The Master of Go

by Yusanari Kawabata

  His first business was to inquire about our safety during the floods. "They still have to use boats to get to the insane asylum down the street from me. At first it was rafts."

  We took the cable car from Miyanoshita down to Dogashima. The Hayakawa, directly below us, was roiled and muddy. The Taiseikan Inn was like an island in its waters.

  After we had been shown to our rooms, Otaké went to make his formal greetings to the Master. In a good mood that evening after his usual cups of sake, the Master talked about this and that, illustrating his remarks liberally with gestures. Otaké spoke of his family and his boyhood. The Master challenged me to a game of chess, and when I seemed reluctant he turned to Otaké instead. The game took almost three and a half hours. Otaké won.

  The next morning the Master was being shaved in the corridor outside the bath. He was putting himself in order for tomorrow's session. Because the chair had no headrest, his wife stood behind him supporting his head.

  Onoda of the Sixth Rank, who was serving as a judge, and Yawata, the secretary of the Association, arrived that evening. The Master livened the evening with challenges to chess and Ninuki. He lost repeatedly to Onoda at Ninuki, also known as Korean Gomoku.{13} He seemed filled with admiration.

  Onoda made a record of a Go match I played with Goi, reporter for the Nichinichi. To have a player of the Sixth Rank as recorder was an honor denied even the Master. I played Black and won by five points. A chart of the game appeared in The Way of Go, journal of the Association.

  It had been agreed that there would be a day to rest from the journey, and that play would be resumed on the tenth. On mornings of play Otaké was a changed man. Tight-mouthed and almost sullen, shoulders back, he paced the halls defiantly. Below the full, somewhat swollen eyelids, the narrow eyes sent forth a fierce light.

  But there came a complaint from the Master. Because of the roar of the waters, he said, he had spent two sleepless nights. Reluctantly, he posed for pictures before the Go board, in a room as far as possible from the river. He let it be known that he wished a change of inns.

  Insomnia scarcely seemed an adequate reason for postponing a session. The way of Go, moreover, demanded that a player honour his commitments even if his father was dying, even if he seemed on the verge of collapse. The principle still tends to be respected. And to lodge a complaint on the very morning of a session, even if the complainant was the Master himself, showed quite astonishing autocratic tendencies. The match was important for the Master, to be sure, but it was even more important for Otaké.

  Since no one among the managers, now and on the earlier occasion when the Master had broken a promise, was prepared to act as umpire and hand down an order, Otaké must have felt considerable uneasiness about the further course of the match. He quietly acceded to the Master's wishes, however, his face showing scarcely a trace of displeasure.

  "I picked the inn myself, and I am very sorry the Master can't sleep," he said. "Suppose we find another, and start play tomorrow, after he has had a good night's rest."

  Otaké had stayed at the inn before, and had thought it a good place for a match. Unfortunately the river was so swollen from the rains that boulders came crashing down it, and with the inn situated as if on an island, sleep was indeed difficult. Otaké felt constrained to apologize.

  Clad in a cotton summer kimono, he set out with Goi in search of a quiet inn.

  14

  That morning we moved to the Naraya Inn. The next day, the eleventh, after a recess of some twelve or thirteen days, play was resumed in an outbuilding. The Master lost himself in the game, and his waywardness left him. Indeed he was as quiet and docile as if he had assigned custody of himself to the managers.

  The judges for the Master's last match were Onoda and Iwamoto, both of the Sixth Rank. Iwamoto arrived at one on the afternoon of the eleventh. Taking a chair on the veranda, he sat gazing at the mountains. It was the day on which, according to the calendar, the rainy season ended, and indeed the sun was out for the first time in some days. Branches cast shadows over the wet ground, golden carp were bright in the pond. When play began, however, the sky was lightly clouded over once more. There was a strong enough breeze that the flowers in the alcove swayed gently. Aside from the waterfall in the garden and the river beyond, the silence was broken only by the distant sound of a rock-cutter's chisel. A scent of red lilies wafted in from the garden. In the almost too complete silence a bird soared grandly beyond the eaves. There were sixteen plays in the course of the afternoon, from sealed White 12 to sealed Black 27.

