Upon consultation with concerned persons on the newspaper and in the Go Association, it was decided that Dr. Kawashima of Tokyo and Dr. Okajima of Miyanoshita would follow the Master’s wishes and permit the match to continue. Their conditions were that, to ease the strain on the Master, the five-hour sessions every fifth day be replaced by sessions half as long every third or fourth day. The Master was to be examined before and after every session.

It was no doubt a last resort, this plan to have the match over in fewer days and leave the Master to convalesce. Accommodations at a hot-spring resort all through a match lasting two or three months may seem like a great luxury. For the players, however, the system of “sealing in cans” was exactly that: they were sealed in tightly with the game of Go. Had they been allowed to return home during the four-day recesses, they might have left the Go board behind and taken their minds from it, and so been able to rest; imprisoned on the site, they had few diversions. There would have been no problem had the “canning” been a matter of a few days or a week, but keeping the sixty-four-year-old Master imprisoned for two and three months must be described as torture. Canning is the usual practice today. Little thought was given to the evils compounded by the Master’s age and the length of the match. To the Master himself the somewhat pompous rules may have seemed the equivalent of a laurel crown.

The Master collapsed in less than a month.

At this late date the rules were to be changed. For Otaké the matter was of grave import. If the Master could not respect the original contract, then the honorable thing would be to forfeit.

Otaké could not say exactly that, but he did lodge a complaint. “I can’t get enough rest in three days, and I can’t get into my stride in only two and a half hours.”

He conceded the point, but the contest with an ailing old man put him in a difficult position. “I don’t want it to be said that I forced a sick man to play. I would as soon not play myself, and he insists on it; but I can’t expect people to understand. It’s as sure as anything can be that they’ll take the other view. If we go on with the match and his heart condition is worse, then everyone will blame me. A fine thing, really. I’ll be remembered as someone who left a smear on the history of the game. And out of ordinary humanity, shouldn’t we let him take all the time he needs to recover and then have our game?”

He seemed to mean, in sum, that it was not easy to play with a man who obviously was very ill. He would not want it thought that he had taken advantage of the illness to win, and his position would be even worse if he lost. The outcome was still not clear. The Master was able to forget his own illness when he sat down at the board, and Otaké, struggling himself to forget, was at a disadvantage. The Master had become a tragic figure. The newspaper had quoted him to the effect that the Go player’s ultimate desire was to collapse over the board. He had become a martyr, sacrificing himself to his art. The nervous, sensitive Otaké had to struggle on as if indifferent to his opponent’s trials.

Even the Nichinichi reporters said the issue had become one of ordinary humanity. Yet it was the Nichinichi, sponsor of this retirement match, that wanted it at all costs to go on. The match was being serialized and had become enormously popular. My reports were doing well too, followed even by persons who knew nothing of Go. There were those who suggested to me that the Master hated the thought of losing that enormous fee. I thought them somewhat too imaginative.

On the night before the next session, scheduled for August 10, an effort was mounted to overcome Otaké’s objections. A certain childish perverseness in Otaké made him say no when others said yes, and a certain obduracy kept him from assenting when assent seemed the obvious thing; and then the newspaper reporters and the functionaries of the Go Association were not good persuaders. No solution was at hand. Yasunaga Hajimé of the Fourth Rank was a friend who knew the workings of Otaké’s mind, and he had had much experience at mediating disputes. He stepped forward to make Otaké see reason; but this dispute proved too much for him.

Late in the night Mrs. Otaké came with her baby from Hiratsuka. She wept as she argued with her husband. Her speech was warm and gentle and without a trace of disorder even as she wept; nor was there a suggestion in her manner of the virtuous wife seeking to edify and reform. Her tearful plea was quite sincere. I looked on with admiration.

Her father kept a hot-spring inn at Jigokudani in Shinshū. The story of how Otaké and Wu shut themselves up at Jigokudani to study new openings is famous in the Go world. I myself had long known of Mrs. Otaké’s beauty, indeed since she was a girl. A young poet coming down from Shiga Heights had taken note of the beautiful sisters at Jigokudani and passed on his impressions to me.

I was caught a little off balance by the dutiful, somewhat drab housewife I saw at Hakoné; and yet in the figure of the mother quite given over to domestic duties, which allowed little time to worry about her own appearance, I could still see the pastoral beauty of her mountain girlhood. The gentle sagacity was immediately apparent. And I thought I had never seen so splendid a baby. In that boy of eight months was such strength and vigor that I thought I could see a certain epic quality in Otaké himself. The boy had clear, delicate skin.

Even now, twelve and thirteen years later, she speaks each time I see her of “the boy you were so kind as to praise.” And I understand that she says to the boy himself: “Do you remember the nice things Mr. Uragami said about you in his newspaper articles?”

Otaké was persuaded by his wife’s remarks. His family was important to him.

He agreed to play, but he lay awake all night. He went on worrying. At five or six in the morning he was pacing the halls. I saw him early in the morning, already in formal clothes, lying on a sofa by the entranceway.