The Master of Go

by Yusanari Kawabata

  He wrote himself to death. Through him I first met the Master and Wu.

  There had been something ghostlike about Naoki in his last days, and there was something ghostlike about the Master here before me.

  Yet the game moved ahead nine plays during the session. It was Otaké's turn at twelve thirty, the hour appointed for the recess. The Master left the board. Otaké stayed on alone to deliberate his sealed play, Black 99.

  For the first time that day there was cheerful conversation. "We ran out of tobacco once when I was a boy," said the Master, having a leisurely smoke. "Of course everyone smoked pipes in those days. We even used to stuff our pipes with lint. It did well enough, in its way."

  A suggestion of a cool breeze had come up. Now that the Master had withdrawn from the board, Otaké, continuing his deliberations, slipped off his cloak of gossamer net.

  Back in his room, the Master startled us again by challenging Onoda to chess. After chess, it is said, there was mahjong.

  The site of combat having become unbearably oppressive, I fled to the Fukujuro Inn at Tōnosawa. When I had finished a day's installment of my report, I left for my summer house in Karuizawa.

  27

  The Master was like a starved urchin in his appetite for games. Shut up in his room with his games, he was doing his heart ailment no good. An introspective person, however, not given to easy switches of mood, he probably found that only games quieted his nerves and turned his mind from Go. He never went for walks.

  Most professional Go players like other games as well, but the Master's addiction was rather special. He could not play an easy, nonchalant match, letting well enough alone. There was no end to his patience and endurance. He played day and night, his obsession somewhat disquieting. It was less as if he were playing to dispel gloom or beguile tedium than as if he were giving himself up to the fangs of gaming devils. He gave himself to mahjong and billiards just as he gave himself to Go. If one put aside the inconvenience he caused his adversaries, it might have been said, perhaps, that the Master himself was forever true and clean. Unlike an ordinary person with preoccupations of some intensity, the Master seemed to be lost in vast distances.

  Even in the interval between a session and dinner, he would be at one game or another. Iwamoto would not yet have finished his flagon of sake when the Master would come impatiently for him.

  At the end of the first Hakoné session, Otaké asked the maid for a Go board as soon as he was back in his room. We could hear stones clicking as, apparently, he reviewed the course of the game. The Master, now in a cotton kimono, promptly appeared at the managers' office. With great dispatch he defeated me at five and six matches of Ninuki Renju.

  "But it's such a lightweight game," he said fretfully as he went out. "We'll play chess. There's a board in Mr. Uragami's room."

  His match with Iwamoto at rook's handicap{26} was interrupted by dinner.

  Happy from his evening drink, Iwamoto sat grandly with his legs crossed and slapped away at his bare thighs; and in due order he lost.

  After dinner a clicking of stones came sporadically from Otaké's room; but soon he came down for rook-handicap games with Sunada of the Nichinichi and myself.

  "When I play chess I have to sing. Excuse me, please. I do like chess. I ask myself and ask myself, and for the life of me I can't understand why I became a Go player instead of a chess player. I've been at chess longer than Go. Must have learned it when I was four, maybe not quite, and a person ought to be stronger at the game he learned first." He would sing happily away at his own versions, dotted with puns and innuendoes, of children's songs and popular songs.

  "I imagine you're the strongest chess player in the Association," said the Master.

  "I wonder. You're rather good yourself, you know, sir. But no one in the Association has made even the First Rank at chess. I imagine I'll always get first play when I play Renju with you. I don't even know the standard moves. I just elbow my way ahead. I believe that you are Third Rank, sir?"

  "But I doubt if I could beat even a First Rank professional. Professionalism gives a person strength."

  "The Master of Chess, Mr. Kimura - how is he at Go?"

  "Possibly First Rank. They say he's improved lately."

  Otaké hummed happily as he did battle with the Master at a no-handicap game. The Master was seduced into humming with him. Such levity was not usual with the Master. His rook having been promoted,{27} he had a slight edge.

