: freedom in exchange for performing an assassination in China. Refusing their inadequate terms, Nicholai demanded Costa Rican citizenship, $100,000, and the addresses of the three men who had interrogated him. Though initially reluctant, the CIA ultimately agreed out of necessity.
Capítulo 6
The Art of Killing: Hel's Life as a Professional Assassin
After completing his mission in China, Nicholai emerged as the world's most sought-after counterterrorist operative. Over two decades, he worked for various governments against terrorist groups worldwide, commanding fees of a quarter-million dollars per assignment. His methods were remarkable-using everything from conventional weapons to ordinary objects like combs, drinking straws, and lightbulbs as lethal weapons.
Governments willingly paid his exorbitant fees because terrorism was an economically devastating form of warfare, making his services a bargain compared to the alternatives. Interestingly, Hel occasionally worked without payment for causes he believed in, including Jewish militant groups and Basque nationalists who protected his chateau in the Pyrenees.
He priced his "stunts" like movie stuntmen do-based on difficulty and danger. Jobs requiring difficult access or penetration commanded higher fees, while targets with incompetent security (like the IRA or CIA) warranted lower prices. His final job before retirement involved extracting someone from Communist China, for which he accepted payment not in money but in the two-year services of Hana, an exceptionally trained concubine from the Orphanage of the Passion, a Christian-fronted training academy for high-end companions.
Despite his successful career, Hel wasn't excessively wealthy. His operations required expensive setups, particularly when neutralizing governments through blackmail information purchased from the mysterious information broker known as the Gnome. He spent lavishly on caving expeditions and had invested over two million restoring his chateau to eighteenth-century authenticity, with no electricity or modern conveniences except an underground telephone line.
Having left Japan permanently after finding its traditional ways corrupted by Americanism, he created his own isolated world of shibumi in the Basque mountains. His chateau featured a meticulously cultivated Japanese garden-a concrete statement of shibumi that represented the most important of his possessions. Working in it brought him both peace and purpose as he trimmed and controlled, striving for modest and subtle effects.
Capítulo 7
The Cave of Life: Finding Peace in Darkness
Seeking escape from the world's complexities, Nicholai discovered caving through his Japanese coworkers. His lithe body was ideal for tight passages, and the mental calculations matched his Go training. Most appealing were the primal fears he confronted alone-darkness, falling, cold, flooding, and tons of rock overhead-with no audience for his victories over these inner demons.
With his Basque friend Le Cagot-a bombastic poet with a tragic past-Hel explored the Gouffre Porte-de-Larrau, a cave system accidentally discovered when young Basque separatists moved boundary stones to place the entrance fully within France. After setting up their winch system with minimal-weight cable, they began the dangerous work of clearing the shaft, taking turns descending to break up rock jams and widen bottlenecks.
At meter 365, they encountered their worst obstacle-a thick jam beneath a constant icy waterfall with the roar of an underground river below. After Hel nearly succumbed to hypothermia, Le Cagot took his turn, breaking through the jam but breaking his arm in the process. When Le Cagot's strength failed during the ascent at the most difficult section-a double dihedron at meter 44-Hel deliberately provoked him by suggesting Basques were Neanderthals, inferior to "higher" Cro-Magnon descendants. Enraged, Le Cagot summoned superhuman strength to complete the climb before collapsing unconscious.
Their exploration revealed a potentially navigable underground river passage they planned to explore on a future expedition with scuba gear. The dye test from their cave exploration had shown the underground water emerging at the gorge eight minutes after release-suggesting exciting possibilities for future adventures.
Capítulo 8
The Final Game: Revenge and Acceptance
Hel's peaceful retirement is shattered when Hannah Stern, the niece of his old friend Asa, arrives at his chateau seeking help. She is the sole survivor of "The Munich Five"-her uncle's amateur revenge cell targeting the Munich Olympics terrorists. Her companions were gunned down at Rome airport while she escaped unharmed, eventually making her way to Hel's remote estate.
