The Master of Go

by Yusanari Kawabata

  "If you are tired, sir," said Onoda to the Master, "suppose you leave."

  "Yes, do, please, sir, if you feel like it," said Otaké, back from the lavatory. "I'll think for a while by myself here, and seal my play. I promise not to ask for advice." For the first time there was laughter.

  They spoke out of concern for the Master, whom it seemed inhuman to keep longer at the board. There was no real need for him to be there, since Otaké's Black 99 would be a sealed play. His head cocked to one side, the Master deliberated whether to stay or to go.

  "I'll stay just a little longer." But immediately he went to the lavatory, and then he was joking with Muramatsu Shōfū in the anteroom. He was surprisingly lively when away from the board.

  Left to himself, Otaké gazed at the White pattern in the lower left corner as if he wanted to sink his fangs into it. An hour and thirteen minutes later, at well past one, he made his sealed play, Black 99, a "peep"{6} at the dead center of the board.

  In the morning the managers had gone to ask the Master whether he wanted to play in an outbuilding or on the second floor of the main building.

  "I can't walk any more," was his answer, "and I'd prefer the main building. But Mr. Otaké said the waterfall bothered him. Suppose you ask him. I'll do as he wishes."

  8

  I had written of the long white hair in the left eyebrow. In my pictures of the dead face, however, the right eyebrow was the thicker. It hardly seemed likely that the right eyebrow had suddenly begun to grow after his death. And had he really had such long eyebrows? One might have concluded that the camera was exaggerating, but probably it had told the truth.

  I need not have been so apprehensive. My Contax had a Sonner 1.5 lens. It had performed quite on its own, without promptings from me. For a lens there was neither living nor dead, there was neither man nor object, not sentimentality or reverence. I had made no great mistake with my Sonner 1.5, and that, I suppose, was that. The face was dead, and the richness and softness were perhaps the work of the lens.

  I was struck by a certain intensity of feeling in the pictures. Was it in the dead face itself? The face was rich in feeling, yet the dead man himself had none. It seemed to me that the pictures were neither of life nor of death. The face was alive but sleeping. One might in another sense see them as pictures of a dead face and yet feel in them something neither living nor dead. Was it that the face came through as the living face? Was it that the face called up so many memories of the living man? Or was it that I had before me not the living face but photographs? I thought it strange too that in pictures I could see the dead face more clearly and minutely than when I had had it before me. The pictures were like a symbol of something hidden, something that must not be looked upon.

  Afterwards I regretted having taken the pictures. It had been heedless of me. Dead faces should not leave behind photographs. Yet it was a fact that the Master's remarkable life came to me in the pictures.

  No one could have described the Master's face as handsome or noble. It was indeed a common sort of face, with no single feature of great merit. The ears, for instance - the lobes were as if they had been smashed. The mouth was large, the eyes were small. Through long years of discipline in his art, the Master seated at the Go board had the power to quiet his surroundings, and that same force of spirit was in my pictures too. There was a deep sadness in the lines of the closed eyelids, as of one grieving in sleep.

  And I looked at the body. The head of a doll, and the head only, seemed to protrude from the honeycomb pattern of the rough-woven kimono. Because the body had been dressed in an Oshima kimono after the Master's death, there was a bunching at the shoulders. Yet one had from it the feeling one had of the Master in life, as if from the waist he dwindled away to nothing. The Master's legs and hips: as the doctor had said at Hakoné, they seemed scarcely enough to bear his weight. Taken from the Urokoya, the body had seemed quite weightless save for the head. During that last match I had noticed the thinness of the seated Master's knees and in my pictures too there seemed to be only a head, almost gruesome, somehow, as if severed. There was something unreal about the pictures, which may have come from the face, the ultimate in tragedy, of a man so disciplined in an art that he had lost the better part of reality. Perhaps I had photographed the face of a man meant from the outset for martyrdom to art. It was as if the life of Shūsai, Master of Go, had ended as his art had ended, with that last match.

