The Master of Go

by Yusanari Kawabata

  "Already?" he said in astonishment, seeing on his return that White 110 had been played.

  "It was rude of me not to wait," said the Master.

  Arms folded, Otaké was listening to the wind. "Might we call it a wintry gale, or are we still too early? I think we might, on the twenty-eighth of November."

  The west wind had quieted from morning, but an occasional gust still passed.

  The Master had glared threateningly toward the upper left with White 108, but Otaké had defended with Black 109 and 111 and rescued his stones. Under White attack, the Black ranks in the corner faced difficulties. Would the Black stones die, would the kō situation{39} arise? The possibilities were as varied as in a textbook problem.

  "I must do something about that corner," said Otaké as Black 109 was opened. "It's on long-term loan, and the interest is high." And he proceeded to solve the riddle the corner had presented and to restore calm.

  Today, surprisingly, the match had advanced five plays by eleven in the morning. Black 115 was not an easy play for Otaké, however. The time had come to stake everything on a grand assault.

  Waiting for Black to play, the Master talked of eel restaurants in Atami, the Jūbako and the Sawashō and the like. And he told of having come to Atami in the days before the railway went beyond Yokohama. The rest of the journey was by sedan chair, with an overnight stop in Odawara.

  "I was thirteen or so, I suppose. Fifty and more years ago."

  "Ages and ages ago," smiled Otaké. "My father would just about then have been born." Complaining of stomach cramps, he left the board two or three times while deliberating his next move.

  "He does take his time," said the Master during one of the absences. "More than an hour already?"

  "It will soon be an hour and a half," said the girl who kept the records. The noonday siren blew. "Exactly a minute," she said, looking at the stopwatch of which she was so proud. "It begins to taper off at fifty-five seconds."

  Back at the board, Otaké rubbed Salomethyl on his forehead and pulled at the joints of his fingers. He kept an eye medicine called Smile beside him. He had not seemed prepared to play before the noon recess, but at eight minutes after the hour there came the smart click of stone on board.

  The Master grunted. He had been leaning on an armrest. Now he brought himself upright, his jaw drawn in, his eyes rolled upwards as if to bore a hole through the board. He had thick eyelids, and the deep lines from the eyelashes to the eyes set off the intentness of his gaze.

  White now needed to defend his inner territories against the clear threat presented by Black 115. The noon recess came.

  Otaké sat down at the board after lunch and immediately went back to his room for a throat medicine. A strong door spread through the room. He put drops in his eyes and two hand-warmers in his sleeves.

  White 116 took twenty-two minutes. The plays down to White 120 came in quick succession. The standard pattern would have had the Master falling quickly back with White 120, but he chose a firm block even though the result was an unstable triangular formation. The air was tense, for a showdown was at hand. If he had given ground it would have been to concede a point or two, and he could not make even so small a concession in so tight a match. He took just one minute for a play that could mean the fine difference between victory and defeat, and for Otaké it was like cold steel. And was the Master not already counting his points? He was counting with quick little jerks of his head. The count pressed on relentlessly.

  Games can be won and lost by a single point. If White was clinging stubbornly to a mere two points, then it was for Black to step boldly forward. Otaké squirmed. For the first time a blue vein stood out on the round, childlike face. The sound of his fan was rough, irritable.

  Even the Master, so sensitive to the cold, was nervously fanning himself. I could not look at the two of them. Finally the Master let out his breath and slipped into an easier posture.

  "I start thinking and there's no end to it," said Otaké, whose play it was. "I'm warm. You must forgive me." And he took off his cloak. Prompted by Otaké, the Master pulled back the neck of his kimono with both hands and thrust his head forward. There was something a little comical about the act.

  "It's hot, it's hot. Here I am taking forever again. I wish I didn't have to." Otaké seemed to be fighting back a reckless impulse. "I have a feeling I'm going to make a mistake. Make a botch of the whole thing."

  After meditating on the problem for an hour and forty-four minutes, he sealed his Black 121 at three forty-three in the afternoon.

  For the twenty-one plays during the three Itō sessions, Black 101 to Black 121, Otaké had used eleven hours and forty-eight minutes. The Master had used only one hour and thirty-seven minutes. Had it been an ordinary match, Otaké would have exhausted his time allotment on a mere eleven plays.

  One could see in the divergence a spiritual incompatibility, and perhaps something physiological as well. The Master too was known as a careful, deliberate player.

  37

  Every night the west wind blew; but the morning of the next session, December 1, was warm and pleasant. One looked for springlike shimmerings in the air.

  After a game of chess the day before, the Master had gone into town for a game of billiards. He had been at mahjong until almost midnight with Iwamoto, Murashima, and Yawata. That morning he was out strolling in the garden before eight. Red dragonflies lay on the ground.

  The maple below Otaké's upstairs room was still half green. Otaké was up at seven thirty. He feared he might be defeated by stomach cramps, he said. He had ten varieties of medicine on his desk.