  In those days the Master's chess games were cheerful and lively, but as illness overtook him that ghostlike quality became apparent. Even after the August 10 session he had to have games to divert him. To me it was as if he were suffering the torments of hell.

  The next session was scheduled for August 14. But the Master was far weaker and in great pain. The managers urged suspending the match. The newspaper had resigned itself to the inevitable. The Master made a single play on August 14 and a recess was called.

  Seated at the board, each player first took his bowl of stones from the board and set it at his knee. The bowl seemed too heavy for the Master. The players in turn, following the earlier course of the match, laid the stones out as at the end of the last session. The Master's stones seemed about to slip through his fingers, but as the ranks took shape he seemed to gain strength, and the click of the stones was sharper.

  Absolutely motionless, the Master meditated for thirty-three minutes over his one play. It had been agreed that White 100 would be sealed.

  "I can play a little more, I think," said the Master.

  No doubt he was in a mood for battle. The managers held a hasty conference. But a promise was a promise. It was decided to end the session with the one sealed play.

  "Very well, then." Even after he had sealed his White 100, the Master gazed on at the board.

  "It has been a long time, sir, and I have caused you a great deal of trouble," said Otaké. "Do care for yourself."

  "Yes," was all the Master said. His wife answered at greater length.

  "Exactly a hundred plays. How many sessions?" Otaké asked the recorder. "Ten? Two in Tokyo and eight here in Hakoné? Exactly ten plays a session."

  Later when I went to take leave of the Master he was looking vacantly into the sky over the garden.

  He was to go immediately into St. Luke's Hospital, but it seemed unlikely that he could get train accommodations for some days.

  28

  My family had moved to Karuizawa at the end of July, and I had been commuting between Karuizawa and Hakoné. Since the trip took seven hours each way, I had to leave my summer house the day before a session. After a session I would spend the night in Hakoné or Tokyo. Each session thus cost me three days. With sessions each fifth day, I had to set out again after a two-day rest. Then I had to do my reports, and it was an unpleasantly rainy summer, and in the end I was exhausted. The reasonable thing, it might be said, would have been to stay on at the Hakoné inn; but after each session I would hurry off, scarcely finishing my dinner.

  It was hard for me to write about the Master and Otaké when we were together at the inn. Even when I stayed overnight at Hakoné I would go down to Miyanoshita or Tōnosawa. It made me uncomfortable to write about them and then be with them at the next session. Since I was reporting on a match sponsored by a newspaper, I had to arouse interest. A certain amount of embroidering was necessary. There was little chance that my amateur audience would understand the more delicate niceties of Go, and for sixty or seventy instalments{28} I had to make the manner and appearance and gestures and general behaviour of the players my chief material. I was not so much observing the play as observing the players. They were the monarchs, and the managers and reporters were their subjects. To report on Go as if it were a pursuit of supreme dignity and importance - and I could not pretend to understand it perfectly - I had to respect and admire the players. I was presently able to feel not only interest in the match but a sense of Go as an art, and that was because I reduced myself to nothing as I gazed a
t the Master.

  I was in a deeply pensive mood when, on the day the match was finally recessed, I boarded a train at Ueno Station for Karuizawa. As I put my baggage on the rack, a tall foreigner hurried over from across the aisle some five or six seats forward.

  "That will be a Go board."

  "How clever of you to know."

  "I have one myself. A great invention."

  The board was a magnet decorated with gold leaf, very convenient for playing on a train. In its cover it was not easy to recognize as a Go board. I was in the habit of taking it with me on my travels, since it added little to my baggage.

  "Suppose we have a game. I am fascinated with it." He spoke in Japanese. He promptly set the board on his knees. Since his legs were long and his knees high, it was more sensible to have the board on his knees than on mine.

  "I am Grade Thirteen,"{29} he said with careful precision, as if doing a sum. He was an American.