Through careful questioning, Hel determines she wasn't specifically targeted and notes that the Japanese gunmen who killed her friends were themselves quickly eliminated-suggesting a complex operation where "the tip-off was tipped off." He theorizes that the PLO or Black Septembrists had learned of their plans through untrustworthy IRA contacts. More significantly, he suspects the Japanese gunmen weren't actually Red Army members but CIA operatives, controlled by what he calls "the Mother Company"-an international consortium of oil and energy companies that functioned as an "infragovernment" with no loyalty except to profit.
Shortly after Hannah's arrival, Diamond-a CIA agent with a personal vendetta against Hel for killing his brother-appears at the chateau with his associates. They reveal the Mother Company's threats: they have seized Hel's Wyoming land holdings and Swiss accounts containing 1.5 million in gold bullion. The land would be strip-mined regardless, but the money would be returned if Hel allowed the Black September terrorists to complete their planned London hijacking.
When Hannah decides to abandon her mission and return home after experiencing a mystical moment in Hel's garden, he takes her to his remote mountain lodge for safety. However, she is murdered while picking wildflowers, shot multiple times by Diamond and his associates. Realizing the Mother Company killed Hannah to prevent him from fulfilling his debt to her uncle, Hel begins planning his response.
With the help of Le Cagot and Sir Wilfred Pyles, a British intelligence officer, Hel executes a daring plan to eliminate the PLO terrorists aboard the Concorde. Disguised as a flight attendant, he systematically eliminates five terrorists using improvised weapons-a comb, a rolled magazine, and a creased plastic cup.
After completing his mission, Hel returns home to find his beloved chateau destroyed by the Mother Company's operatives. Though Hana survived the attack, her eyes were severely injured. Leveraging compromising information about the Kennedy assassination provided by his dying friend Maurice de Lhandes, Hel forces a meeting with the Mother Company in New York.
There he meets Mrs. Perkins, a matronly woman who insists everyone call her "Ma" despite being the ruthless head of the organization. Hel presents his demands: return of his Wyoming land, cessation of strip-mining, restoration of his Swiss account, six million dollars to rebuild his home, and personal revenge-he wants Diamond and his associates delivered to him.
In the misty mountains near the Gouffre Pierre-Saint-Martin, Hel exacts his revenge on Diamond, Starr, and Haman. After luring them to a plateau surrounded by dangerous gouffres (deep pits), he eliminates them one by one, though he momentarily considers sparing Diamond before remembering the environmental destruction wrought by the Mother Company.
Back at his partially rebuilt chateau, Hel makes a final decision. He realizes the Mother Company will eventually discover his deception or uncover the Kennedy assassination facts. Though he could continue fighting, cutting off "many arms of the faceless corporate hydra," they would ultimately kill him. Accepting the inevitable, Hel decides to live peacefully with Hana until they come for him, at which point he will withdraw from the game "voluntarily, by his own hand."
With this decision made, years of accumulated disgust and hate melt away, as "once severed from the future, the past becomes an insignificant parade of trivial events." Late into the night, Hel kneels before his lacquered table holding two treasures: the Go bowls from Kishikawa-san and the yellowed letter of official regret from Shimbashi Station. Along with the idea of his garden in his mind, these three spiritual sea anchors have sustained him through his years wandering in the West.
Capítulo 9
The Pursuit of Perfection: Shibumi as a Life Philosophy
Throughout the novel, shibumi emerges not merely as an aesthetic concept but as a comprehensive life philosophy. When General Kishikawa first introduces Nicholai to the idea, he describes it as "great refinement underlying commonplace appearances," an ineffable quality of understated beauty, elegant simplicity, and spiritual tranquility without passivity.
This concept immediately captivates the young Nicholai, who adopts shibumi as his primary goal in life-to become a personality of overwhelming calm, to "excel invisibly, without attracting the attention and vengeance of the tyrannical masses." To the General, shibumi was a kind of submission; to Nicholai, it was a kind of power.
