Once shortly after play was resumed at Itō I asked the Master whether he
meant to return to St. Luke’s Hospital when the match was over, or winter
as usual in Atami.
“The question is whether I last that long,” he said, as if taking me into
his confidence. “It seems strange that I’ve come as far as I have. I’m not
much of a thinker, and I don’t have what you might call beliefs. People talk
about my responsibility to the game, but that hasn’t been enough to bring
me this far. And they can call it physical strength if they like—but that
really isn’t it either.” He spoke slowly, his head slightly bowed. “Maybe I
have no nerves. A vague, absent sort—maybe the vagueness has been good
for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and in Osaka, you
know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness
in a painting and in a game of Go. That sort of thing.” The Master seemed
to savor the word as he spoke, and I savored it as I listened.
It was not like the Master to discuss his feelings so openly. He was not
one to show emotion on his face or in his speech. More than once through
my long hours of observing the match, I had suddenly felt that I was
savoring a quite ordinary word or gesture of the Master’s.
Hirotsuki Zekken, who had been the Master’s faithful supporter since
1908, when he succeeded to the title Honnimbō, and who had collaborated
in his writings, once wrote that in more than thirty years of service he had
not received a single word of thanks from the Master. He had mistakenly
taken the Master for a chilly, unfeeling man, he added. And when people
said that the Master was using Zekken, the Master is said to have responded
with lordly indifference, as if to say that the question was not of a sort that
he chose to concern himself with. Reports that the Master was not very
