The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata

First published:Meijin, 1942-1954, serial; 1954, book (English translation, 1972)

Type of work: Chronicle novel

Time of work: June, 1938, to January, 1940

Locale: Tokyo and Ito, Japan

Principal Characters:

• Honnimbo Shūsai, the master of Go
• Otaké, the challenger in Shūsai’s last match
• Uragami, the narrator, a news reporter assigned to cover the Go match

The Novel

The Master of Go is a fictional rendering of an actual Go match that occurred in Japan in 1938 on which Yasunari Kawabata reported for the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun. The details from the game are factual as are the interactions of the players. Kawabata, who himself referred to The Master of Go as a “chronicle novel,” has fictionalized the story only in his delineation of the protagonist and in his interpretive comments on the action. In this literary rendering, the Go match is a metaphoric battlefield, in which the warriors pit themselves against their own limits, illness, time, and death.

The narrative is in the first person, in the voice of the news reporter Uragami. The novel opens at the end of the story with an account of the death of the protagonist, Honnimbo Shūsai, the master of Go, and a description of events surrounding the end of the master’s last match. The game is then reported chronologically, with occasional digressions, from the elaborate opening ceremonies to the game’s conclusion six months later. Events in the lives of the contestants, negotiations for alterations in the game’s schedule, commentary on the game, and key moves of the game (which lasts 237 moves) make up the materials of the story.

On June 26, 1938, at the Koyokan Restaurant in Tokyo, each player makes his first move amid the ceremonies that convey the importance of the game and the high respect that it receives. The next day, the players complete up to move 12, and the game moves to another location, at Hakone, where, in the following month and a half, the next eighty-eight moves take place. Shūsai’s weak health deteriorates rapidly as his heart begins to fail him, and the game recesses for three months, to resume in Ito, where it continues from move 100 to the close of the game. With comments on the game’s outcome and Shūsai’s death a year later, the novel ends where it began.

Though the focus of The Master of Go is on the characters of the competing players, drama is also provided by the moves of the game and the players’ negotiations over their schedules. The game of Go is extremely complex in strategy—so much so that the relative strengths of the players’ moves are frequently open to much debate, even among experts, and the final tallying of the points is a lengthy and difficult matter. As chronicler of the game, Uragami does not attempt to teach even the game’s basics but instead describes the players’ reactions to key moves to give a sense of their significance. The most dramatic of these is move 121 by Otaké, the challenger. Each session of play ends with a “sealed in” play, one in which the last player, rather than playing his move, records it for storage until the opening of the next session. The purpose of the sealed play is to avoid giving an advantage to either player during a recess from the game. Play 121 is such a sealed play, but one that Otaké makes on an area of the board remote from the tense series of previous moves that are determining the fates of the players at the center of the board. Once the play is unsealed, even expert analysts have trouble finding it on the board, not guessing that Otaké would have broken the thematic thread the previous plays had established. For Shūsai, move 121 destroys the harmony of the game and degrades it. To a master of the oldschool that regards each game as a carefully wrought work of art with its own unique rhythms and patterns, governed by the competing yet mutually appreciating intelligences of the players, move 121 is a blotch, or intentional smear, on a masterpiece. It destroys the game’s tension at its height of play. The thought that Otaké might have played it intentionally to throw his opponent off balance makes the move even more offensive. As a result, Shūsai loses some of his commitment to the match. Soon after, in the equally controversial move 130, he moves with unnecessary haste and ensures his defeat. The dramatic tension surrounding moves 121 and 130—a tension made more complex by various levels of ambiguity—typifies all elements of this game, including the consequences of the players’ illnesses and arrangements to accommodate the dying master.

The Characters

The Master of Go is an excellent example of Kawabata’s technique of revealing character indirectly, through observations of gesture, small details, and brief, telling moments of dialogue. Though this narrative’s focus is clearly on the master, Shūsai (which offers much opportunity for a conventional revelation of character through dramatic action), odd bits of detail are still important. Two chapters are devoted to a set of photographs Uragami takes of Shūsai after his death, at the request of the master’s wife. Fastidious in taking the photographs, and in keeping them secret until he has examined them, Uragami studies them with equal care and discovers material for a character study. Though moved initially by the unattractiveness of Shūsai’s face, with its grotesquely unbalanced features—small eyes, overly large nose and mouth, flattened earlobes—Uragami also notes how the images represent a face rich in feeling, unlike the man who in life was so cool and aloof. Uragami decides that this might be the revelation of a secret that was intended not to be disclosed and has second thoughts about releasing the photographs. In another chapter, similar attention is given to one very long hair of Shūsai’s left eyebrow. Uragami learns from Shūsai’s wife that Shūsai was flattered by the reporter’s observation of the hair which Uragami made in a newspaper article. Significant to Shūsai as a promise of long life, and to Uragami as a welcome aberration observed at a moment of unrelenting tension in the game, the hair becomes a vehicle for revealing the relationships that exist among the principal players and their close scrutiny of each other during the drama of the Go match.

