see the lines on the palms of the small hands he held lightly clasped behind
him, but the network of veins seemed to be complex and delicate. He was
carrying a folded fan. His body, bent forward from the hips, was perfectly
straight, making his legs seem all the more unreliable. From below the
thicket of dwarf bamboo, along the main road, came a sound of water down
a narrow ditch. Nothing more—and yet the retreating figure of the Master
somehow brought tears to my eyes. I was profoundly moved, for reasons I
do not myself understand. In that figure walking absently from the game
there was the still sadness of another world. The Master seemed like a relic
left behind by Meiji.
“A swallow, a swallow,” he said in a low, husky voice, stopping and
looking up into the sky. Beyond him was a stone informing us that the
Meiji Emperor had deigned to stay at the inn. The branches of a crape
myrtle, not yet in bloom, spread above it. The Naraya had once been a way
station for the military aristocracy and their parties.
Onoda came up behind the Master, as if to shield him from something.
The Master’s wife had come to meet him at the stone bridge over the pond.
In the morning and afternoon she would see him as far as the game room,
and slip away when he had taken his place at the board. At noon and at the
end of a day’s session she was always at the pond by their room, waiting
for him.
The Master’s figure, viewed from the rear, seemed oddly off balance. He
had not yet come out of his trance, and the absolutely straight trunk and
head were as if he were still at the Go board. He seemed uncertain on his
feet. In a state of bemusement, he suggested some rarefied spirit floating
over a void; and yet the lines of the figure we saw at the board were still
unbroken. They gave off a sort of leftover fragrance, an afterglow.
“A swallow, a swallow.” Perhaps, as the words caught in his throat, the
Master was for the first time aware that his posture had not yet returned to
