Must play go on even in this extremity I asked myself, grieving for the
Master. What was this something called Go? As death was approaching, the
novelist Naoki Sanjugo wrote what was for him a curiosity, an
autobiographical story called “I.” He said that he envied the Go player. “If
one chooses to look upon Go as valueless,” he said, “then absolutely
valueless it is; and if one chooses to look upon it as a thing of value, then a
thing of absolute value it is.”
“Are you ever lonely?” he asked the owl on the table before him. The
owl turned to destroying a newspaper which carried an account of the
Master’s game with Wu, recessed because of the Master’s illness. Naoki
sought to examine the worth of his own popular writings in the light of the
strong fascination Go had for him, and its world of pure competition.
“I am very tired. I must write thirty pages by nine this evening and it is
now past four. I do not really care. I think I may be allowed to waste a day
on an owl. How little I have worked for myself, how much for journalism
and other encumbering forces. And how coldly they have treated me!”
He wrote himself to death. Through him I first met the Master and Wu.
There had been something ghostlike about Naoki in his last days, and
there was something ghostlike about the Master here before me.
Yet the game moved ahead nine plays during the session. It was Otaké’s
turn at twelve thirty, the hour appointed for the recess. The Master left the
board. Otaké stayed on alone to deliberate his sealed play, Black 99.
For the first time that day there was cheerful conversation. “We ran out
of tobacco once when I was a boy,” said the Master, having a leisurely
smoke. “Of course everyone smoked pipes in those days. We even used to
stuff our pipes with lint. It did well enough, in its way.”
A suggestion of a cool breeze had come up. Now that the Master had
withdrawn from the board, Otaké, continuing his deliberations, slipped off
his cloak of gossamer net.
