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This novel about the last game of a dying Go master was a wonderful gift from my friends. They were well aware of my long-standing passion for Go, and thus, presented me with this novel on my birthday. I had previously read a few of Yasunari Kawabata's short stories in anthologies. However, I always felt that his writing was a bit more oblique than what I was comfortable with. This book, which is said to be more straightforward than many of his other novels, is still quite challenging to understand as an emotional work. But despite that, I ended up deeply contemplating its themes, turning them over in my mind just like one would fiddle with a Go stone.
Yasunari Kawabata's "The Master of Go" is an example of the shishosetsu, a novel form that is based on the fictionalization of real events as experienced by the author. In this particular novel, the author is the newspaper correspondent covering the retirement game of the highly influential Go master Honinbo Shusai and the innovative younger player Otake. Kawabata uses the actual game record in his storytelling, and you can access a recreation of it here.
The novel begins with the news of Honinbo Shusai's death. He was the last hereditary heir to the title of Honinbo, the dominant school of Go for the past 300 years. Shusai did not name a successor; instead, he bequeathed the name Honinbo to the Japan Go Association. In many ways, Shusai's death marked the end of Go as the genteel preoccupation of the shogun class, a break from the imperial past. Interspersed with the story of his wake and the people traveling to pay their respects are scenes from the actual game, which spanned six grueling months and several cities.
His competitor Otake also had a lot at stake. He was one half of the two pillars of a new movement within the game called Shin Fuseki. I understand the inherent nerdiness of calling board game moves "revolutionary," but believe me when I say that Shin Fuseki changed so much of the game theory that it's now very difficult to apply the openings of games from the last century to current gameplay. If you ask me in the comments, I'll try to elaborate in the nerdiest way I can.
You know that Hemingway exhortation about stories being icebergs where most of the mass is under the surface? Well, "The Master of Go" is basically an iceberg the size of a continent, and the only visible part is one square yard of unadorned reportage. The novel functions most overtly as an elegy, a mourning of the past by sensitive and artistic souls who are uncertain about a highly industrialized present. Although the game itself took place in 1938, Kawabata (who published it serially in 1951) transformed the story to encompass Japan's modernization, militarization, and eventual loss in World War II. A significant portion of his narrative is consumed by Shusai's ambivalence towards the new, rigorous rules of Go, which he feels render the game dehumanized.
Another, more subtle motif in the story is the idea of the game as a pure form, untouched by the outside world. One scene features a visibly angered Otake threatening to forfeit because the length of the game has forced him to be away from his family and school for extended periods, sometimes due to the caprice of the older Honinbo. His fatigue ends up showing in his performance. Another crucial plot point involves the use of the rules to get more thinking time in between sessions. On a more meta level, it also made me examine the idea of a "pure novel" that exists perfectly outside of all intertextuality. Since I found a lot of the themes opaque while reading the book, a lot of my subsequent pleasure came mostly from outside of it, from reading about the historical context and studying the commentary on the actual game. My opinion has also been influenced by the knowledge that Shusai himself had been a highly divisive figure throughout his life, a discovery that tempers the idea of him as a figure of bodhisattvan temperance, enduring one last painful game to glorify posterity.
My experience with Kawabata has been a circuitous one. As a teenager, I was very fascinated with the author Yukio Mishima, who wrote existentialist and dramatic set pieces that had made him one of the foremost Japanese modernists. In a Mishima biography written by John Nathan, he relates Mishima's admiration and respect for the older Kawabata, a sensei/kouhai relationship that seemed ironic given the vast difference in their personalities. Mishima was bold and iconoclastic, while Kawabata was serene and seemingly removed from time. There was one particularly poignant anecdote about Mishima's conflicted feelings when Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. Mishima (who actually nominated Kawabata to the Swedish academy) knew that the Nobel wouldn't be awarded to a Japanese author again within his lifetime. Two years later, Mishima would commit suicide through seppuku after participating in an attempted rightist coup.
