I had arrived just as Otaké was arriving, a large suitcase in his hand.
"Why the luggage ?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied, in the abrupt manner that was his before a session. "We leave for Hakoné today. To be sealed in for the rest of the match."
I had been told that the contestants would go directly from the Kōyōkan to a Hakoné inn. Yet the proportions of Otaké's baggage rather startled me.
The Master had made no arrangements for the move.
"Oh was that the idea?" he said. "In that case I should call a barber."
This was a bit deflating for Otaké, who had come all prepared to be away from home till the end of the match, in perhaps three months' time. And the Master was in violation of contract. Otaké's annoyance was not soothed by the fact that no one seemed quite sure how clearly the terms had been communicated to the Master. They should have been solemn and inviolable, and that they were broken so soon naturally left Otaké uneasy about the later course of the match. The managers had erred in not explaining them to the Master and explaining them again. No one was prepared to challenge him, however. He was in a class apart, and so the obvious solution was to cajole the young Otaké into continuing play at the Kōyōkan. Otaké proved rather stubborn.
If the Master did not know of the move to Hakoné today, well, that was that. There was a gathering in another room, there were nervous footsteps in the corridors, Otaké disappeared for a long interval. Having nothing better to do, I waited beside the Go board. Soon after what would ordinarily have been lunch time, a compromise was reached: today's session would be from two to four, and with two days' rest the party would go to Hakoné.
"We can't really get started in two hours," said the Master. "Let's wait till we get to Hakoné and have a decent session."
It was a point, but he could not be allowed to have his way. Just such remarks had been responsible for the discord that morning. The spirit of the game should have precluded arbitrary changes in the schedule. The game of Go tended to be controlled these days by inflexible rules. Elaborate conditions had been set for the Master's last game, to keep his old-fashioned willfulness under control, to deny him a special status, to ensure complete equality.
The system of "sealing the players in cans" was operative and must be followed through to the end. It was proper that the players go directly from the Kōyōkan to Hakoné. The system meant that they might not leave the appointed site or, lest they receive advice, meet other players until the end of the game. It might be said therefore to guard the sanctity of the contest. It could as well be said to deny human dignity, and yet, in the balance, the integrity and probity of the players were no doubt served. In a match expected to last three months, the sessions to take place at five-day intervals, such precautions seemed doubly necessary. Whatever the wishes of the players themselves, the danger of outside interference was real, and once doubts arose there would be no end to them. The world of Go did of course have its conscience and its ethics, and the likelihood seemed small that there would be talk of a game lasting through multiple sessions, least of all to the players themselves; but again, once an exception was made there would be no end to exceptions.
In the last decade or so of the Master's life he played only three title matches. In all three he fell ill midway through the match. He was bedridden after the first, and after the third he died. All three were eventually finished, but because of recesses the first took two months, the second four, and the third, announced as his last, nearly six months.
The second was held in 1930, five years before the last.{11} Wu of the Fifth Rank was the challenger. The two sides were in delicate balance as the match came into its middle stages, and at about White 150 the Master seemed in a shade the weaker position. Then, at White 160, he made a most extraordinary play, and his second victory was assured. It was rumoured that the play was in fact conceived by Maeda of the Sixth Rank, one of the Master's disciples. Even now the truth is in doubt. Maeda himself has denied the allegation. The game lasted four months, and no doubt the Master's disciples studied it with great care. White 160 may indeed have been invented by one of them, and perhaps, since it was a remarkable invention, someone did pass it on to the Master. Perhaps, again, the play was the Master's own. Only the Master and his disciples know the truth.
The first of the three matches, in 1926, was actually between the Association and a rival group, the Kiseisha, and the generals of the two forces, the Master and Karigané of the Seventh Rank, were in single combat; and there can be little doubt that during the two months it lasted the rival forces put a great deal of study into it. One cannot be sure all the same that they gave advice to their respective leaders. I rather doubt that they did. The Master was not one to ask advice, nor was he an easy man to approach with advice. The solemnity of his art was such as to reduce one to silence.
And even during this his last match there were rumours. Was the recess, ostensibly because of his illness, in fact a stratagem on his part? To me, watching the game through to the end, such allegations were impossible to believe.
It astonished the managers, and myself as well, that Otaké deliberated his first move at Itō, when the game was resumed after a three-month recess, for two hundred and eleven minutes - a full three hours and a half. He began his deliberations at ten thirty in the morning, and with a noon recess of an hour and a half, finally played when the autumn sun was sinking and an electric light hung over the board.
It was at twenty minutes before three that he finally played Black 101.
He looked up laughing. "See what an idiot I am. It shouldn't have taken me a minute to make the jump. Three and a half hours deciding whether to jump or to swim.{12} Ridiculous." And he laughed again.