  I first tried giving him a six-stone handicap. He had taken lessons at the Go Association, he said, and challenged some famous players. He had the forms down well enough, but he had a way of playing thoughtlessly, without really putting himself into the game. Losing did not seem to bother him in the least. He went happily through game after game, as if to say that it was silly to take a mere game seriously. He lined his forces up after patterns he had been taught, and his opening plays were excellent; but he had no will to fight. If I pushed him back a little or made a surprise move, he quietly collapsed. It was as if I were throwing a large but badly balanced opponent in a wrestling match. Indeed this quickness to lose left me wondering uncomfortably if I might not have something innately evil concealed within me. Quite aside from matters of skill, I sensed no response, no resistance. There was no muscular tone in his play. One always found a competitive urge in a Japanese, however inept he might be at the game. One never encountered a stance as uncertain as this. The spirit of Go was missing. I thought it all very strange, and I was conscious of being confronted with utter foreignness.

  We played on for more than four hours, from Ueno to near Karuizawa. He was cheerfully indestructible, not in the least upset however many times he lost, and seemed likely to have the better of me because of this very indifference. In the face of such honest fecklessness, I thought myself rather perverse and cruel.

  Their curiosity aroused by the novel sight of a foreigner at the Go board, four or five other passengers gathered around us. They made me nervous, but they did not seem to bother the foreigner who was losing so effortlessly.

  For him it was probably like having an argument in a foreign language learned from grammar texts. One did not of course wish to take a game too seriously, and yet it was quite clear that playing Go with a foreigner was very different from playing Go with a Japanese. I wondered whether the point might be that foreigners were not meant for Go. It had more than once been remarked at Hakoné that there were five thousand devotees of the game in Dr. Dueball's Germany, and that it was beginning to attract notice in America too. One is of course rash to generalize from the single example of an American beginner, but perhaps the conclusion might be valid all the same that Western Go is wanting in spirit. The Oriental game has gone beyond game and test of strength and become a way of art. It has about it a certain Oriental mystery and nobility. The "Honnimbō" of Honnimbō Shūsai is the name of a cell at the Jakkōji Temple in Kyoto, and Shūsai the Master had himself taken holy orders. On the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of the first Honnimbō, Sansa,{30} whose clerical name was Nikkai, he had taken the clerical name Nichion. I thought, as I played Go with the American, that there was no tradition of Go in his country.

  Go came to Japan from China. Real Go, however, developed in Japan. The art of Go in China, now and three hundred years ago, does not bear comparison with that in Japan. Go was elevated and deepened by the Japanese. Unlike so many other civilized arts brought from China, which developed gloriously in China itself, Go flowered only in Japan. The flowering of course came in recent centuries, when Go was under the protection of the Edo Shogunate. Since the game was first imported into Japan a thousand years ago, there were long centuries when its wisdom went uncultivated. The Japanese opened the reserves of that wisdom, the "road of the three hundred and sixty and one,"{31} which the Chinese had seen to encompass the principles of nature and the universe and of human life, which they had named the diversion of the immortals, a game of abundant spiritual powers. It is clear that in Go the Japanese spirit has transcended the merely imported and derivative.

  Perhaps no other nation has developed games as intellectual as Go and Oriental chess. Perhaps nowhere else in the world would a match be allotted eighty hours extended over three months. Had Go, like the Nō drama and the tea ceremony, sunk deeper and deeper into the recesses of a strange Japanese tradition?

  Shūsai the Master told us at Hakoné of his travels in China. His remarks had to do chiefly with whom he had played and where and at what handicap.

  "So I suppose the best players in China would be good amateurs in Japan?" I asked, thinking that Chinese Go must after all be fairly strong.

  "Something of the sort, I should think. They may be a touch weaker, but I should think a strong amateur there would be a match for a strong amateur here. They have no professionals, of course."

