Mr. Kawabata has described The Master of Go as “a faithful chronicle-novel.” The word used, of course, is not “novel” but shōsetsu, a rather more flexible and generous and catholic term than “novel.” Frequently what would seem to the Western reader a piece of autobiography or a set of memoirs, somewhat embroidered and colored but essentially nonfiction all the same, is placed by the Japanese reader in the realm of the shōsetsu.
So it is with The Master of Go. It contains elements of fiction, but it is rather more chronicle than novel, a sad, elegant piece of reportage, based upon a 1938 Go match, the course of which was precisely as described in this “chronicle-novel,” and upon which Mr. Kawabata reported for the twin Osaka and Tokyo newspapers that today both bear the name Mainichi.
Certain elements of fiction are obvious. Mr. Kawabata gives himself a fictitious name, Uragami, and apparently, though the matter could be a small failure of memory, assigns himself a different age from that which is actually his. The Master is known by his own name, or rather his professional name, but, as if to emphasize that the Master is the protagonist, always at the center of things, Mr. Kawabata also assigns the adversary, in real life Mr. Kitani Minoru, a fictitious name. The complex treatment of time, with the action beginning and ending at the same point, and the delicate, impressionistic descriptions of setting and season are further justification for the expression “chronicle-novel.”
But the most complex element of fiction probably is in the delineation of the Master himself. Persons who knew him in real life have told us that in addition to being almost grotesquely diminutive, he gave an impression of deviousness and even of a certain foxlike slyness. He had, at least to the casual observer, little of the nobility with which Mr. Kawabata has endowed him. Mr. Kawabata’s achievement thus transcends faithful chronicling and becomes fictional characterization of a virtuoso order.
Shūsai the Master becomes a sad and noble symbol. In what is perhaps the most famous of all his pronouncements, Mr. Kawabata said shortly after the war that henceforward he would be able to write only elegies. The defeat of 1945 was, along with the loss of all his immediate relatives in childhood, one of the great events molding the Kawabata sensibility. He began reworking his chronicle of the 1938 Go match during the war, and did not complete it until nearly a decade after the end of the war. The symbolic reality breathed into its central character makes The Master of Go the most beautiful of his elegies.
“The invincible Master” lost his final championship match, and at Mr. Kawabata’s hands the defeat becomes the defeat of a tradition. It is the aristocratic tradition which, until 1945, was the grounding for morals and ethics in Japan, and for the arts as well. Just as Mr. Kawabata would have nothing of jingoistic wartime hysteria, so he would have nothing of the platitudinous “democracy” and “liberalism” of the postwar years. He was not prepared to turn his back on what was for him the essence of Japan. One was puzzled to know why the flamboyant Mishima Yukio and the quiet, austere Kawabata should have felt so close to each other. Perhaps a part of the secret lies in the aristocratic tendencies the two men shared.
The game of Go is simple in its fundamentals and infinitely complex in the execution of them. It is not what might be called a game of moves, as chess and checkers. Though captured stones may be taken from the board, a stone is never moved to a second position after it has been placed upon one of the three hundred sixty-one points to which play is confined. The object is to build up positions which are invulnerable to enemy attack, meanwhile surrounding and capturing enemy stones.
A moment’s deliberation upon the chart of the completed game should serve to establish that Black controls major territories at the lower left and the upper right of the board, and that White is strong at the lower right. Black controls a lesser area at the upper left and White at the left center. The upper central regions of the board are delicately divided between the two, and the center and the regions immediately below are neutral. The counting of points is extremely complicated. It is significant that at the end of the match not even the Master himself has the precise count. A very special sort of visual faculty seems required for the final summing up, and, one might say, a sort of kinetic faculty too. Persons who know Go well have been able to give me a reasonably clear account of the 1938 game only by lining the stones up one by one as they were in fact played.
When, in 1954, The Master of Go first appeared in book form, it was somewhat longer than the version translated here. The shorter version is Mr. Kawabata’s own favorite, for it is the one included in the most recent edition of his “complete works.” The portions excised from the 1954 version fall between the end of the match and the Master’s death.
I am very greatly in debt to Miss Ibuki Kazuko and Mr. Yanagita Kunio, both of the Chuo Koron Publishing Company in Tokyo. Out of sheer kindness, they were more help in solving the mysteries of the text and the game than a platoon of paid researchers could have been.
E.G.S.
January 1972