  9

  I doubt that there were precedents for the ceremonies that opened the Master's last game. Black made a single play and White a single play, followed by a banquet.

  On June 26, 1938, there was a lull in the early-summer rains, and bland summer clouds were in the sky. The foliage in the garden of the Kōyōkan had been washed clean by the rains. Strong sunlight shimmered on a scattering of bamboo leaves.

  Seated before the alcove in the downstairs parlor were Honnimbō Shūsai, Master of Go, and his challenger, Otaké of the Seventh Rank. All told, four masters were in the assembly: on Shūsai's left, Sekiné, thirteenth in the line of Grand Masters of Chess, as well as Kimura, Master of Chess, and Takagi, Master of Renju,{7} all brought together for this the commencement of the Master's last match by the sponsoring newspaper. I myself, special reporter for the newspaper, was beside Takagi. To the right of Otaké were the editor and directors of the newspaper, the secretary and directors of the Japan Go Association, three venerable Go champions of the Seventh Rank, Onoda of the Sixth Rank, who was one of the judges, and various disciples of the Master.

  Looking over the assembly, all in formal Japanese dress, the editor made some preliminary remarks. Suspense gripped the room as the Go board was readied at the center. The Master's little idiosyncrasies as he faced the Go board were once more apparent, especially in the droop of the right shoulder. And the thinness of those knees! The fan seemed huge. Eyes closed, Otaké nodded and inclined his head from side to side.

  The Master got up. A folded fan in his hand, he suggested a warrior readying his dirk. He seated himself at the board. The fingers of his left hand in the overskirt of his kimono, his right hand lightly clenched, he raised his head and looked straight before him. Otaké seated himself opposite. After bowing to the Master he took the bowl of black stones from the board and placed them at his right. He bowed again and, motionless, closed his eyes.

  "Suppose we begin," said the Master.

  His voice was low but intense, as if he were telling Otaké to be quick about it. Was he objecting to the somewhat histrionic quality of Otaké's behavior, was he eager to do battle? Otaké opened his eyes and closed them again. During the sessions at Itō he read the Lotus Sutra on mornings of play, and he now seemed to be bringing himself to order through silent meditation. Then, quickly, there came a rap of stone on board. It was twenty minutes before noon.

  Would it be a new opening or an old, a "star" or a komoku?{8} The world was asking whether Otaké would mount a new offensive or an old. Otaké's play was conservative, at R-16, in the upper right-hand corner; and so one of the mysteries was solved.

  His hands on his knees, the Master gazed at the opening komoku. Under the gaudy camera lights his mouth was so tightly closed that his lips protruded, and the rest of us seemed to have left his world. This was the third match I had seen the Master play; and always, when he sat before the Go board, he seemed to exude a quiet fragrance that cooled and cleaned the air around him.

  After five minutes he seemed about to play, having forgotten that his play was to be sealed.

  "I believe we have arranged, sir, that your play should be a sealed one," said Otaké. "But I suppose you don't feel that you have played at all unless you have played on the board."

  The Master was led to the next room by the secretary of the Go Association. Closing the door, he noted down his opening play, White 2, on the chart, which he put in an envelope. A sealed play is invalid if anyone besides the player himself sees it.

  "We don't seem to have any water," he said, back at the boa
rd. Wetting two fingers with his tongue, he sealed the envelope and signed his name across the seal. Otaké signed below. The envelope was put in a larger envelope, to which one of the managers affixed his seal, and which was then locked in the safe of the Kōyōkan.

  The opening ceremonies were over.

  Wishing to have pictures taken with which to introduce the match abroad, Kimura Ihei had the players go back to their places. The assembly relaxed, and the venerable gentlemen of the Seventh Rank gathered to admire the board and the stones. There were many estimates as to the thickness of the white stones, perhaps a quarter of an inch, perhaps a fifth.

  "They are the best you will find anywhere," said Kimura, Master of Chess. "Perhaps I might be allowed to touch one or two." He took up a handful.

  Go boards can be of great value, and several players had brought boards of which they were proud, as if asking permission to make at least one play in this grandest of matches.