  "If their amateurs and ours are about equal, then you might say that they have the makings of professionals?"

  "I think you might." "They have the potential."

  "But it won't happen overnight. They do have some good players, though, and I gather that they like to play for stakes."

  "They have the material."

  "They must, when they can produce someone like Wu."

  I meant to visit Wu of the Sixth Rank soon. As the retirement match took shape, much of my interest turned to the shape his commentary was taking. I thought of it as a sort of aid and supplement to my report.

  That this extraordinary man was born in China and lived in Japan seemed symbolic of a preternatural bounty. His genius had taken life after his remove to Japan. There had been numerous examples over the centuries of persons distinguished in one art or another in a neighbouring country and honoured in Japan. Wu is an outstanding modern example. It was Japan that nurtured, protected, and ministered to a genius that would have lain dormant in China. The boy had in fact been discovered by a Japanese Go player who lived in China for a time. Wu had already studied Japanese writings on Go. It seemed to me that the Chinese Go tradition, older than the Japanese, had sent forth a sudden burst of light in this boy. Behind him a profound source of light lay buried in the mud. Had he not been blessed with a chance to polish his talents from his very early years, they would have lain forever hidden. No doubt in Japan too, remarkable Go players have remained in obscurity. Such is the way of the fates with human endowments, in the individual and in the race. Examples must be legion of wisdom and knowledge that shone forth in the past and faded toward the present, that have been obscured through all the ages and into the present but will shine forth in the future.

  29

  Wu of the Sixth Rank was in a sanitarium at Fujimi, to the west of Mt. Fuji. After each of the Hakoné sessions, Sunada of the Nichinichi would go to Fujimi for his comments. I would insert them appropriately into my report. The Nichinichi had chosen him because he and Otaké were the reliables among younger players, strong competitors in skill and in popularity.

  He had over-exerted himself at Go and fallen ill. And the war with China grieved him deeply. He had once described in an essay how he longed for an early peace and the day when Chinese and Japanese men of taste might go boating together on beautiful Lake T'ai. During his illness at Fujimi he studied such works as The Book, of History, Mirror of the Immortals, and Collected Works of Lu Tsu.{32} He had become a naturalized Japanese citizen, taking Kuré Izumi as his Japanese name.

  Although the schools were out when I returned from Hakoné to Karuizawa, that international summer resort was crowded with students.
There was gunfire. Troops of student reserves were in training. More than a score of acquaintances in the literary world had gone off with the army and navy to observe the attack on Hankow. I was not selected for the party. Left behind, I wrote in my Nichinichi reports of how popular Go had always been in time of war, of how frequently one heard stories of games in battle encampments, of how closely the Way of the Warrior resembled a way of art, there being an element of the religious in both.

  Sunada came to Karuizawa on August 18 and we took a train on the Komi line from Komoro. One of the passengers reported that in the heights around Mt. Yatsugataké great numbers of centipede-like insects came out in the night to cool themselves, in such numbers that the train wheels spun as if the tracks had been greased. We spent the night at the Saginoyu hot spring in Kamisuwa and went on the next morning to Fujimi.

  Wu's room was above the entranceway. In one corner were two tatami mats. He illustrated his remarks with small stones on a small wooden board which he had laid out upon a small cushion and a collapsible wooden stand.

  It was in 1932 at the Dankōen in Itō that Naoki Sanjugo and I watched Wu play the Master at a two-stone handicap. Those six years before, in a short-sleeved kimono of dark blue speckled with white, his fingers long and slender, the skin fresh at the nape of his neck, he had made one think of an elegant and sensitive young girl. Now he had taken on the manner of the cultivated young monk. The shape of the head and ears and indeed of every feature suggested aristocracy, and few men can have given more clearly an impression of genius.

  His comments came freely, though occasionally he would stop, chin in hand, and think for a time. The chestnut leaves glistened in the rain. How in general would he characterize the game, I asked.