  The aging Master seemed to have fought off his cold, and his young adversary was suffering from varied complaints. Otaké was, surprisingly, the more highly strung of the two. Away from the board, the Master sought to distract himself with other games. Once he had returned to his room he never touched a Go stone. Otaké apparently stayed close to the board all through the days of rest and was assiduous in his study of the most recent formations. The difference had to do not only with age but with temperament as well.

  "The Condor flew in last night at ten thirty." The Master went to the managers' room on the morning of the first. "Can you imagine such speed!"

  The sun was bright against the paper doors of the game room, which faced southeast.

  A strange thing happened before the session could begin.

  Having submitted the seals for verification, Yawata opened the envelope. He leaned over the board, the chart in his hand, and looked for Black 121. He could not find it.

  The player whose turn it is at the end of a session marks his sealed play on the chart, which he puts in an envelope, showing it to no one. At the end of the preceding session Otaké had stepped into the hall to set down his play. The two players had put their seals on the envelope, which Yawata had sealed in a larger envelope, kept in the safe of the inn through the recess. Thus neither the Master nor Yawata knew Otaké's play. The possibilities were limited, however, and the play seemed fairly predictable to us who were watching. We looked on in great excitement. Black 121 might well be the climax of the game.

  Yawata should have found it immediately, but his eyes wandered over the chart. "Ah!" he said at length. I was some slight distance from the board, and even after the Black stone had been played I had difficulty finding it. When presently I did find it, I was at a loss for an explanation. Off in the remote upper reaches of the board, it lay apart from the fight that was coming to a climax at the centre.

  Even to an amateur like myself it had the look of a play from the kō situation to a distant part of the board.{40} A wave of revulsion came over me. Had Otaké taken advantage of the fact that Black 121 was a sealed play? Had he put the device of the sealed play to tactical use? If so, he was not being worthy of himself.

  "I expected it to be near the centre," said Yawata, smiling wryly as he drew back from the board.

  Black had set out to destroy the massive White position from the
lower right toward the centre of the board, and it seemed quite irrational that at the very height of the attack he should play elsewhere. Understandably, Yawata had looked for the sealed play in the battle zone, from the centre down toward the right. The Master shielded his "eyes"{41} by playing White 122 in response to Black 121. If he had not, the eight White stones at the top of the board would have been dead. It would have been as if he had declined to answer a play from kō.

  Otaké reached for a stone, and went on thinking for a time. His hands tightly folded on his knees, his head cocked to one side, the Master sat in an attitude of great concentration.

  Black 123, which took three minutes, brought Otaké back to the task of cutting into the White formation. He first invaded the lower right corner. Black 127 turned once more to the centre of the board, and Black 129 finally lashed out to decapitate the triangle the Master had so stubbornly put together with White 120.

  Wu of the Sixth Rank commented: "Firmly blocked by White 120, Black embarked with resolution upon the aggressive sequence from Black 123 to Black 129. It is the sort of play, suggesting a strongly competitive spirit, which one sees in close games."

  But the Master pulled away from this slashing attack, and, counterattacking to the right, blocked the thrust from the Black position. I was startled. It was a wholly unexpected play. I felt a tensing of my muscles, as if the diabolic side of the Master had suddenly been revealed. Detecting a flaw in the plans suggested by Black 129, so much in Otaké's own characteristic style, had the Master dodged away and turned to in-fighting by way of counterattack? Or was he asking for a slash so that he might slash back, wounding himself to down his adversary ? I even saw in that White 130 something that spoke less of a will to fight than of angry disdain.

  "A fine thing," Otaké muttered over and over again. "A very fine thing." He was still deliberating Black 131 when the noon recess was called. "A fine thing he's done to me. A terrible thing, that's what it is. Earthshaking. I make a stupid play myself, and here I am with my arm twisted behind me."

  "This is what war must be like," said Iwamoto gravely. He meant of course that in actual battle the unforeseeable occurs and fates are sealed in an instant. Such were the implications of White 130. All the plans and studies of the players, all the predictions of us amateurs and of the professionals as well had been sent flying.

  An amateur, I did not immediately see that White 130 assured the defeat of "the invincible Master."

  38

  Yet I was aware that something unusual had happened. Whether we somehow followed the Master to lunch or whether he somehow invited us to come with him I do not know, but we were in his room; and as we sat down he said in a low but intense voice: "The match is over. Mr. Otaké ruined it with that sealed play. It was like smearing ink over the picture we had painted. The minute I saw it I felt like forfeiting the match. Like telling them it was the last straw. I really thought I should forfeit. But I hesitated, and that was that."

  I do not remember whether Yawata was with us, or Goi, or both. In any case, we were silent.

  "He makes a play like that, and why?" growled the Master. "Because he means to use two days to think things over. It's dishonest."

  We said nothing. We could neither nod assent nor seek to defend Otaké. But our sympathies were with the Master.

  I had not been aware, at the moment of play, that the Master was so angry and so disappointed as to consider forfeiting the match. There was no sign of emotion on his face or in his manner as he sat at the board. No one among us sensed his distress.