  The banquet began after a recess.

  Kimura, Master of Chess, was thirty-four, Sekiné, thirteenth Grand Master of Chess, was seventy-one, and Takagi, Master of Renju, was fifty-one, all by the Oriental count.

  10

  Born in 1874, the Master had celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday a few days before with a modest private gathering appropriate to a time of national crisis.

  "I wonder which of us is older, the Kōyōkan or I," he remarked before the second session.

  He reminisced upon the fact that such Meiji Go players as Murasé Shūho of the Eighth Rank and Shūei, Master in the Honnimbō line to which he himself belonged, had played in this Kōyōkan.

  The second session was held in an upstairs room which had the mellow look of Meiji about it. The decorations were in keeping with the name Kōyōkan, "House of the Autumn Leaves." The sliding doors and the openwork panels above were decorated with maple leaves, and the screen off in a corner was bright with maple leaves painted in the Kōrin fashion. The arrangement in the alcove was of evergreen leaves and dahlias. The doors of this eighteen-mat room had been opened to the fifteen-mat room next door, so that the somewhat exaggerated arrangement did not seem out of place. The dahlias were slightly wilted. No one entered or left the room save a maid with flowered bodkins in a childlike Japanese coiffure who occasionally came to pour tea. The Master's fan, reflected in a black lacquer tray on which she had brought ice water, was utterly quiet. I was the only reporter present.

  Otaké of the Seventh Rank was wearing an unlined black kimono of glossy habutaé silk and a crested gossamer-net cloak. Somewhat less formal today, the Master wore a cloak with embroidered crests. The first day's board had been replaced.

  The two opening plays had been ceremonial, and serious play began today. As he deliberated Black 3, Otaké fanned himself and folded his hands behind him, and put the fan on his knee like an added support for the hand on which he now rested his chin. And as he deliberated - see - the Master's breathing was quicker, his shoulders were heaving. Yet there was nothing to suggest disorder. The waves that passed through his shoulders were quite regular. They were to me like a concentration of violence, or the doings of some mysterious power that had taken possession of the Master. The effect was the stronger for the fact that the Master himself seemed unaware of what was happening. Immediately the violence passed. The Master was quiet again. His breathing was normal, though one could not have said at what moment the quiet had come. I wondered if this marked the point of departure, the crossing of the line, for the spirit facing battle. I wondered if I was witness to the workings of the Master's soul as, all unconsciously, it received its inspiration, was host to the afflatus. Or was I watching a passage to enlightenment as the soul threw oft all sense of identity and the fires of combat were quenched? Was it what had made "the invincible Master"?

  At the beginning of the session Otaké had offered formal greetings, after which he had said: "I hope you won't mind, sir, if I have to get up from time to time."

  "I have the same trouble myself,'.' said the Master. "I have to get up two and three times every night."

  It was odd that, despite this apparent understanding, the Master seemed to sense none of the nervous tension in Otaké.

  When I am at work myself, I drink tea incessantly and am forever having to leave my desk, and sometimes I have nervous indigestion as well. Otaké's trouble was more extreme. He was unique among competitors at the grand spring and autumn tournaments. He would drink enormously from the large pot he kept at his side. Wu{9} of the Sixth Rank, who was at the time one of his more interesting adversaries, also suffered at the Go board from nervous enuresis. I have seen him get up ten times and more in the course of four or five hours of play. Though he did not have Otaké's addiction to tea, there would all the same (and one marveled at the fact) come sounds from the urinal each time he left the board. With Otaké the difficulty did not stop at enuresis. One noted with curiosity that he would leave his overskirt behind him in the hallway and his obi as well.

  After six minutes of thought he played Black 3; and immediately he said, "Excuse me, please," and got up. He got up again when he had played Black 5.

  The Master had quietly lighted a cigarette from the package in his kimono sleeve.

  While deliberating Black 5, Otaké put his hands inside his kimono, and folded his arms, and brought his hands down beside his knees, and brushed an invisible speck of dust from the board, and turned one of the Master's white stones right side up. If the white stones had face and obverse, then the face must be the inner, stripeless side of the clamshell; but few paid attention to such details. The Master would indifferently play his stones with either side up, and Otaké would now and again turn one over.

