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 center.

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 center,” 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 center 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 center 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 center 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.”