At first the young Japanese were stiff and uncomfortable in Nicholai’s company, but it was not long before, in the open and free way of youth, they accepted him as a green-eyed Japanese who had had the misfortune to misplace his epicanthic fold. He was admitted to their circle and even joined in their hoarse, bawdy laughter concerning the sexual misadventures of the American officers they chauffeured. All these jokes had the same central figure of ridicule: the stereotypic American who was constantly and blindly randy, but tactically incompetent.
The subject of caving came up during one of these lunch breaks when they were all squatting under the corrugated metal roof of a rain shelter, eating from metal boxes the rice and fish that were the rations for Japanese workers. Three of the ex-university men were caving enthusiasts, or had been, before the last desperate year of the war and the chaos of the Occupation. They talked about the fun and difficulty of their expeditions into the mountains and lamented their lack of money and basic supplies to return. By this time, Nicholai had been long in the city, and its noise and congestion were eroding his village-life sensibilities. He drew the young men out on the subject of exploring caves and asked what supplies and equipment were needed. It turned out that their requirements were minimal, although inaccessible on the pittance they were paid by the Occupation Forces. Nicholai suggested that he collect whatever was needed, if they would take him along and introduce him to the sport. The offer was snatched up eagerly, and two weeks later four of them passed a weekend in the mountains, cave-bashing by day and spending their nights at cheap mountain inns where they drank too much saki and talked late into the night in the way of bright young men the world over, the conversation drifting from the Nature of Art, to bawdy double entendre, to plans for the future, to strained puns, to improvised haiku, to horseplay, to politics, to sex, to memories, to silence.
After his first hour underground, Nicholai knew this was the sport for him. His body, lithe and wiry, seemed designed for slithering through tight spots. The rapid and narrow calculations of method and risk were consonant with the mental training Gô had given him. And the fascination of danger was seductive to him. He could never have climbed mountains, because the public bravado of it offended his sense of shibumi and dignified reserve. But the moments of risk and daring in the caves were personal, silent, and unobserved; and they had the special spice of involving primitive animal fears. In vertical work down a shaft, there was the thrill and fear of falling, native to all animals and honed keener by the knowledge that the fall would be into a black void below, rather than into the decorative landscape beneath the mountain climber. In the caves, there was the constant presence of cold and damp, primordial fears for man, and real ones for the caver, as most grave accidents and deaths result from hypothermia. There was also the animal dread of the dark, of endless blackness and the ever-present thought of getting lost in mazes of slits and belly crawls so tight that retreat was impossible because of the jointing of the human body. Flash flooding could fill the narrow caves with water with only minutes of warning, or none. And there was the constant mental pressure of knowing that just above him, often scraping against his back as he wriggled through a tight cave, were thousands of tons of rock that must inevitably one day obey gravity and fill in the passage.
It was the perfect sport for Nicholai.
He found the subjective dangers particularly attractive and exhilarating. He enjoyed pitting mental control and physical skill against the deepest and most primitive dreads of the animal within him, the dark, fear of falling, fear of drowning, the cold, solitude, the risk of being lost down there forever, the constant mental erosion of those tons of rock above. The senior ally of the caver is logic and lucid planning. The senior foes are imagination and the hounds of panic. It is easy for the caver to be a coward and difficult to be brave, for he works alone, unseen, uncriticized, unpraised. Nicholai enjoyed the foes he met and the private arena in which he met them. He delighted in the idea that most of the foes were within himself, and the victories unobserved.
Too, there were the unique delights of emerging. Dull, quotidian things took on color and value after hours inside the earth, particularly if there had been danger and physical victory. The sweet air was drunk in with greedy breaths. A cup of bitter tea was something to warm stiff hands, something to delight the eye with its rich color, something to smell gorgeously, a rush of heat down the throat, a banquet of subtly varying flavors. The sky was significantly blue, the grass importantly green. It was good to be slapped on the back by a comrade, touched by a human hand. It was good to hear voices and make sounds that revealed feelings, that shared ideas, that amused friends. Everything was novel and there to be tasted.
For Nicholai, the first hour after emerging from a cave had almost the quality of the life he knew during mystic transport. For that brief hour before objects and experiences retreated again into the commonplace he was almost united with the yellow sunlight and the fragrant grasses.
The four young men went into the mountains every free weekend, and although their amateur class and jury-rigged equipment limited them to bashing about in cave networks that were modest by international caving standards, it was always a thorough test of their will, endurance, and skill, followed by nights of fellowship, talk, saki, and bad jokes richly appreciated. Although in later life Nicholai was to gain a wide reputation for his participation in significant underground expeditions, these apprentice outings were never surpassed for pure fun and adventure.
By the time he was twenty-three, Nicholai had a lifestyle that satisfied most of his needs and compensated for most of his losses, save that of General Kishikawa. To replace the household of Otake-san, he had filled his home in Asakusa with people who took roughly the territorial roles of family members. He had lost his boyhood, and largely boyish, love; but he satisfied his body needs with the irrepressible and inventive Tanaka sisters. His once consuming involvement with the mental disciplines and delights of Gô had been replaced by the emotional and physical ones of caving. In a peculiar and not altogether healthy way, his training in Naked/Kill combat gave vent to the most corrosive aspects of his hatred for those who had destroyed his nation and youth; for during his practice periods he fantasized round-eyed opponents, and felt better for it.
Most of what he had lost was personal and organic, most of his substitutes were mechanical and external; but the gap in quality was bridged in large part by his occasional retreats into the soul-rest of mystic experience.
The most onerous part of his life was the forty hours a week he passed in the basement of the San Shin Building in remunerative drudgery. Breeding and training had given him the inner resources to satisfy his needs without the energy sponge of gainful employment so vital to the men of the egalitarian WAD who have difficulty filling their time and justifying their existence without work. Pleasure, study, and comfort were adequate to him; he did not need the crutch of recognition, the reassurance of power, the narcotic of fun. Unfortunately, circumstance had made it necessary to earn a living, and yet more ironic, to earn it amongst the Americans. (Although Nicholai’s co-workers were a mixture of Americans, Britons, and Australians, American methods, values, and objectives were dominant, so he soon came to think of Britons as incompetent Americans and Australians as Americans-in-training.)