Hel's pursuit of shibumi manifests in various aspects of his life. His chateau in the Basque mountains, restored to eighteenth-century authenticity with no electricity or modern conveniences, represents a rejection of superficial modernity. His Japanese garden-a concrete statement of shibumi-embodies the qualities that separate Japanese art from Western dynamics and Chinese hyperbole: sweet melancholy, forgiving sadness, intentional imperfection, and organic simplicity that creates and satisfies aesthetic tensions.
Even Hel's approach to sexuality reflects this philosophy. Having progressed through what he identifies as the four stages of sexual development-from amateur beginnings with Mariko, through Stage I's healthy animal curiosity with the Tanaka sisters, past Stage II's psychological relief, through Stage III's gourmandizing (the highest most Westerners reach)-he arrives at Stage IV's refined "game phase" where excitation and climax become merely terminal gestures in an activity demanding mental vigor, training, and endurance.
Perhaps most significantly, Hel's mystical experiences-his ability to "rest" during intense concentration-represent the ultimate expression of shibumi. These moments of oneness with the universe, of "departing without leaving," allow him to transcend the limitations of individual existence and experience a profound connection with everything around him.
Ironically, it is the loss of this mystical gift-blocked by his hatred after General Kishikawa's death-that marks Hel's greatest spiritual wound. Though he achieves extraordinary success as an assassin and amasses considerable wealth, this spiritual amputation haunts him throughout his life. Only in the novel's final pages, as he accepts his inevitable fate and relinquishes his hatred, does Hel approach the true shibumi that has eluded him for so long-the ability to face death with calm acceptance and find beauty in impermanence, like cherry blossoms falling in the wind.
Capítulo 10
The Age of Mediocrity: A Prophetic Warning
One of the novel's most enduring themes is its critique of what Otake-san calls "the age of the mediocre man." In his final lesson to Nicholai, the dying Go master warns: "Your defeats will not come from those more brilliant than you. They will come from the patient, the plodding, the mediocre." He describes this mediocre man as "dull, colorless, boring-but inevitably victorious."
This prophecy proves accurate throughout Hel's life. His greatest enemies are not brilliant adversaries but institutions and bureaucracies-the CIA, the Mother Company, governments driven by profit rather than principle. These entities, composed of mediocre individuals following procedures rather than exercising judgment, pose the greatest threat precisely because they lack the imagination to recognize their own limitations.
Hel's critique of American culture stems from this same observation. He views Americans as essentially merchants whose core genius is buying and selling. They sell democracy like hucksters, their wars are exercises in production, their government a series of contracts, their marriages emotional deals easily broken. Honor for them means fair trading, and their only real class is mercantile, with the elite distinguished merely by wealth.
This critique extends beyond Americans to what Hel sees as the fundamental problem of modern civilization-the triumph of commerce over culture. He respects farmers, artisans, artists, warriors, scholars and priests, but feels only disdain for merchants who "collect power and wealth out of proportion to discrimination" and are responsible for "kitsch" and "consumption without use."
The Mother Company-an international consortium of oil and energy companies that functions as an "infragovernment" with no loyalty except to profit-represents the ultimate expression of this mediocrity triumphant. Its leader, Mrs. Perkins, with her grandmotherly appearance masking ruthless calculation, embodies the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt identified in her study of Adolf Eichmann.
In the novel's final confrontation, Hel realizes the futility of fighting against this hydra-headed mediocrity. Though he could continue cutting off "many arms of the faceless corporate hydra," they would ultimately kill him through impersonal means like a bomb or stray bullet. His decision to withdraw from the game "voluntarily, by his own hand" represents not surrender but a final assertion of individual dignity against the crushing weight of institutional mediocrity.
In this way, Trevanian's novel offers a prophetic warning about the direction of modern civilization-a world increasingly dominated by corporate interests, where profit trumps principle and where the mediocre many inevitably triumph over the exceptional few. Yet it also suggests a response: the cultivation of shibumi, a personal aesthetic and ethical stance that allows one to maintain dignity and purpose even in a world that no longer values such qualities.