  After a recess of four days, the second Hakoné session took place on July 16. The girl who kept the records had always before worn a dark blue kimono speckled with white. Today she had changed to summer dress, a kimono of fine white linen.

  This outbuilding was almost a hundred yards across the garden from the main building. The noon recess came, and the figure of the Master going alone down the path caught my eye. Just beyond the gate of the outbuilding was a short slope, and the Master bent forward as he climbed it. I could not see the lines on the palms of the small hands he held lightly clasped behind him, but the network of veins seemed to be complex and delicate. He was carrying a folded fan. His body, bent forward from the hips, was perfectly straight, making his legs seem all the more unreliable. From below the thicket of dwarf bamboo, along the main road, came a sound of water down a narrow ditch. Nothing more - and yet the retreating figure of the Master somehow brought tears to my eyes. I was profoundly moved, for reasons I do not myself understand. In that figure walking absently from the game there was the still sadness of another world. The Master seemed like a relic left behind by Meiji.

  "A swallow, a swallow," he said in a low, husky voice, stopping arid looking up into the sky. Beyond him was a stone informing us that the Meiji Emperor had deigned to stay at the inn. The branches of a crape myrtle, not yet in bloom, spread above it. The Naraya had once been a way station for the military aristocracy and their parties.

  Onoda came up behind the Master, as if to shield him from something. The Master's wife had come to meet him at the stone bridge over the pond. In the morning and afternoon she would see him as far as the game room, and slip away when he had taken his place at the board. At noon and at the end of a day's session she was always at the pond by their room, waiting for him.

  The Master's figure, viewed from the rear, seemed oddly off balance. He had not yet come out of his trance, and the absolutely straight trunk and head were as if he were still at the Go board. He seemed uncertain on his feet. In a state of bemusement, he suggested some rarefied spirit floating over a void; and yet the lines of the figure we saw at the board were still unbroken. They gave off a sort of leftover fragrance, an afterglow.

  "A swallow, a swallow." Perhaps, as the words caught in his throat, the Master was for the first time aware that his posture had not yet returned to normal. So it was with the aged Master. My affection for him, the nostalgia he calls up, come from his power at such times to move me.

  15

  The first sign from the Master's wife that she was concerned about his health came on July 21, the day of the third Hakoné session.

  "He has been having pains here," she said, bringing a hand to her chest. He had, it seems, been aware of the trouble since spring.

  He had lost his appetite. The day before he had had no breakfast at all, and only a thin slice of toast and a glass of milk for lunch.

  During the third session I had noticed the twitching of the hollow cheeks that sagged over the prominent jaws, but I had thought that the heat was affecting him.

  That year it went on raining after the rainy season should have ended, and summer was late in coming. Then, before July 20, when the calendar has summer beginning, it suddenly turned warm. On July 21 a mist hung heavy over Mt. Myōjō. The garden was muggy and still. A black swallowtail butterfly hovered among the red lilies, fifteen and sixteen to a stem, at the veranda. Even the flock of crows cawing in the garden seemed warm. Eve
ryone, down to the clerk, was plying a fan. It was the first uncomfortably warm session since the beginning of the match.

  "Fierce," said Otaké, wiping at his forehead and hair with a small towel. "And Go is fierce too.

  ‘Up to Hakoné we've come, we've come,

  The steepest of them all…”{14}

  With time out for lunch, Otaké took three hours and thirty-five minutes to play Black 59.

  The Master, his right hand behind him and his left arm on an armrest, was unconcernedly fanning himself with his left hand. From time to time he looked out into the garden. He seemed cool and very much at ease. I could almost feel myself straining with the young Otaké, but the Master's strength seemed quiet, its centre far away.

