Before starting ‘The Master of Go’, I was slightly familiar with Kawabata’s work. I had read a collection of his extremely short, short stories entitled ‘The Palm of the Hand Stories.’ The title of that collection captures the economy of the stories (most are between one and three pages in length) as well as the feeling that they typically provoke. Reading them is like holding something in hand for a moment, something miniature that can concealed in a fist or secretly palmed off to someone else. You don’t read them so much as hold them up to the light for a moment before moving on to the next. One or two stories made a lasting impression, though most came across in translation as rough drafts, marked by the constant, near-obsessional return to the same stock elements (sea life, snow, peasant girls, childbirth, illness.) The stories can also be thought of as textual versions of palm-reading, which is one of the arts of finding symbols in mundane things. Kawabata worked on these tales all his life. They are steeped in images and lore that are so pungently Japanese that some of the stories may be alienating to a non-Japanese reader (such as myself.) That said, it is really not the cultural differences that make Kawabata’s stories hypnotically weird but the nature of their construction, which wraps a tiny, hard nugget of narrative structure in layers of surrealistic impressions, folktales gone haywire, half-formed theories; imaginative sketches that might lose their narcotic effect if they’re drawn out a page longer or clarified, made reasonable.

Kawabata was a journalist for many years but these stories don’t really resemble, to my mind, Latin American ‘Magical Realism’ (originally the application of a journalistic form to wildly outlandish content – the treating of supernatural events as though they are quite commonplace.) Rather they are closer to the Japanese writer Murakami Haruki’s short works: willfully strange but making the point that the ‘real’ world we inhabit is pretty much devoid of normalcy too. I was surprised, therefore, that ‘The Master of Go’ adopts and sticks to a journalistic mode. The writing is entirely different from most of the ‘Palm of the Hand Stories’; there are no dalliances with surrealism, no sex, no obvious uses of symbolism or abstraction. The narrator is a newspaper reporter covering a Go match between an aged master and a younger challenger (think Carlsen-Anand perhaps?) The story is explicitly a slightly fictionalized rendition of Kawabata’s first-hand experiences. Like Uragami, the narrator, Kawabata recorded a similarly climatic Go match for a major newspaper. Uragami comes across as a bit of Nick Carraway-type, a mostly objective, relatively unimportant character on the periphery of the events he depicts. As with Carraway, there is also a sense that no one else finds the events that unfold quite as significant as Uragami does.  His point of view is initially that of a typical 1930s Japanese gentleman. He is married, middle-class, well-mannered and extremely reverent of the previous generation. It is only later that his particular form of Romantic nostalgia begins to reveal itself and we can appreciate the depth of his investment in the Master and his doomed struggle against the modern world.

As in many Japanese novels (or even in the work of certain English-language writers like Henry James) the chief interest for the reader is to try and catch the unexpressed logic or emotion that links one perfectly ordinary observation with the next. It is only through careful attention to the invisible thread of implication that a sense of the narrator’s emotional life starts to peak out of the even-handed assessment of the characters. This is not to say that the writing is dull or pedestrian. The Go game – a simple but infinitely complex game of black and white pebbles – it anchors the plot, but the finest individual pieces of writing occur elsewhere, such as when the narrator goes for a walk or talks to his wife or fixates on some absorbing detail (a long hair sprouting from the Master’s eyebrow.) Such bursts of lyricism are kept in check, however, in order to generate and sustain tension in the main story. The final passages of the book work well precisely because the emotional build-up was barely released along the way. In a sense, the emotional stakes barely register until it becomes apparent that they have been voided, and the reader is only aware, though painfully, that we are in the aftermath of something, some event of monumental importance that slipped by in the casual manner of almost everything that ever happens.

Reading the novel, it struck me how readily nostalgia tends to cling to relatively unimportant things such as sports, games, advertisements, fashion trends and not life changing events, relationships or experiences. Perhaps  our real battles go on being fought within us. We can’t detach from them, so we project our sentimentality onto those who win and lose in public arenas. ‘The Master of Go’ recognizes this truth – that a game always indirectly embodies the personal struggles of its spectators – it also reminds us of the inherent dignity of a world where a human being can plausibly dedicate his or her entire life to a board game without needing sponsorship or endorsements. Beyond the sentimentality, it is obvious that traditional Japan’s stultifying feudalism allowed for such aristocratic attitudes to thrive.That said, modern nationalism is equally inclined to attach an inordinate amount of symbolic importance on competitions. As a South African, I can remember being nine years old when the rugby team won the 1995 world cup. During the final, I played with some children my age in the basement and we only come up to watch the ending ceremony because one of us wanted to see the trophy. The much-vaunted catharsis that the game was meant to supply (as a supposed milestone in the transition from fascism to democracy) was lost on us. I could understand the match as a conflict between two teams but I lacked the historical consciousness to make anything more of it. The investment that passionate spectators have in another’s victory or defeat blends easily into the wistful, fantasy that there was once a time when competitions were fair, when the worthiest among us were counted among the winners and not beaten down through negative tactics. In the American context, the ‘long count fight’ between Dempsey and Tunney and the ‘Quiz Show’ scandals of the 1950s seem to denote a universe where winning is all that matters.

