boyhood. “I was sick a great deal in those days. Your lady was very kind to
me.”
From talk of the hot springs of Shinshū, Mrs. Otaké’s home, the
conversation moved to domestic matters. Otaké had married at twenty-
three, when he had reached the Fifth Rank. He had three children and kept
three disciples in his house, which thus contained ten persons.
His oldest, a girl of six, had learned the game from watching him.
“I gave her a nine-stone handicap the other day. I’ve kept a chart of the
game.”
“Very remarkable,” the Master too had to admit.
“And my second, the four-year-old, knows all about putting stones in
check. I suppose we can’t tell yet whether they have talent, but there might
be possibilities.”
The others seemed uncomfortable.
Apparently Otaké, one of the eminences of the Go world, was thinking
seriously that if his two daughters, six and four, showed promise, he would
make them professionals like himself. It is said that talent in Go appears at
about ten, and that if a child does not begin his studies by that age there is
no hope for him. Yet Otaké’s words struck me as odd. Did they tell,
perhaps, of youth, of a thirty-year-old who was a captive of Go but had not
yet been bled by it? His household must be a happy one, I thought.
The Master spoke of his own house. It stood on something under a
quarter of an acre in Setagaya, but since the house itself covered almost a
third of the land, the garden was somewhat cramped. He would like to sell
and move to a house with even slightly more spacious grounds. For the
Master, family meant himself and his wife, who was here beside him. He
no longer kept disciples in his house.
