The Master of Go

by Yusanari Kawabata

  The fatal play suggested a psychological or a physiological failure. I myself, amateur though I am, thought at the time that with White 130, which seemed a strong play and which seemed a quiet, withdrawn sort of play, the Master, consistently on the defensive, was trying to turn the tide; and at the same time I felt that his patience was at an end, his temper taxed to the breaking. But he said that if he had cut Black at a single point he could have saved himself. It would seem that the mistake resulted from more than an outburst of the anger the Master had felt all morning. Yet one cannot be sure. The Master himself could not have measured the tides of destiny within him, or the mischief from those passing wraiths.

  As the Master played White 130, the sound of a virtuoso flute came drifting in, to quiet somewhat the storm on the board.

  The Master listened. He seemed to be reminiscing.

  " 'From high in the hills, see the valley below.

  Melons in blossom, all in a row!

  "The first piece you learn on the flute. There is another kind of bamboo flute, you know, with one hole less than this one. The single-joint,{43} they call it."

  Otaké pondered over Black 131 for an hour and fifteen minutes, exclusive of the noon recess. At two in the afternoon he took up a stone.

  "Shall I?" He paused and finally played.

  The Master, seated bolt upright, thrust his head forward and rapped irritably on the rim of the brazier. He glared at the board. He was counting up points.

  The White triangle that had been cut off by Black 129 was cut on the other side by Black 133, and, with white stones in check play after play down to Black 139, the "earthshaking" changes of which Otaké had spoken took shape around and below the three white stones. Black had invaded the very heart of the White formation. I could almost hear the sound of the collapse.

  "I don't know. It's all the same. I don't know," muttered the Master, fanning himself furiously. Should he take the two black stones beside him or pursue his line of flight? "I don't know, I don't know."

  But he played with remarkable speed, in twenty-eight minutes. Tea and refreshments were brought in.

  "I'm not feeling well, thank you." Otaké declined the helping of mushizushi{44} the Master pressed upon him.

  "Think of it as medicine."

  "I was sure this would be the sealed play," said Otaké, contemplating White 140. "You play so fast, sir, you have my head spinning. Nothing upsets me more."

  Black 145 was the sealed play. Otaké took a stone in his hand and went on thinking, and the time appointed for the end of the session arrived. He withdrew into the hall to set down his sealed play. The Master continued to gaze at the board. His lower eyelids seemed inflamed and somewhat swollen. Through the sessions at Itō he was constantly looking at his watch.

  40

  "I think I would like if possible to finish today," the Master said to the managers on the morning of December 4. In the course of the morning's session he said to Otaké: "Suppose we finish today." Otaké nodded quietly.

  The faithful battle reporter, I felt a tightening in my chest at the thought that after more than half a year the match was to finish today. And the Master's defeat was clear to everyone.

  It was also in the morning, at a time when Otaké was away from the board, that the Master turned to us and smiled pleasantly. "It's all over. Nothing more to be done."

  I do not know when he had called a barber, but this morning he resembled a shaven-headed priest. He had come to Itō with his hair long and parted, as in the hospital, and dyed black; and now, suddenly, it was cropped short. One might have seen histrionics in this refashioning; yet he seemed young and brisk, as if a layer of aging had been washed away.

  December 4 was a Sunday. There were one or two plum blossoms in the garden. Since numbers of guests had come to the inn on Saturday, the session was held in the new addition, in the room that had always been mine, next to the Master's. The Master's room was at the far end of the new building. The managers had the night before occupied the two rooms directly above. They were in effect protecting the Master from incursions by other guests. Otaké, who had been on the second floor of the new building, had moved downstairs a day or two before. He was not feeling at all well, he said, and it was a trial to climb up and down stairs.

  The new building faced directly south. The garden was wide and open, and direct sunlight fell near the Go board.

  His head inclined to one side, his brows wrinkled and his torso sternly upright, the Master gazed at the board while Black 145 was being opened. Otaké played more rapidly, perhaps because he knew he had won.

  The tension of die final encounter at close quarters is unlike that through the opening and middle stages. Raw nerves seem to flash, there is something grand and even awesome about the two figures pressing forward into closer combat. Breath came more rapidly, as if two warriors were parrying with dirks; fires of knowledge and wisdom seemed to blaze up.

  It was the time when, in an ordinary game, Otaké would be going into his sprint, playing a hundred stones in the course of his last allotted minute. He still had a margin of some six or seven hours, and yet, as if riding the wave of his aroused nerves, he seemed intent upon keeping his momentum. He would reach for a stone as if whipping himself on, and then, from time to time, he would fall into deliberation. Even the Master would sometimes hesitate when he had a stone in his hand.

  Watching these last stages was like watching the quick motions of a precisely tooled machine, a relentless mathematical progression, and there was an aesthetic pleasure too in the order and the formal propriety. We were watching a battle, but it took clean forms. The figures of the players themselves, their eyes never leaving the board, added to the formal appropriateness.

