No one could have described the Master’s face as handsome or noble. It
was indeed a common sort of face, with no single feature of great merit.
The ears, for instance—the lobes were as if they had been smashed. The
mouth was large, the eyes were small. Through long years of discipline in
his art, the Master seated at the Go board had the power to quiet his
surroundings, and that same force of spirit was in my pictures too. There
was a deep sadness in the lines of the closed eyelids, as of one grieving in
sleep.
And I looked at the body. The head of a doll, and the head only, seemed
to protrude from the honeycomb pattern of the rough-woven kimono.
Because the body had been dressed in an Oshima kimono after the Master’s
death, there was a bunching at the shoulders. Yet one had from it the feeling
one had of the Master in life, as if from the waist he dwindled away to
nothing. The Master’s legs and hips: as the doctor had said at Hakoné, they
seemed scarcely enough to bear his weight. Taken from the Urokoya, the
body had seemed quite weightless save for the head. During that last match
I had noticed the thinness of the seated Master’s knees and in my pictures
too there seemed to be only a head, almost gruesome, somehow, as if
severed. There was something unreal about the pictures, which may have
come from the face, the ultimate in tragedy, of a man so disciplined in an
art that he had lost the better part of reality. Perhaps I had photographed the
face of a man meant from the outset for martyrdom to art. It was as if the
life of Shūsai, Master of Go, had ended as his art had ended, with that last
match.