  There were beads of oily sweat on his face, however. Suddenly he brought both hands to his face and pressed at his cheeks. "It must be fearful in Tokyo." His mouth was open for some moments afterwards, as if he were remembering the heat of another time, of a distant place.

  "Yes," said Onoda. "It turned hot very suddenly the day after we went to the lake." Onoda had just come from Tokyo. On the seventeenth, the day after the preceding session, the Master, Otaké, and Onoda had gone fishing on Lake Ashi.

  Three moves followed inevitably when, after long deliberation, Otaké had played Black 59. The stones were as if echoing one another. The situation in the upper reaches of the board was stabilized for the time. The next Black play was a difficult one, the range of possibilities being wide, but Otaké turned to the lower part of the board and played Black 63 after only a moment's thought. He had planned ahead, it seemed, and given himself over to his next assault, a slashing one of the sort that characterized his game. Having dispatched a spy against the White forces below, he returned to the upper part of the board. There was an aggressive impatience in the click of the stone.

  "I feel a little cooler now." Immediately he got up. He left his overskirt in the hall, and when he came out put it on backwards. "All backwards. Playing tricks on me. Skirt backwards is tricks, you know." He righted the error and tied a skillful figure-ten knot. Immediately he was off again, this time to the urinal. "The heat is worst when you're at the board," he said, back once more. He wiped vigorously at his glasses with the towel.

  It was three in the afternoon. The Master was having an ice. He deliberated for twenty minutes. Apparently Black 63 struck him as a trifle unorthodox.

  At the outset of the game, Otaké had been careful to warn the Master that he would frequently ask to be excused; but his departures from the board had been so frequent during the preceding session that the Master had thought them a little odd.

  "Is something wrong ?" he asked.

  "Kidneys. Nerves, really. When I have to think I have to go."

  "You shouldn't drink so much tea."

  "I know. But when I think I want to drink. Excuse me, if you will, please." And he got up again.

  This little way of Otaké's had become material for the gossip columns and the cartoons in the Go journals. The amount of walking he did in the course of a match, it was said, would take him down the Tōkaidō as far as Mishima.

  16

  Before leaving the board at the end of a session, the players would check the number of moves and the time consumed. The Master was not quick to understand.

  On July 16 Otaké sealed the last play, Black 43, at half past four. Informed that there had been a total of sixteen plays in the course of the day, the Master found the statement hard to accept.

  "Sixteen? Can we have made that many?"

  The girl explained again that from White 28 through the sealed play there had been a total of sixteen. Otaké concurred. The game was still in its early stages and there were only forty-two stones on the board. A glance should had sufficed to confirm the girl's statement, but the Master had his doubts. He counted up stone by stone on his fingers, and still did not seem convinced.

  "Let's line them up and see."

  Taking away the stones played that day, he and Otaké replaced them in alternation: one, two, three, and so to sixteen.

  "Sixteen?" muttered the Master vacantly. "Quite a day's work."

  "That's because you're so fast, sir," said Otaké.

  "Oh, but I'm not, though."

  The Master sat absently by the board and showed no inclination to leave. The others could not leave before him.

  "Suppose we go on over," said Onoda after a time. "You'll feel better."

  "Shall we have a game of chess?" said the Master, looking up as if he had just been awakened. There was nothing feigned about this air of abstraction.

  A mere sixteen plays scarcely demanded a recount, and a player has the whole of the board constantly in his head, when he is eating and even when he is sleeping. Perhaps it was a sign of dedication and a concern for precision that the Master all the same insisted on replaying each of the stones, and would not be satisfied until he had done so. Perhaps too it had in it a certain element of circumspection. One saw in the curious mannerism the loneliness of an old man who has not had too happy a life.

  At the fifth session five days later, July 21, there were twenty-two plays, from White 44 to the sealed Black 65.

  "How much time did I use?" the Master asked the girl.

  "An hour and twenty minutes."

  "That much?" He seemed incredulous. The total time he had used for his eleven plays was six minutes fewer than Otaké had used for Black 59 alone. Yet he seemed to think he had played more rapidly.

