The Master of Go

by Yusanari Kawabata

  Again, the arrangement to play every fifth day was out of deference to the Master's age; but in fact it added to the burden. If both sides had used the allotted time to the full, a total of eighty hours, and each session had lasted five hours, then there would have been a total of sixteen sessions - which is to say that even if the match had proceeded without interruption it would have lasted some three months. Anyone who knows the spirit of Go knows too that the required concentration cannot be maintained or the tension endured for three whole months. They mean something akin to a whittling away of the player's physical being. The Go board is with a player waking and sleeping, and a four-day recess therefore meant not rest but exhaustion.

  The recesses became even more trying after the Master fell ill. The Master himself, of course, and the managers as well, wanted to be finished with the match on the earliest day possible. He must be allowed to rest, and there was a danger that he might collapse along the way.

  He had even said to his wife, she told me sadly, that he no longer cared who won, he only wanted to be finished with it all.

  "And not once before in his whole life has he said that sort of thing."

  "He won't improve as long as the match goes on," one of the managers is reported to have said, his head bowed. "I've sometimes thought he might do well just to throw it over. But of course he couldn't. His art means too much to him. I haven't really taken the possibility seriously, of course. It's just a thought that comes to me at bad moments."

  It may have been a professional remark of a confidential nature, but the moments must have been very bad ones indeed. The Master himself had not once been heard to complain. Indeed through his competitive career of a half century he had probably won a considerable number of games by being a very little more patient than his adversary. Nor was the Master one to exaggerate his unhappiness or discomfort.

  18

  Once shortly after play was resumed at Itō I asked the Master whether he meant to return to St. Luke's Hospital when the match was over, or winter as usual in Atami.

  "The question is whether I last that long," he said, as if taking me into his confidence. "It seems strange that I've come as far as I have. I'm not much of a thinker, and I don't have what you might call beliefs. People talk about my responsibility to the game, but that hasn't been enough to bring me this far. And they can call it physical strength if they like - but that really isn't it either." He spoke slowly, his head slightly bowed. "Maybe I have no nerves. A vague, absent sort - maybe the vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and in Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go. That sort of thing." The Master seemed to savour the word as he spoke, and I savoured it as I listened.

  It was not like the Master to discuss his feelings so openly. He was not one to show emotion on his face or in his speech. More than once through my long hours of observing the match, I had suddenly felt that I was savouring a quite ordinary word or gesture of the Master's.

  Hirotsuki Zekken, who had been the Master's faithful supporter since 1908, when he succeeded to the title Hon-nimbō, and who had collaborated in his writings, once wrote that in more than thirty years of service he had not received a single word of thanks from the Master. He had mistakenly taken the Master for a chilly, unfeeling man, he added. And when people said that the Master was using Zekken, the Master is said to have responded with lordly indifference, as if to say that the question was not of a sort that he chose to concern himself with. Reports that the Master was not very clean in financial matters were also mistaken, said Zekken, and he could offer ample evidence to refute them.

  Nor did the Master offer anyone a word of thanks during his retirement match. His wife took responsibility for such niceties. He was not presuming upon his rank and title. He was being himself.

  When professionals in the Go world came to him with problems, he would grunt and fall silent, and it was very difficult indeed to guess his views. Since one could hardly press a point upon so exalted a person, he must have been a source of much uncertainty, I sometimes thought. His wife would act as aide and moderator, seeking to temper his unconditional silence.

  This somewhat dull and insensitive side of his nature, the slowness of apprehension that he himself had called "vagueness," was very apparent in his hobbies and diversions. In chess and Renju of course, and in billiards and mahjong as well, he was die despair of his adversaries for the time he spent in thought.

  He played billiards a number of times with Otaké and myself during our stay in Hakoné. He would score perhaps seventy if the other player were generous. Otaké kept careful tally, as became a professional. "Forty-two for me, fourteen for Wu…"

  The Master would think out each stroke at his leisure, and after he had taken up his position he would draw the cue endlessly back and forth through his hand. One tends to think that in billiards good form depends upon the speed of the flow from shoulder and arm to billiard ball, but in the case of the Master there was no such flow at all. One quite lost patience as he slipped the cue back and forth. But, watching, I would feel a kind of sadness and affection.

  When he played mahjong he would line up his tiles on a long, narrow piece of white paper. Taking the neatness of the folded paper and the row of tiles as a mark of the Master's fastidiousness, I once asked him about it.

  "Yes. They're clearer and easier to see when you have them on white paper. Try it sometime."

  In mahjong too the key to victory is supposed to be brisk, quick play; but the Master deliberated each move at length. His adversaries, pushed beyond boredom, would presently flag and fall. Lost in his own game, the Master was quite oblivious of the feelings of others. He was not even aware of the fact that he sometimes dragged people kicking and struggling into a game.

  19

  "You do not learn about your opponent's character when you play Go or when you play chess," the Master once remarked, apropos of amateur Go. "Trying to judge your opponent's character perverts the whole spirit of the game." Presumably he was annoyed at amateur theoreticians of Go. "I lose myself in the game, and my opponent stops mattering."

