The Master of Go
Yasunari Kawabata
The Master of Go describes a single match of Go between the old master Honinbo Shusei and the young Otake of Seventh Rank. We follow the game from the single first stone played on June 26th to the final counting of the score on December 4th. While the novel’s main theme is the match, its focus lies on the characters of the players, especially the master’s. We hear about the reverence he expects (and receives) and how he is able to fully immerse himself in the play, forgetting everything else. During the recesses, however, he appears more human and his illness, which will lead to a 3 month interruption of the game, comes to the fore.
The Master of Go is a somewhat fictionalized account of the last match of Honinbo Shusei against Minoru Kitani, where Kawabata was present as reporter for a newspaper. The novel is often seen as an homage to the courteous Old Japan, that must make place – involuntarily but inevitably – for the formal New Japan, where strict regulations take the place of the ingrained behaviour of old. The match itself is legendary and is still used for teaching Go.
Now that computers have finally managed to learn how to play Go, I found it interesting that the book describes a similar culture clash between the retiring master and the young player. Both their characters, their backgrounds, and their dealing with problems on and off the Go board are described in great detail and bring to life what might otherwise have been nothing more than sports commentary.
Yasunari Kawabata, born in 1899 in Osaka, was one of the most renowned Japanese writers. Orphaned at four, he lived with various family members before moving to a boarding house at the age of 17. He started to study English literature, but soon became known as a writer in the early 1920s. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature as the first Japanese in 1968, and died four years later. He considered “The Master of Go” his finest novel.
You don’t need to know how to play Go to enjoy the novel, promised! Check it out on amazon.