  "The Master is so quiet," Otaké once said, half jokingly. "The quiet is always tripping me up. I prefer noise. All this quietness wears me down."

  Otaké was much given to jesting when he was at the board; but since the Master offered no sign that he had even noticed, the effect was somewhat blunted. In a match with the Master, Otaké was unwontedly meek.

  Perhaps the dignity with which the real professional faces the board comes with middle age, perhaps the young have no use for it. In any case, younger players indulge all manner of odd quirks. To me the strangest was a young player of the Fourth Rank who, at the grand tournament, would open a literary magazine on his knee and read a story while waiting for his adversary to play. When the play had been made, he would look up, deliberate his own play, and, having played, turn nonchalantly to the magazine again. He seemed to be deriding his adversary, and one would not have been surprised had the latter taken umbrage. I heard one day that the young player had shortly afterwards gone insane. Perhaps, given the precarious state of his nerves, he could not tolerate those periods of deliberation.

  I have heard that Otaké of the Seventh Rank and Wu of the Sixth once went to a clairvoyant and asked for advice on how to win. The proper method, said the man, was to lose all awareness of self while awaiting an adversary's play. Some years after this retirement match, and shortly before his own death, Onoda of the Sixth Rank, one of the judges at the retirement match, had a perfect record at the grand tournament and gave evidence of remarkable resources left over. His manner at play was equally remarkable. While awaiting a play he would sit quietly with his eyes closed. He explained that he was ridding himself of the desire to win. Shortly after the tournament he went into a hospital, and he died without knowing that he had had stomach cancer. Kubomatsu of the Sixth Rank, who had been one of Otaké's boyhood teachers, also put together an unusual string of victories in the last tournament before his death.

  Seated at the board, the Master and Otaké presented a complete contrast, quiet against constant motion, nervelessness against nervous tension. Once he had sunk himself into a session, the Master did not leave the board. A player can often read a great deal into his adversary's manner and expression; but it is said that among professional players the Master alone could read nothing. Yet for all the outward tension, Otaké's
game was far from nervous. It was a powerful, concentrated game. Given to long deliberation, he habitually ran out of time. As the deadline approached he would ask the recorder to read off the seconds, and in the final minute make a hundred plays and a hundred fifty plays, with a surging violence such as to unnerve his opponent.

  Otaké's way of sitting down and getting up again was as if readying himself for battle. It was probably for him what the quickened breathing was for the Master. Yet the heaving of those thin, hunched shoulders was what struck me most forcefully. I felt as if I were the uninvited witness to the secret advent of inspiration, painless, calm, unknown to the Master and not perceived by others.

  But afterwards it seemed to me that I had rather outdone myself. Perhaps the Master had but felt a twinge of pain in his chest. His heart condition was worse as the match progressed, and perhaps he had felt the first spasm at that moment. Not knowing of the heart ailment, I had reacted as I had, probably, out of respect for the Master. I should have been more coolly rational. But the Master himself seemed unaware of his illness and of the heavy breathing. No sign of pain or disquiet came over his face, nor did he press a hand to his chest.

  Otaké's Black 5 took twenty minutes, and the Master used forty-one minutes for White 6, the first considerable period of deliberation in the match. Since it had been arranged that the player whose turn came at four in the afternoon would seal his play, the sealed play would be the Master's unless he played within two minutes. Otaké's Black 11 had come at two minutes before the hour. The Master sealed his White 12 at twenty-two minutes after the hour.

  The skies, clear in the morning, had clouded over. The storm that was to bring floods in both the east and the west of Japan was on its way.{10}

  11

  The second session at the Kōyōkan was to have begun at ten. Because of a misunderstanding it was delayed until two. I was an onlooker, outside it all; but the consternation of the managers was quite apparent. Virtually the whole of the Association had rushed to the scene, I gathered, and was meeting in another room.