The Master smiled wryly and did not answer.
It was as Otaké said: Black 101 was quite obvious to all of us. The game was entering its decisive stages and the time had come for Black to invade the White formation in the lower right corner; and the point where the play was finally made offered almost the only reasonable beginning. Besides the one-space "jump" to S-7, the "swim" at S-8 was a possibility; but though some hesitation was understandable the difference was of little account.
Why then did he take so long? Bored with the long wait, I at first thought it merely strange, and then I began to have suspicions. Was it all a show? Was it an irritant, or perhaps a camouflage? I had reasons for these uncharitable suspicions. Play was being resumed after a three-month recess. Had Otaké been studying the board all through those months? At the hundredth play the match was a tight, delicate one. The final stages might have a certain boldness and sweep, but the issue would probably remain in doubt to the end. However often and in whatever formation one lined up the stones there could be no real determination of the outcome. The research and the probing could go on indefinitely. Yet it seemed unlikely that Otaké had abandoned his studies of so important a match. He had had three months in which to think about Black 101. Now to take three and a half hours over the play: might he not be seeking to cover his activities during those three months? The organizers seemed to share my doubts and distaste.
In an interval when Otaké was out of the room, even the Master hinted at dissatisfaction. "He does take his time," he muttered. However matters may have been in a practice match, the Master had never before been heard to say anything critical of an opponent during a title match.
But Yasunaga of the Fourth Rank, who was close to both the Master and Otaké, disagreed with me. "Neither of them seems to have done much of anything during the recess," he said. "Otaké is a very fastidious person. He would not want to do anything while the Master was lying helpless in bed."
Probably it was the truth. Probably in those three hours and a half Otaké was not only deliberating his play; he was bringing himself back to the board after a three-month absence, and doing his best to map out the finished game, through all the stages and formations it was likely to take.
12
It was the Mas
ter's first experience with the sealed play. At the beginning of the second session the envelope was brought from the safe of the Kōyōkan, and the seal inspected by the contestants with the secretary of the Association as witness. The contestant who had made the sealed play showed the chart to his adversary, and a stone was placed appropriately on the board. At Hakoné and at Itō the same procedure was followed. The sealed play was in effect a way of hiding from an adversary the last play of a session.
In games lasting over several sessions, it was the custom from ancient times for Black to make the last play of a session, as an act of courtesy toward the more distinguished player. Since the practice gave the advantage to the latter, the injustice was remedied by having the player whose turn it was at the prearranged end of a session, say five o'clock, make the last play. A further refinement was hit upon: to seal the last play. Go took its example from chess, which had first devised the sealed play. The purpose was to eliminate the manifest irrationality of allowing the first player at the beginning of a session, having seen the last play, the whole of the recess, and it could be several days, in which to deliberate his next play, and of not charging the prolonged interval against his allotted time.
It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice, even when challenging the Master himself. The fault was not Otaké's. Perhaps what had happened was but natural, Go being a contest and a show of strength.
In more than thirty years the Master had not played Black. He was first among them all, and brooked no second. During his lifetime no one among his juniors advanced as far as the Eighth Rank. All through the epoch that was his own he kept the opposition under control, and there was no one whose rank could carry across the gap to the next age. The fact that today, a decade after the Master's death, no method has been devised for determining the succession to the title Master of Go probably has to do with the towering presence of Honnimbō Shūsai. Probably he was the last of the true masters revered in the tradition of Go as a way of life and art.
It begins to seem evident in championship tournaments that the title "Master" will become a mark of strength and no more, and that the position will become a sort of victory banner and a commercial asset for a competitive performer. It may in fact be said that the Master sold his last match to a newspaper at a price without precedent. He did not so much go forth into combat as allow himself to be lured into combat by the newspaper. It may be that, like the system of certification by schools and teachers in so many of the traditional Japanese arts, the notion of a lifetime Master and of ranks is a feudal relic. It may be that, if he had had to face annual title matches, as do chess masters, the Master would have died years before he did.
In old times the holder of the title, fearful of doing injury to it, seems to have avoided real competition even in practice matches. Never before, probably, was there a master who fought a title match at the advanced age of sixty-four. But in the future the existence of a master who does not play will be unthinkable. Shūsai the Master would seem, in a variety of meanings, to have stood at the boundary between the old and the new. He had at the same time the lofty position of the old master and the material benefits of the new. In a day the spirit of which was a mixture of idolatry and iconoclasm, the Master went into his last match as the last survivor among idols of old.