  From about Black 177 to White 180, Otaké seemed in a state of rapture, in the grip of thoughts too powerful to contain. The round, full face had the completeness and harmony of a Buddha head. It was an indescribably marvellous face - perhaps he had entered a realm of artistic exaltation. He seemed to have forgotten his digestive troubles.

  Perhaps too worried to come nearer, Mrs. Otaké, that splendid Momotarō of a baby in her arms, had been walking in the garden, from which she gazed uneasily toward the game room.

  The Master, who had just played White 186, looked up as the long siren sounded from the direction of the beach. "There's room for you all," he said amiably, turning toward us.

  The autumn tournament having ended, Onoda of the Sixth Rank was in attendance. Others too were watching as the battle pressed to a close: Yawata of the Association, Goi and Sunada of the Nichinichi, the Itō correspondent for the Nichinichi, the managers and other functionaries. They were crowded together just inside the anteroom, and some were beyond the partition. The Master was inviting them to watch from nearer the board.

  That Buddha countenance lasted for but a moment. Otaké's face was alive again with a lust for battle. The small, beautifully erect figure of the Master as he counted up points seemed to take on a grandeur that stilled the air around him. When Otaké played Black 191, the Master's head fell forward, his eyes were wide, he moved nearer the board. Both men were fanning themselves violently. The noon recess came with Black 195.

  The afternoon session was moved back to the usual site, Room 6 in the main building. The sky clouded over from shortly after noon, and crows cawed incessantly. There was a light above the board, a sixty-watt bulb. The glare from a hundred watts would have been too much. Faint images the colour of the stones fell across the board. Perhaps in special observance of this last session, the innkeeper had changed the hangings in the alcove for twin landscapes by Kawabata Gyokushō{45}. Below them was a small statue of a Buddha on an elephant, and beside that a bowl of carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, mushrooms, trefoil parsley, and the like.

  The last stages of a grand match, I had heard, were so horrible that one could scarcely bear to watch. Yet the Master seemed quite unperturbed. One would not have guessed that he was the loser. A flush came over his cheeks from ab
out the two hundredth play, and he seemed a trifle pressed as for the first time he took off his muffler; but his posture remained impeccable. He was utterly quiet when Otaké made the last play, Black 237.

  As the Master filled in a neutral point, Onoda said: "It will be five points?"

  "Yes, five points," said the Master. Looking up through swollen eyelids, he made no motion toward rearranging the board. The game had ended at forty-two minutes past two in the afternoon.

  "I judged before they had redone the board{46} that it would be five points," said the Master, smiling, when the next day he had given his thoughts on the game. "I judged it would be sixty-eight against seventy-three. But I think if you actually redid the board you would not find that many." He rearranged the board for himself, and came to a score of fifty-six for Black against fifty-one for White.

  Until Black succeeded in destroying the White formation after that fatal White 130, no one had predicted a five-point difference. It had been careless of the Master not to take the offensive and cut at R-2{47} with perhaps White 160, the Master himself said, for he lost a chance thereby to reduce the proportions of Otaké's victory. One can see that such a play would have narrowed the difference to perhaps three points, even with that unfortunate White 130. What would have been the outcome, then, if the Master had not blundered and the "earthshaking" changes had not come? A defeat for Black? An amateur like myself cannot really say, but I do not think that Black would have lost. I had come almost to believe as an article of faith, from the manner, the resolve, with which Otaké approached the game, that he would avert defeat even if in the process he must chew the stones to bits.

  But one may say too that the sixty-four-year-old Master, gravely ill, played well to beat off violent assaults from the foremost representative of the new regulars until the moment late in the game when the initiative quite slipped from his hands. Neither was he taking advantage of poor play by Black nor was he unfolding a grand strategy of his own. The natural flow led into a close and delicate match. Yet perhaps because of his health the Master's game lacked persistence and tenacity.

  "The Invincible Master" had lost his final match.

  "The Master seems to have made it a principle to put everything into a game with the next in line, the one who might succeed him," said a disciple.

  Whether or not the Master himself had so stated the principle, he acted upon it throughout his career.

  The next day I went home to Kamakura. Then, scarcely able to finish my sixty-six newspaper instalments, I went as if fleeing the battlefield on a trip to Isé and Kyoto.

  I have heard that the Master stayed on at Itō, and gained weight, some four pounds, until he weighed upwards of seventy pounds; and that he visited a military convalescent home with twenty sets of Go stones. By the end of 1938, hot-spring inns were being used as convalescent homes.

  41

  It was New Year of the second year afterwards, just upwards of a year after the end of the retirement match: the Master and two of his disciples, Maeda of the Sixth Rank and Murashima of the Fifth Rank, attended New Year observances at the school (he offered lessons in his Kamakura house) of the Master's brother-in-law, Takahashi of the Fourth Rank. The day was January 7. I saw the Master for the first time since the match.

  He played two practice matches, but they seemed to tire him. No sound seemed to emerge from the stones as he dropped them lightly, unable to keep them between his fingers. During the second match his shoulders heaved occasionally from his breathing. His eyelids were swollen. The swelling was not particularly noticeable, but I thought of how he had been at Hakoné. He was still unwell.