  On January 2, 1940, which is to say a half month before his death, the Master participated in the game of linked Go that officially opened the year for the Go Association. The players who assembled at the Association offices made five plays each, the equivalent of leaving their calling cards. Since the wait seemed likely to be a long one, a second game was started. The Master took his place opposite Seo of the Second Rank, who had no other partner, at White 20 of the second game. They made their five plays each, from Black 21 to White 30. There being no others to follow, the game was to be suspended at White 30. Even so, the Master spent forty minutes thinking about his last play. He was the last to appear in what was after all a ceremonial observance, and he could as well have made his play immediately and been done with the matter.

  I went to see him at St. Luke's Hospital during the three-month recess in his retirement match. The furnishings were huge, to fit the American physique. There was something precarious about the Master's small figure perched on the lofty bed. The dropsical swelling had largely gone from his face, and his cheeks were somewhat fuller; but more striking was a certain lightness in the figure, as if he had thrown off a heavy spiritual burden. He seemed carefree and almost lackadaisical, a different old gentleman from the Master at the Go board.

  A reporter from the Nichinichi chanced to be visiting him too. The competitions, he said, had proved extremely popular. Every Saturday readers were invited to submit opinions as to how at certain crucial points the match should proceed.

  "This week's problem is Black 91," I ventured to add. "Black 91?" The expression on the Master's face was as if he were gazing at a Go board.

  I regretted my remark. One was not to talk about Go. But I went on to explain: "White jumps one space, and Black plays on the diagonal away from himself."

  "Oh, that.
But there's nothing for him to do but play next to his own stone either on the horizontal or on the diagonal. I imagine plenty of people will come up with the answer." As he spoke he brought himself into an upright kneeling position, knees together, head up. It was his posture at the Go board. There was a cold, severe dignity in it. For a time it was as if, face to face with a void, he had lost all consciousness of his own identity.

  It did not seem, now or at the linked match, that devotion to his art made him take each move so seriously, or that he was overdoing his responsibilities as the Master. It seemed rather that what must happen was happening.

  When a younger player was trapped into a game with the Master, he was left quite exhausted at the end of it. There was, for example, a one-lance handicap game{18} he played with Otaké during our stay at Hakoné: it lasted from ten in the morning until six in the evening. Then there was a chess game during a three-match Go contest between Otaké and Wu, sponsored by this same Tokyo Nichinichi. The Master did the commentary and I was reporter for the second match. The Master forced Fujisawa Kuranosuké of the Fifth Rank, who also happened to be present, into a game of chess which lasted from noon through the afternoon and evening and on until three in the morning. The moment he saw Fujisawa the next day, the Master pulled out his chess board again. So it was with the Master.

  We had gathered the night before the second Hakoné session. "The Master is astonishing," said Sunada, a Nichinichi Go reporter who was acting as a sort of factotum for the Master. "On every one of these last four days when he is supposed to have been resting, he has come around first thing in the morning and challenged me to a game of billiards. We've played all day long and on into the night, every single day. He's not just a genius. He's inhuman."

  The Master had not once, it is said, complained to his wife of weariness from competitive play. There is a story she likes to tell of his ability to sink himself into a game. I myself heard it at the Naraya.

  "We were living at Kōgai-chō in Azabu. It wasn't a very big house, and he had matches and practice in a ten-mat room. The trouble was that the eight-mat room next door was the parlour. Sometimes we had rather noisy guests. He was having a match one day with I don't remember who when my sister came by to show me her new baby. Babies will be babies, and it cried the whole of the time. I was frantic and only wished she would go away; but I hadn't seen her for a very long time, and she had come for a very special reason, and I couldn't tell her to go. When she did finally leave, I went to apologize for all the noise. And do you know he hadn't heard a thing! He hadn't known she was there, and hadn't heard the baby." And she added: "Ogishi used to say that he wanted as soon as he possibly could to be like the Master. Every night before he went to sleep he would sit up in bed and meditate. There was the Okada school of meditation in those days, you know."

  The Ogishi she referred to was Ogishi Sōji of the Sixth Rank, so outstanding a pupil that he was said to have had a monopoly on the Master's trust and confidence and the Master had thought of making him heir to the title Honnimbō. He died in January, 1924, at the age of twenty-seven by the Oriental count. The Master in his last years was constantly being reminded of Ogishi.

  Nozawa Chikuchō has similar stories of how, during his days in the Fourth Rank, he would have games at the Master's house. Off in the houseboy's room some very young disciples who were living with the Master were one day making a stir that could be heard in the game room itself. Nozawa went off to caution them. They were certain to be scolded by the Master, he said. But the Master, it appeared, had heard nothing.

  20

  "All through lunch he sat gazing off into space," said his wife. "He must have been in a difficult spot." It was July 26, the day of the fourth Hakoné session. "I told him it wouldn't do. If he went on eating as if he didn't know he was eating, his stomach would rebel. I told him he would ruin his digestion if he didn't put himself into a mood for it. He frowned and went on looking off into space."

