Black and White Stones

Yasunari Kawabata – The Master of Go

A photo of the author in 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, aged 39.

THERE is something strangely compelling about this text, despite the dryness of the subject matter (in my opinion). Go is certainly an interesting looking game and before starting on this novella, I made sure to familiarise myself with the rules. It’s one of those games of infinite complexity, where the number of permutations in a given game must be almost numberless. The game looks, to me, as interesting as chess – for instance – but I had my doubts before reading as to whether or not the efforts I had gone through to make sense of the text before reading it would prove fruitful. Certainly, it still seems to me a lot to go through for a text that is finished in less than 140 pages – diagrams and all. Furthermore, the novella, I’ve read, is adapted from a series of actual journalistic articles which Kawabata (his family name seems to be appended to the rear in this particular convention) published for quite major Japanese newspaper. To me, these points had counted against the text before I’d even started.

                I determined that the novel could thus only be estimated in two capacities: how engaging the historical background of the text was, and how effective the style of the prose was. In the former, the eponymous Master and his opponent spent something like six months playing their game. While this was partially down to ill health, there is something quite wonderful about the idea of two intellectuals entirely focussing themselves on something for this length of time. This actually ties neatly to the style of the writing itself. By this point in his career, Kawabata had decided to only write elegiac texts – texts of mourning and sorrow. While the novella deals with the death of the Master, really it deals with a theme which the other Japanese writer with whom I am familiar, Yukio Mishima (actually part of his social milieu), namely the decay of Japanese culture.

                The Master’s deliberate, yet steady pace and thoughtful focus (perhaps obsessiveness) haven’t escaped Kawabata’s notice as very Japanese traits. Thus, the play at 130 with which the Master secures his own defeat marks the downfall of traditional Japanese values and the rise of the New Japanese style. In this way when the Master says “Suppose we finish today” in Chapter 40, the journalist-author-protagonist tells us:  

The faithful battle reporter, I felt a tightening in my chest at the thought that after more than half a year the match was to finish today. And the Master’s defeat was clear to everyone.             It was also in the morning, at a time when Otaké was away from the board, that the Master turner to us and smiled pleasantly. ‘It’s all over. Nothing more to be done.’ The Master of Go, 40

The sorrow that we are moved to feel here is really intensified by its seeming inevitability. The reader also knows at this point that the Master’s loss was what essentially caused his death – giving the term Last Game a rather more morbid meaning, perhaps. One of the more subtle effects of the text here, is that there are a lot of layers of meaning at work here – different tensions played out with the two players and their “styles” – that the reader really determines which of the meanings is the most important one by his or her own perspective. For instance, for me, I feel that the idea of Go as a game really limits its importance. However, apparently the text is commonly recommended for younger players to pick up and read, just to demonstrate the importance of the game in the culture of Japan. Looking at it in this way, it is difficult to determine what the text is actually about.

                Looking at post-WWII Japanese fiction, particularly from an author who was affected by the war (he lost his family in Hiroshima actually), it is tempting to portray these new and old cultural modes as having differing values and then assigning them to East-West mentalities respectively. Certainly, the text is more complex than this. At one point the protagonist plays a good number of matches against an American on a train journey. He is depicted as being friendly and eager to play, but seemingly uncaring about whether he wins or loses. Is whether or not the haste and waste with which he plays is reflected at all in Otaké’s style, or indeed, the Master’s style as he slowly loses power? Certainly the American’s attitude is neither representative of the younger player’s attitude, which still seems very situated in Japanese values, yet it lacks still the scientific rigour of the new-style rules with which the Master has such difficulty attending to.