three in the morning. The moment he saw Fujisawa the next day, the Master
pulled out his chess board again. So it was with the Master.
We had gathered the night before the second Hakoné session. “The
Master is astonishing,” said Sunada, a Nichinichi Go reporter who was
acting as a sort of factotum for the Master. “On every one of these last four
days when he is supposed to have been resting, he has come around first
thing in the morning and challenged me to a game of billiards. We’ve
played all day long and on into the night, every single day. He’s not just a
genius. He’s inhuman.”
The Master had not once, it is said, complained to his wife of weariness
from competitive play. There is a story she likes to tell of his ability to sink
himself into a game. I myself heard it at the Naraya.
“We were living at Kōgai-chō in Azabu. It wasn’t a very big house, and
he had matches and practice in a ten-mat room. The trouble was that the
eight-mat room next door was the parlor. Sometimes we had rather noisy
guests. He was having a match one day with I don’t remember who when
my sister came by to show me her new baby. Babies will be babies, and it
cried the whole of the time. I was frantic and only wished she would go
away; but I hadn’t seen her for a very long time, and she had come for a
very special reason, and I couldn’t tell her to go. When she did finally
leave, I went to apologize for all the noise. And do you know he hadn’t
heard a thing! He hadn’t known she was there, and hadn’t heard the baby.”
And she added: “Ogishi used to say that he wanted as soon as he possibly
could to be like the Master. Every night before he went to sleep he would
sit up in bed and meditate. There was the Okada school of meditation in
those days, you know.”
The Ogishi she referred to was Ogishi Sōji of the Sixth Rank, so
outstanding a pupil that he was said to have had a monopoly on the
Master’s trust and confidence and the Master had thought of making him
heir to the title Honnimbō. He died in January, 1924, at the age of twenty-
