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.
