sixteenth and played two games of chess
with him. He took a sudden turn
for the worse that evening, very shortly after I had left him. Those were his
last games of the chess of which he was so fond. I did the newspaper
accounts of his last championship match at Go, I was his last adversary at
chess, and I was the last to take his picture.
I came to know him well when the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun (now the
Mainichi Shimbun) invited me to report on that last match. Even for a
match sponsored by a newspaper the ceremonies were elaborate, without
equal in the years since. The match began in Tokyo on June 26, 1938, at the
Kōyōkan Restaurant in Shiba Park, and ended on December 4, in Itō, at the
Dankōen Inn. A single game took almost half a year. There were fourteen
sessions. My report was serialized in sixty-four installments.
There was, to
be sure, a three-month recess, from mid-August to mid-November, because
the Master fell seriously ill. It was a critical illness that added much to the
pathos. One may say that in the end the match took the Master’s life. He
never quite recovered, and in upwards of a year he was dead.