My years have also tempered my fascination with these two writers, who seemed so preoccupied with the beauty in death and the mourning of a bygone era. For Kawabata in particular, the past is another country, and he is the perpetual exile.
Yasunari Kawabata's "The Master of Go" is an example of the shishosetsu, a novel form that is based on the fictionalization of real events as experienced by the author. In this particular novel, the author is the newspaper correspondent covering the retirement game of the highly influential Go master Honinbo Shusai and the innovative younger player Otake. Kawabata uses the actual game record in his storytelling, and you can access a recreation of it here.
The novel begins with the news of Honinbo Shusai's death. He was the last hereditary heir to the title of Honinbo, the dominant school of Go for the past 300 years. Shusai did not name a successor; instead, he bequeathed the name Honinbo to the Japan Go Association. In many ways, Shusai's death marked the end of Go as the genteel preoccupation of the shogun class, a break from the imperial past. Interspersed with the story of his wake and the people traveling to pay their respects are scenes from the actual game, which spanned six grueling months and several cities.
His competitor Otake also had a lot at stake. He was one half of the two pillars of a new movement within the game called Shin Fuseki. I understand the inherent nerdiness of calling board game moves "revolutionary," but believe me when I say that Shin Fuseki changed so much of the game theory that it's now very difficult to apply the openings of games from the last century to current gameplay. If you ask me in the comments, I'll try to elaborate in the nerdiest way I can.
You know that Hemingway exhortation about stories being icebergs where most of the mass is under the surface? Well, "The Master of Go" is basically an iceberg the size of a continent, and the only visible part is one square yard of unadorned reportage. The novel functions most overtly as an elegy, a mourning of the past by sensitive and artistic souls who are uncertain about a highly industrialized present. Although the game itself took place in 1938, Kawabata (who published it serially in 1951) transformed the story to encompass Japan's modernization, militarization, and eventual loss in World War II. A significant portion of his narrative is consumed by Shusai's ambivalence towards the new, rigorous rules of Go, which he feels render the game dehumanized.
Another, more subtle motif in the story is the idea of the game as a pure form, untouched by the outside world. One scene features a visibly angered Otake threatening to forfeit because the length of the game has forced him to be away from his family and school for extended periods, sometimes due to the caprice of the older Honinbo. His fatigue ends up showing in his performance. Another crucial plot point involves the use of the rules to get more thinking time in between sessions. On a more meta level, it also made me examine the idea of a "pure novel" that exists perfectly outside of all intertextuality. Since I found a lot of the themes opaque while reading the book, a lot of my subsequent pleasure came mostly from outside of it, from reading about the historical context and studying the commentary on the actual game. My opinion has also been influenced by the knowledge that Shusai himself had been a highly divisive figure throughout his life, a discovery that tempers the idea of him as a figure of bodhisattvan temperance, enduring one last painful game to glorify posterity.
My experience with Kawabata has been a circuitous one. As a teenager, I was very fascinated with the author Yukio Mishima, who wrote existentialist and dramatic set pieces that had made him one of the foremost Japanese modernists. In a Mishima biography written by John Nathan, he relates Mishima's admiration and respect for the older Kawabata, a sensei/kouhai relationship that seemed ironic given the vast difference in their personalities. Mishima was bold and iconoclastic, while Kawabata was serene and seemingly removed from time. There was one particularly poignant anecdote about Mishima's conflicted feelings when Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. Mishima (who actually nominated Kawabata to the Swedish academy) knew that the Nobel wouldn't be awarded to a Japanese author again within his lifetime. Two years later, Mishima would commit suicide through seppuku after participating in an attempted rightist coup.
My years have also tempered my fascination with these two writers, who seemed so preoccupied with the beauty in death and the mourning of a bygone era. For Kawabata in particular, the past is another country, and he is the perpetual exile.