  "It does seem unlikely that you used so much time, sir," said Otaké. "You were playing at a fearful rate."

  "How much for the cap?"{15} the Master asked the girl.

  "Sixteen minutes."

  "The dead-end?"{16}

  "Twenty minutes."

  "The link took you longer," said Otaké.

  "White 58 that would be?" The girl looked at her records. "Thirty-five minutes."

  The Master still did not seem convinced. He took the chart from the girl and examined it intently.

  I like a good bath, and it was summer; and always when a session ended I went immediately to the bath house. Today Otaké was almost as quick as I was.

  "You made good progress."

  "The Master is fast and he makes no mistakes, and that gives him a double advantage," laughed Otaké. "The game is as good as over."

  I could still feel the strength that seemed to flow from him when he was at the board. It was something of an embarrassment to meet a Go player just before or after a session.

  This restless energy suggested great resolve. Branded on his mind, perhaps, was a plan for a violent attack.

  Onoda of the Sixth Rank too was astonished at the Master's speed.

  "Eleven hours would be more than enough for him even in a grand tournament. But it's a difficult spot. That cap isn't the kind of play you make in a hurry."

  Through the fourth session, on July 16, White had used four hours and thirty-eight minutes, and Black six hours and fifty-two minutes. At the end of the fifth session, on July 21, the difference was even greater: five hours and fifty-seven minutes for White, ten hours and twenty-eight minutes for Black.

  At the end of the sixth session, on July 31{17}, White had used eight hours and thirty-two minutes, Black twelve hours and forty-three minutes; and at the end of the seventh on August 5, White had used ten hours and thirty-one minutes, Black fifteen hours and forty-five minutes.

  But by the tenth session, on August 14, the distance had narrowed: White had used fourteen hours and fifty-eight minutes as against Black's seventeen hours and forty-seven minutes. It was on that day, after sealing White 100, that the Master went into St. Luke's Hospital. Struggling bravely on despite his illness, he had used two hours and seven minutes for a single play, White 90, on August 5.

  When finally the match ended on December 4, there was an uncomfortable difference of some fourteen or fifteen hours between the two. Shūsai the Master had used nineteen hours and fifty-seven minutes, and Otaké of the Seventh Rank had used
thirty-four hours and nineteen minutes.

  17

  Nineteen hours and fifty-seven minutes would be very near the time allotted both players in an ordinary match, but the Master still had more than twenty hours left. Otaké with his thirty-four hours and nineteen minutes still had almost six hours.

  The Master's White 130 was the careless play that proved fatal. If he had not made the mistake, and if the match had continued with the two sides generally equal or the advantage for the one or the other very small, it seems likely that Otaké would have hung on until he had used the whole of his forty hours. After White 130, he knew that he had won.

  Both the Master and Otaké were famous for tenacity, and both were given to long deliberation. Otaké would wait until most of his time was gone; and his way of making a hundred and more plays in the last minute gave his game its own peculiar ferocity. The Master, disciplined in an age when there were no time restrictions, was not capable of such a tour de force. Indeed he had probably insisted upon forty hours so that the last battle of his life might be quite free from the pressures of time.

  The time allotment in the Master's title matches had always been large. It was sixteen hours when in 1926 he played Karigané of the Seventh Rank. Karigané lost because he ran out of time, but a victory by five or six points for the Master's White seemed unshakable. Indeed there were those who said that Karigané should have played like a man, and not allowed insufficient time to be the excuse for his defeat. When the Master played Wu of the Fifth Rank, twenty-four hours were allotted each player.

  For the Master's retirement match, the time was about double that for even these unusually long matches, and four times that for an ordinary match. Time restrictions could as well have been dispensed with.

  If this extraordinary time allotment was made at the Master's behest, then it may be said that he took upon himself a heavy burden. He had to endure both his own illness and long periods of meditation on the part of his adversary. Those thirty-four hours should argue the case convincingly enough.