The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata

One of Kawabata's masterpieces. An account of a Go match between the Master and his challenger Otaké of the Seventh Rank, which, back in those times, was played over several sessions. This particular match is played over several months.

The story ends with the defeat of the Master--Kawabata takes enormous liberties with the dimension of time in his narrative. This is, however, a mere symptom of a larger formal decision, one which shows how inventive Kawabata could be as a writer.

Kawabata writes his story through first-person narration as a journalist covering the Go match: the narrative is given the veneer of journalistic objectivity. In one instance, Kawabata intertwines portions of the newspaper articles that he himself wrote about the match. Only after page 25 is the first-person narrator's name revealed--Mr. Uragami--and additional personal details are sprinkled in subtly throughout the narrative, as if they are besides the point. Such was my surprise at a minor expression of subjectivity by the first-person narrator on page 18, when the narrator is with the Master outdoors on a late-autumn day: "'Newlyweds, all of them, I suppose,' I said to the Master, feeling an envy that approached resentment" (p. 18).

For the careful reader, the semblance of journalistic objectivity begins to fade as the narrative continues. This happens in two ways. Mr. Uragami, as an acquaintance of both players, actively intervenes and plays a crucial role as a mediator to ensure the continuation of the match. On a second and more important level, despite the pretensions to an objective journalistic account, Kawabata--through the humble and unobtrusive Mr. Uragama--is the great creator who is actively shaping a particularly Kawabatan conflict between Japanese tradition and modernity.

​For Kawabata, Go is a definitive expression of the Japanese spirit--through the foil of a foreign Go player, Kawabata extricates Go from its Chinese roots and claims it for Japan: "It is clear that in Go the Japanese spirit has transcended the merely imported and derivative" (p. 118).

For Go qua the Japanese spirit, modernity is presented as a wholly antagonistic approach: "It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice, even when challenging the Master himself” (p. 52).

And so, the match between the Master and the challenger Otaké of the Seventh Rank is transmogrified into a symbolic battle between two contrasting approaches. In the writing of this battle, Kawabata reveals himself to be the great Master of Japanese literature, who tells a story of Japanese tradition and modernity by, ironically, combining his exemplary typical Japanese prose with modern literary formal inventions.

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