  The Master apparently had not expected the violent attack that came with Black 69. He deliberated his response for an hour and forty-six minutes. It was his slowest play since the beginning of the match.

  But Otaké had probably been planning Black 69 all through the recess. At the beginning of the session he reread the situation for twenty minutes, as if restraining an impulse toward haste. He seemed to exude strength, he swayed violently, he thrust a knee toward die board. Briskly he played Black 67 and Black 69. Then he laughed a high laugh.

  "A thunder storm? A tempest?"

  Dark clouds were blowing up. There was rain on the lawn, and then rain against the glass doors that had hastily been pulled shut. Otaké's jest was of a sort he was much given to, but it had the sound of fulfillment as well.

  An expression flickered across the Master's face as of astonishment or foreboding, and at the same time as of feigned bewilderment, meant to please and amuse. Even so ambiguous an expression was unusual for the Master.

  Black made a very curious play during the sessions at Itō, a sealed play that seemed to take advantage of the fact that it was a sealed play. The Master could scarcely wait for the recess to let his indignation be known. He thought that the game had been sullied and he was on the point of forfeiting. Seated at the board, however, he had not let his face reveal a trace of his feelings. No one among the spectators could have guessed their intensity.

  Black 69 was like the flash of a dagger. The Master fell into silent thought, and the time came for the noon recess. Otaké stood beside the board even after the Master had left.

  "Now we're in for it," he said. "This is the divide." He continued to look down at the board as if unable to tear himself away.

  "A little unkind of you ?" I said.

  "He's always making me do the thinking." Otaké laughed brightly.

  But the Master played White 70 as soon as he returned from lunch. It was all too clear that he had made use of the noon recess, not charged against his time allotment; but the trickery was not in the Master to conceal the misdemeanor by pretending to deliberate his first afternoon play. The penalty was that he had spent the recess gazing into space.

  21

  That aggressive Black 69 has been described as "a diabolic stroke." The Master himself said afterwards that it had the sort of ferocity Otaké was known for. Everything depended upon the White response. If it proved inadequate, White could quite easily have lost control of the board. The Master deliberated an hour and forty-six minutes over White 70. His longest period of meditation came ten days later, on August 5, when he spent two hours and seven minutes on White 90. White 70 was his second slowest play.

  If Black 69 was diabolically aggressive, White 70 was a brilliant holding play. Onoda, among others, was speechless with admiration. The Master stood firm and averted a crisis. He retreated a pace and forestalled disaster. A magnificent play, it cannot have been easy to make. Black had charged into a headlong assault, and with this one play White had turned it back. Black had made gains, and yet it seemed that White, casting away the dressings from his wounds, had emerged with greater lightness and freedom of action.

  The sky was dark with the squall Otaké had called a tempest, and the lights were on. The white stones, reflected on the mirrorlike face of the board, became one with the figure of the Master, and the violence of the wind and rain in the garden seemed to intensify the stillness of the room.

  The squall soon passed. A mist trailed over the mountain, and the sky brightened from the direction of Odawara, down the river. The sun struck the rise beyond the valley, locusts shrilled, the glass doors at the veranda were opened again. Four black puppies were sporting on the lawn as Otaké played Black 73. Once more the sky was lightly clouded over.

  There had been showers early in the morning. Seated on the veranda, Kumé Masao had said at the morning session: "What a feeling it gives a person just to be sitting here." His voice was soft but intense. "A clean, transparent feeling."

  Kumé, who had recently become literary editor for
the Nichinichi, had stayed over to be present at the session. He was the first novelist in many years to become a literary editor. Go fell within his jurisdiction.

  He knew almost nothing about Go. He would sit on the veranda, now looking at the mountains and now looking at the players. Psychic waves seemed to come to him from the players all the same. The Master would be sunk in anguished thought, and an expression of anguish would cross Kumé's good-natured face.

  I could not pretend to know much more about Go than Kumé did; but even so it seemed to me that the unmoving stones, as I gazed at them from the side of the board, spoke to me as living creatures. The sound of the stones on the board seemed to echo vastly through another world.

  The game site was an outbuilding, three rooms in a row, one of ten mats and two of nine. There were nemu blossoms in the alcove of the ten-mat room.

  "They seem ready to fall," said Otaké.

  White 80 was the sealed play, and die fifteenth of the day. The Master did not seem to hear the girl's warning that four o'clock, the hour appointed for the end of the session, was near. She hesitated, leaning slightly forward.

  "You will seal your play, please, sir, if you don't mind," said Otaké in her place, as if shaking a drowsy child.

  The Master seemed, at length, to hear. He muttered something to himself. His voice caught in his throat, and I do not know what he said. Thinking that the sealed play would have been decided upon, the secretary of the Association readied an envelope; but the Master sat vacantly on, as if apart from the matter at hand.

  "I haven't decided," he said finally. The expression on his face was as of having been away from reality and not being able to return quite yet.