A short work, ‘The Master of Go’ epitomizes the notion (now a bit unfashionable) that discipline and craftsmanship are the most important qualities for a writer to possess. What is amazing to me, is that the same person wrote both ‘The Master of Go’ and the ‘Palm of the Hand Stories.’ I think it proves that Kawabata was an unusually complete talent, equally able to get at the strange and the ordinary, equally adept at slow-burn and quick-moving storytelling. The Master of Go’ can be defined by its complete obedience to formal conventions of realistic storytelling, lacking any experimentalism or self-indulgence. Even the shortest of the ‘Palm of the Hand’ stories are bursting with irrationally, hallucinogenic passages, compelling, subconscious impressions that force their way to the surface. Kawabata’s command over two types of writing makes him an artist at home in either of the two hemispheres of the Japanese imagination. He is also a rare type of Modernist writer who respects the both the truth of experience and the truth of impersonal fact. The excellent prose is due to the work of famous Japanese scholar Edward G. Seidensticker, the translator. Seidensticker’s translation captures the technicalities of the game, its suspense and pressure and the moments of relief felt by Uragami when he is away from the board. Much of the novel is devoted to the actual match between Shusai the Master and his challenger (called in this novel ‘Otake’ instead of the real life Kitani.) As suggested previously, however, the really interesting aspect of the storytelling lies in the narrator’s underlying view of what the game actually stands for. Like Ozu’s films or Mishima’s novels, Kawabata keys into the bittersweet feelings of many Japanese towards the modern world. Modernization began in earnest in the mid to late 19th Century with the decline of the feudal era and the start of a kind of theocratic imperialism. The novel’s period, 1938, must have also seemed retrospectively to be the dawn of a new, troubling world of problematic ‘modern’ attitude and, of course, the disaster of impending war. A prominent sequence dramatizes this, in an ambiguous way, when the narrator includes some notes regarding a day’s play, mentioning a ‘girl of the modern sort’, he sees in the garden:

From the veranda outside the players’ room, which was ruled by a sort of diabolical tension, I glanced out  into  the garden, beaten down by the powerful summer sun, and saw a girl of the modern sort inconstantly feeding the carp. I felt as if I were looking at some freak. I could scarcely believe that we belonged to the same world.

Naturally, Kawabata means to suggest that something is peculiar about the ritual of the Go match with its aristocratic, feudal tradition and not just to express a kind of obtuse, curmudgeonly disdain for the world of young people. It demonstrates the severe atmosphere of the Go tournament, using (as Kawabata does throughout the ‘Palm of the Hand Stories’ too) a young girl as a symbol of her whole generation. Despite his apparently critical treatment of the girl, and by extension the shallowness of modern Japan, he raises the questions of whether the ‘diabolic tension’ of the past is in any way preferable to the frivolous freedom of the young. The conflict in the novel arises not just the demise of old-fashioned, aesthetic thinking in favour of utilitarian convention (proven true, decades later, by the rise of computer chess!) but merely because different types of people have to co-exist in the same world despite having opposing conceptions of the good life. The carefree image of the ‘freak’ (really just a modern girl feeding carp) comes after Uragami praises the sight of a sleeping baby, whose peacefulness offsets the oppressive, spiritual aggression of the room: ‘It has been one of those days when a person finds it impossible to face an adult, and for me this little Momotaro has been a savior.’ Uragami associates the child with the folklore of Japan, referring to him as a ‘momotaro’ – the infant-hero who was born out of a peach in a fairy tale. Why does the sight of the infant provide comfort while the girl invites dissonance and disapproval? Japanese realism often centers either on melodrama or comedy of manners: excessive misfortune handled stoically or minor details causing hyperbolic reactions. This book skews towards the latter, implying that once you immerse yourself in the strangeness of Go or any pursuit of equivalent depth the ordinary world begins to feel unnatural. If it is reasonable to devote years to a game of black and white stones, how can normal life be justified? No doubt, the customs, mores and rhythms of a Go player’s life are stifling and belong to an archaic, Manichean worldview and yet, once immersed in it, nothing can seem more natural than a life dedicated to mastering it. Uragami’s glimpses at things outside of the combatants and their go-ban tend to either refresh or alienate him, so total is his focus on the plays. The sleeping infant seems a beacon of calm vitality while the girl’s indifference to the match and its customs startles and frustrates the narrator on some level, as it casts doubt on the significance of the story he writes.