It was his good fortune to be born in the early flush of Meiji. Probably never again will it be possible for anyone - for, say, Wu Ch'ing-yuan of our own day - knowing nothing of the vale of tears in which the Master spent his student years, to encompass in his individual person a whole panorama of history. It will not be possible even though the man be more of a genius at Go than the Master was. He was the symbol of Go itself, he and his record shining through Meiji, Taisho, and Showa, and his achievement in having brought the game to its modern flowering. The match to end the career of the old Master should have had in it the affectionate attention of his juniors, the finesse and subtlety of the warrior's way, the mysterious elegance of an art, everything to make it a masterpiece in itself; but the Master could not stand outside the rules of equality.
When a law is made, the cunning that finds loopholes goes to work. One cannot deny that there is a certain slyness among younger players, a slyness which, when rules are written to prevent slyness, makes use of the rules themselves. In the arsenal are myriad uses of the time allotment and the last play before a recess, the sealed play; and so a Go match as a work of art is besmirched. The Master, when he faced the board, was a man of old. He knew nothing about all these refined latter-day tricks. Through his long competitive career it had been for him the wholly natural thing that the senior in rank should behave arbitrarily, calling a halt to the day's session upon having forced his opponent into an unfortunate play. There was no time allotment. And the arbitrary ways that had been allowed the Master had forged the Master's art, incomparably superior to the latter-day game and all its rules.
The Master was accustomed not to this new equality but to old-fashioned prerogatives, and there had been ugly rumours when the match with Wu of the Fifth Rank had fallen behind schedule; and so it would seem that, in challenging him to this final match, his juniors had imposed the strictest rules to restrain his dictatorial tendencies. The rules for the match had not been set by the Master and Otaké. High-ranking members of the Association had conducted an elimination tournament to decide who would be the challenger, and the code had been drawn up before it began. Otaké, representing the Association, was only trying to make the Master honor the code.
Because of the Master's illness and for other reasons, numbers of disagreements arose, and Otaké's manner, as he repeatedly threatened to forfeit the match, carried suggestions of an inability to understand the courtesies due to an elder, a want of sympathy for a sick man, and a rationalism that somehow missed the point. It caused considerable worry for the managers, and always the technical arguments seemed to be ranged on Otaké's side. There was a possibility, moreover, that giving an inch meant giving a mile, and a possibility too that the slackening of spirit in giving the inch would mean defeat. Such things must not be permitted in so important a contest. Knowing that he had to win, Otaké could not surrender to the whims of his older adversary. It even seemed to me that, when anything suggesting the usual arbitrariness arose, Otaké's insistence on the letter of the law was the more determined for the fact that his opponent was the Master.
The rules were of course very different from those for an ordinary match. Yet it should have been possible to fight without mercy on the board even while making concessions in matters of time and place. There are players capable of such flexibility. The Master perhaps found himself with the wrong adversary.
13
In the world of competitive games, it seems to be the way of the spectator to build up heroes beyond their actual powers. Pitting equal adversaries against each other arouses interest of a sort, but is not the hope really for a nonpareil? The grand figure of "the invincible Master" towered over the Go board. There had been numerous other battles upon which the Master had staked his destinies, and he had not lost one of them. The results of contests before he gained the title may have been determined by accident and shifting currents. After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy. By comparison with Sekiné, Master of Chess, who was happiest when he lost, Shūsai the Master had a
difficult life. One is told that in Go the first player has seven chances in ten of winning, and so it should have been in the nature of things for the Master as White to lose to Otaké; but such refinements are beyond the amateur.
Probably the Master was lured into the game not only by the power of a large newspaper and the size of the fee, but in very great measure too by a real concern for his art.
There could be no question that he was consumed by a desire for battle. He probably would not have gone into the match had it occurred to him that he might lose; and it was as if his life ended when the crown of invincibility fell from his head. He had followed his extraordinary destinies through to the end. Might one perhaps say that following them meant flouting them?
Because the invincible Master, an absolute, was coming forward for the first time in five years, a code unduly complicated even for the day was drawn up. It later came to seem like a foreshadowing of death.
But the code was violated on the day of the second Shiba session, and again immediately after the move to Hakoné.
The move was to take place on June 30, the third day after the second session. Because of floods it was postponed to July 3 and finally to July 8. The Kanto was drenched and there were floods in the Kobé region. Even on the eighth the Tokaido line was still not through to Osaka. Leaving from Kamakura, I changed at Ofuna for the train on which the Master and his party had come from Tokyo. The 3:15 for Maibara was nine minutes late.
It did not stop at Hiratsuka, where Otaké lived. He promptly appeared at Odawara Station in summer dress, a dark blue suit and a Panama hat turned smartly down at the brim. He was carrying the large suitcase he had brought to the Kōyōkan.
The Master of Go Page 4