Kawabata’s attention to character in The Master of Go is devoted almost entirely to Shūsai and Otaké. Other characters—the players’ wives and high-ranking players who are observing the game—are described, often vividly, but primarily to underscore characteristics of the two principals. Otaké, for whom Uragami has great respect and affection, is depicted as a brilliant opponent, in some ways ideally suited to be the austere master’s adversary. Otaké has a good sense of humor, an intense drive to succeed in Go equal to that of Shūsai, humaneness, and a determination to be treated respectfully and fairly—even in the face of Shūsai’s illness, which forces him occasionally to accept undesirable changes in their playing schedule. Most significant, he is a foil to Shūsai as a representative of a younger generation of Go players, and, by extension, of postwar Japanese modernism pitted against the Meiji world represented by the master. Otaké lives and plays by rational laws and their loopholes, by mathematical calculations that determine a competitor’s standing; Shūsai lives and plays in a world in which Go is regarded as the ancient warrior’s way, in which age and hard-won authority earn respect, in which Go is surrounded by an aura of elegance and mystery. In Shūsai’s Meiji world, action is governed by reverence rather than by equality. In this clash over the ancient game of Go, what transpires is not only the defeat of the master but also the overthrow of Meiji refinement by modern rationalism.

Critical Context

Though uncharacteristic in its absence of the erotic or of deeply probed relationships between men and women, The Master of Go nevertheless remains similar to much of Kawabata’s writing. From the beginning of his literary career, in the mid-1920’s, Kawabata demonstrated an interest in sensations and details that are described for their own sakes, which undoubtedly trained him for the observation of small, telling details in The Master of Go. Also characteristic of his writing is loose plot construction, as exemplified in the circular presentation of chronology in The Master of Go, which begins and ends at the same point and contains within it many abrupt jumps in time.

The Master of Go was published in book form in 1954, the same year as was Yama no oto (1954; The Sound of the Mountain, 1970), which many consider to be Kawabata’s most important work. Common to the two books is the theme of postwar spiritual chaos. In both, traditional Japanese sensibility takes a stand against modernism.

Kawabata’s creation of unique worlds as settings for his stories is another characteristic that distinguishes many of the works for which he is best known. The setting of Yukiguni (1947; Snow Country, 1956) is a winter resort, remote from the environs to which its main characters are accustomed. Sembazuru (1952; Thousand Cranes, 1958) isolates itself in the world of the tea ceremony. Nemureru bijo (1961; The House of the Sleeping Beauties, 1969) takes place in a brothel catering to old men. The worlds of these books, like the world of Go at the level of masters, are rarefied and abnormally focused, which lends intensity to their action.

Most significant, The Master of Go is the elegiac masterpiece of a writer so taken with eulogies and obituaries that in his lifetime he was dubbed “the undertaker.” In this novel, Kawabata uses the freedom of the form to go beyond conventional elegiac writing. He expands his meditation to include commentary on the era that was ushered in with the defeat of his country and the deaths of all his immediate family. Kawabata began the novel during World War II and completed it nine years after the war’s end. It can be fairly regarded as his major work on the theme of the loss that he observed in the historic change.

Bibliography

Barry, P. “Citizens of a Lost Country: Kawabata’s The Master of Go and James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master,’” in Comparative Literature Studies. XX (Spring, 1983), pp. 77-93.

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, 1984.

Rogers, W.N. “Hero’s Defense: The Lost Positions of Nabokov’s Luzhin and Kawabata’s Shūsai,” in Comparative Literature Studies. XX (Summer, 1983), pp. 217-230.

Swann, Thomas. “The Master of Go,” in Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, 1976. Edited by Kinya Tsuruta and Thomas Swann.

Ueda, Makoto. “Kawabata Yasunari,” in Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.