Uragmai confesses that he has to write watered-down human-interest portraits of the players in his column instead of play-by-play accounts, since his readers probably won’t be interested in technical commentary. Thus, not even casual fans of Go really belong to the cloistered world of the ‘true way.’ He fetishizes this ‘way’ while producing an accessible, bastardized version of it for his readers. The position of the reader of the novel, who quite likely knows even less about Go than the newspaper readers, is even more ambiguous. On the one hand, the novel is clearly not just about Go. On the other hand, Kawabata is explicitly writing an elegy (he himself stated that he would only write elegies after World War Two) for the Master and for the pristine Go that was once played. Our inability to appreciate the game turns us into outsiders to some extent. Perhaps we belong alongside the insipid modern girl, feeding the carp.  While Kawabata does not come across as a ultranationalist like Mishima, he admits to a nostalgia for old Japan: in one section, for instance, he claims the game of Go as something essentially Japanese despite its roots in China. That diatribe – sparked when the narrator plays Go on a train against a good-natured but uncompetitive American – is the closest the novel gets to jingoism:

One always found a competitive urge in a Japanese. One never encountered a stance as uncertain as this. The spirit of Go was missing. I thought it all very strange, and I was conscious of being confronted with utter foreignness.

Since Kawabata is committed to producing an authentic version of the story, he refuses to present simplistic caricatures of the players. It is clear that he finds Otake’s use of the sealed play rule can be considered a rather obnoxious act but this is tempered by a generally sympathetic treatment of him throughout the book. Otake is depicted as the kind of person who excels at these kinds of games: somewhat pedantic, resolute, overly sensitive to and prone to odd outpourings of feeling. Kawabata makes it clear that Otake does not prioritize victory at Go above all else in life – he is a family man and an attentive husband. In some senses, he represents the notion of professionalism more than the Master who is an artistic, romanticized figure. Otake lives in the modern world but takes his career seriously – the Master’s existence centers around Go. I recall one Russian Grandmaster described the play of the great Ukrainian chess champion Mikhail Tal as a ‘return to Romanticism.’ The improvisational, bohemian Tal can be contrasted with players like Anatoly Karpov who were obsessed with the achievement of victory through the resolute adherence to formulas. Like Tal, The Go Master is depicted as one who plays the game according to some internal fascination with its machinations and possibilities. Otake is more of a Karpov type; one who wins by not allowing the smallest advantage to slip by. The framing narration makes it clear from the start that the Master not only loses the final match but dies shortly afterwards (it is none other than Uragami himself who photographs his corpse.) As implied by the novel’s allegorical tone, Otake’s victory must in part be seen as the triumph of new ways over an older romantic or spiritual mentality. Yet, due to kidney problems, Otake is disadvantaged to a comparable extent as the Master. In a nice moment, Otake wonders aloud if the weak, spluttering rainfall means the sky, too, suffers kidney failure.

The Master plays according to the ‘sealed play’ rules for the first time, meaning that the last move will be kept secret until the next match day. The move is written on a card and kept by officials. Otake, however, deliberately makes a very unorthodox move as one of his sealed plays. This confers on him the advantage of spending the interval days planning his next phase of play. Since the matches are timed, the Master would have to formulate a new plan on the spot once play is resumed, while Otake would have had liberty to think ahead of his game-changing sealed move. The Master considers withdrawing in protest from the match while the general audience (and Uragami) clearly disapproves of Otake’s methods:

When a law is made, the cunning that finds loopholes goes to work. One cannot deny that there is a certain slyness among younger players, a slyness which, when rules are written to prevent slyness, makes use of the rules themselves… The Master, when he faced the board, was a man of old. He knew nothing about all these refined latter-day tricks.

With hindsight, however, Uragami comes to admit that it is natural for a competitor to try and bend new rules in their favour. He suggests that we cannot blame a player for trying to win by any means. The younger player also shows gamesmanship in his use of (what are assumed to be) intentional delays, the annoyance of which is amplified by his constant need to go to the bathroom. Uragami’s displeasure with the American he plays on the train, it is important to remember, arises from the Westerner’s enjoyment of the game as a game, free of any particular competitiveness. To condemn Otake’s competitiveness would be hypocritical. Otake is under at least as much pressure as the Master since he will either lose – and perhaps never be canonized as a master – or he will win and be remembered for ending the golden age of ‘true Go’, usurping it with a new age of prosaic, utilitarian play. Kawabata carefully expresses the significance of every move on the board. He never exaggerates or adds a forced sense of suspense to the proceedings. The narrative comes outwards from the titanic struggle that’s the centerpiece of the book to include the cruel but dignified world of pre-war Japan to include the wives, children, workers, all of were blissfully unaware that the soul of their nation was being decided in a game of Go. The ambivalence that Uragami comes to feel in the aftermath of the Master’s passing is best encapsulated in a quote he cites from the novelist Naoki Sanjugo: “if one choose to look upon Go as valueless, then absolutely valueless it is; and if one chooses to look upon it as a thing of value, then a thing of absolute value it is.”