There had been showers early in the morning. Seated on the veranda,
Kumé Masao had said at the morning session: “What a feeling it gives a
person just to be sitting here.” His voice was soft but intense. “A clean,
transparent feeling.”
Kumé, who had recently become literary editor for the Nichinichi, had
stayed over to be present at the session. He was the first novelist in many
years to become a literary editor. Go fell within his jurisdiction.
He knew almost nothing about Go. He would sit on the veranda, now
looking at the mountains and now looking at the players. Psychic waves
seemed to come to him from the players all the same. The Master would be
sunk in anguished thought, and an expression of anguish would cross
Kumé’s good-natured face.
I could not pretend to know much more about Go than Kumé did; but
even so it seemed to me that the unmoving stones, as I gazed at them from
the side of the board, spoke to me as living creatures. The sound of the
stones on the board seemed to echo vastly through another world.
The game site was an outbuilding, three rooms in a row, one of ten mats
and two of nine. There were nemu blossoms in the alcove of the ten-mat
room.
“They seem ready to fall,” said Otaké.
White 80 was the sealed play, and the fifteenth of the day. The Master
did not seem to hear the girl’s warning that four o’clock, the hour appointed
for the end of the session, was near. She hesitated, leaning slightly forward.