  Since his opponents were amateurs and the matches were for practice, the Master should have had no trouble winning. As always, however, he quite lost himself in play. We had dinner reservations at a seaside hotel and the second match was suspended at Black 130. The Master's opponent was a strong amateur of the First Rank, whom he gave a four-stone handicap. Black showed strength from the middle stages of the game and was pushing into White's broad but rather thin positions.

  "Black seems to have the better of it?" I asked Takahashi.

  "Yes," he said. "It's a blackish board. Black is thicker. White is having trouble. Our Master is getting a little senile. He breaks more easily than he used to. He can't really play any more, as a matter of fact. He's gone down at a fearful rate since that last match."

  "Yes, he does seem to have taken on the years in a hurry."

  "He's turned into a sweet old gentleman. I doubt if it would have happened if he had won that last game."

  "I will see you in Atami," I said to the Master as I left the hotel.

  The Master and his wife arrived at the Urokoya on January 15. I had been staying at the Juraku from some days earlier. My wife and I went to the Urokoya on the afternoon of the sixteenth. The Master immediately brought out a chess board, and we played two games. I am an inept chess player and was not enthusiastic, and he had no trouble defeating me even at a rook-bishop handicap.{48} He urged repeatedly that we stay for dinner and a good talk.

  "It's really too cold," I said. "When it's warmer we must go to the Jubako or the Chikuyo." There had been flurries of snow that day.

  The Master was fond of eels.

  After we left he had a hot bath, I was told. His wife had to help him. Later, in bed, he was taken with chest pains and had trouble breathing. He died before dawn two days later. Takahashi informed us by telephone. I opened the shutters. The sun was not yet up. I wondered if that last visit had been too much of a strain.

  "And he was so eager to have us for dinner," said my wife.

  "Yes."

  "And she kept urging us too. I thought it was wrong of you to refuse. She had told the maid that we would be with them for dinner."

  "I knew that. But I was afraid he might catch cold."

  "I wonder if he understood. He did want us to stay, and I wonder if he wasn't hurt. He didn't at all want us to go. We should have quietly accepted. Don't you suppose he was lonely?"

  "Yes. But he was always lonely."

  "It was cold, and he saw us to the door."

  "Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die."

  The body was taken back to Tokyo that day. It was carried from the hotel in a quilt, so tiny that it scarcely seemed to be there at all. My wife and I stood a short distance off, waiting for the hearse to leave.

  "There are no flowers," I said. "Go find a florist. Quick, before it leaves."

  My wife ran off for flowers, and I gave them to the Master's wife, who was in the hearse with the Master.

  A Note About the Author

  Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of Japan's most distinguished novelists. He was famous for adding to the once fashionable naturalism imported from France a sensual, more Japanese impressionism. Born in Osaka in 1899, as a boy he hoped to become a painter - an aspiration reflected in his novels—but his first stories were published while he was still in high school, and he decided to become a writer.

  He was graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His story "The Izu Dancer," first published in 1925, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1954, It captures the shy eroticism of adolescence, and from that time, Kawabata devoted his novels largely to aspects of love. Snow Country, a novel concerning the love affair of a Tokyo snob with a country geisha, was published here in 1956 and excited much praise. Thousand Cranes (1959) is a deeply moving story of ill-fated love. The Sound of the Mountain (1970) is a remarkable expression of the unique talents of this great writer, who was undisputed dean of Japanese letters.

  Kawabata was found dead, by his own hand, on the evening of April 16, 1972. He left no suicide note, and no satisfactory explanation for his suicide has been offered.

  A Note About the Translator

  Edward George Seidensticker was born in Castle Rock, Colorado, in 1921. He received his B.A. from the University of Colorado, his M.A. from Columbia University, and has done
graduate work at Harvard University and Tokyo University. He is currently professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan.

  Among the important contemporary Japanese novels Mr. Seidensticker has translated are The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki and Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata. For his translation of The Sound of the Mountain Mr. Seidensticker received the National Book Award.

  {1} Shōgi, which shares a common Indian ancestor with the Western game of chess, is played on eighty-one squares with twenty pieces per side. Most pieces can be "promoted," which is to say that they acquire greater freedom of motion upon penetrating deep into enemy territory. Captured pieces may be put back into play by the capturing side.

  {2} The counting of installments is not consistent throughout the

  narrative. The number sixty-four would seem to include sixty-two installments in the narrative proper plus a sort of entr'acte following the suspension of the Hakoné sessions and an epilogue at the end of the match.

  {3} A complex process of consolidating and simplifying the lines takes place at the end of an important match, to make the outcome clear to the most untutored eye.

  {4} The “throwing of beans” to drive out malign influences. The rites occur during the first week in February between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. There is a touch of fiction here, for the sign of the zodiac under which Mr. Kawabata was in fact born fell in 1935 and not again until 1947.

  {5} The rest of the chapter combines, with some revision, the larger portions of two of Mr. Kawabata's newspaper articles.