  We had been watching Yawata, of course, as he was having his troubles with the chart and the sealed play, and we had not looked at the Master. Yet the Master had played White 122 in literally no time, less than a minute. It was understandable that we should not have noticed. The minute had not started precisely when Yawata found the sealed play, to be sure; and yet the Master had brought himself under control in a very short time, and maintained his composure throughout the session.

  To have these angry words from the Master, who had so nonchalantly made his next play, was something of a shock. I felt in them a concentrated essence, the Master doing battle from June down into December.

  The Master had put the match together as a work of art. It was as if the work, likened to a painting, were smeared black at the moment of highest tension. That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the forms of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony as of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary. That Black 121 having been a source of wonder and surprise and doubt and suspicion for us all, its effect in cutting the flow and harmony of the game cannot be denied.

  Black 121 was much discussed among the professionals of the Go world and in the larger world as well. To an amateur like me the play most definitely seemed strange and unnatural, and not at all pleasing. But afterwards there were professionals who came forward and said that it was time for just such a play.

  "I had been thinking that the time was ripe for Black 121 one of these times," said Otaké in his "Thoughts after Combat."

  Wu touched only lightly on the play. After a diagonal linking on White's part at E-19 or F-19, he said, "White need not respond as the Master did with 122 even to Black's 121, but could defend himself at H-19. Black would thus find the possible plays from kō more limited."

  No doubt Otaké's explanation would have been similar.

  Black 121 had come as the battle at the centre was reaching a climax, and it had been a sealed play. It had angered the Master and aroused suspicions in the rest of us. In a difficult situation, a player might, in effect, make a sealed play like Black 121 as a temporary expedient, and until the next session, in this case three days later, give thought to what the last play of the preceding session should in fact have been. I had even heard of players who, at perhaps one of the grand tournaments, would play as if from kō to the far reaches of the board while the last allotted seconds were being read off, and so prolong life a few seconds more. All manner of devices had been invented to make use of recesses and sealed plays. New rules bring new tactics. It was not perhaps entirely accidental that each of the four sessions since play had been resumed at Itō had been ended with a sealed play on the Black side.

  The Master was so ready for a showdown that he said afterwards: "The time had passed for pulling back with White 120." And the next play was this Black 121.

  The important point, in any case, is that Black 121 angered and disappointed the Master that morning.

  In his review of the game the Master did not touch upon Black 121.

  A year later, however, in "Selected Pieces on Go,' from Collected Works of the Master, he spoke out quite openly. "Now was the time to make effective use of Black 121…We must note that if he proceeded at his leisure (which is to say waited until White had linked diagonally), there was a chance that Black 121 would not suffice."

  Since Otaké's opponent himself made the admission, little doubt should remain. He was angry at the time because the move was so unexpected. In his anger he unjustly questioned Otaké's motives.

  Perhaps, embarrassed at the want of clarity, the Master made a special point of touching upon Black 121. But is it not more likely that, in a work published a year after the match and a half year before his death{42} he remembered the proportions of the controversy and quietly recognized the play for what it was?

  The Master's "now" was Otaké's "one of these times." To an amateur like me something of a puzzle still remained.

  39

  Another puzzle: why did the Master play White 130 and so ensure his own defeat?

  He made the play at eleven thirty-four, after twenty-seven minutes of deliberation. It was a matter of chance, I suppose, that he should have made a bad play after deliberating almost a half hour. Yet I was so
rry afterwards that he had not waited another hour and so carried the play past the noon recess. If he had left the board and taken an hour and a half's rest, he would probably have played more effectively. He would not have fallen victim to a passing wraith, so to speak. He had twenty-three hours of play remaining, and need not have worried about an hour or two. But the Master was not one to make tactical use of a recess. It was Black 131 that had the advantage of the recess.

  White 130 seemed like a counterattack at close quarters, and Otaké said that he had been left with his arm twisted behind him.

  This was Wu's comment: "It is a delicate spot. White 130 may be seen as an effective play in response to a cutting thrust."

  Yet White should not have retreated before the thrust, however telling. To pull back from a conflict so fierce, a challenge so determined, means to give way completely.

  Through the Itō sessions Otaké had played a careful, solid game, control reinforcing control, tenacity backing up tenacity. The sudden eruption of his accumulated powers came with the cut at Black 129. Otaké seems to have been by no means as startled and confused by White's withdrawal as the rest of us were. If White took the four black stones to the right, Black would quite simply overrun the White ranks toward the centre of the board. Black did not respond to White 130, but extended Black 129 with Black 131. White returned to the defense at the centre with White 132. He should rather have responded directly to Black 129.

  The Master lamented the play in his review of the match. "White 130 was the fatal error. The proper sequence would have been to cut immediately at P-11, and see how Black replied. If for instance he replied at P-12, then White 130 would be the correct play. Even if he extended, as with Black 131, White need not hurry with the oblique extension at Q-8, but could quietly consolidate his ranks with M-9. Whatever variations might have occurred, the lines would have been more complex than on the chart as we have it, and an extremely close fight would have ensued. The coup de grâce came with the assault following upon Black 133. However desperate he might be in his search for remedies, White was powerless to send the crushing wave back."