A day after the end of that half-year contest, the managers and the rest
were in a rush to be off. It was the day before the test run on the new Itō
railway line.
With trains coming through just at the holiday season, the main street
was bright with festive decorations. I had been in seclusion at the inn,
“sealed in a tin can,” as the process of keeping the game shut off from the
world is described. Now, on the bus for home, the decorations bright
around me, I felt liberated, as if I had emerged from a dark cave. The raw
earth of the roads around the new station, the flimsy houses—the jumble
and disorder of the new town spoke to me of all the vital world outside.
As the bus left Itō and set out along the coast road, we passed women
with bundles of brushwood on their backs. Some carried white-leafed ferns,
decorations for the New Year, in their hands, some had ferns tied to their
brushwood. I suddenly wanted to be among people. It was as if I had come
over a mountain and caught sight of smoke from a village beyond. I longed
for the routines of ordinary life, preparations for the New Year and the like.
I felt as if I had fled some morbid, distorted world. The women had
gathered their firewood and were on their way home for dinner. The sea
shone with a light so dull that one could not guess its source. The color, at
the edge of darkness, was of winter.
Even on the bus I thought of the Master. Perhaps my longing for
company had to do with my feelings for him.
The last of the people in attendance on the game had withdrawn, and
only the aged Master and his wife were left at the Itō inn.
“The invincible Master” had lost his last championship match. One
would have thought he would be the first to wish to leave; and to recover
