Why ´The Master of the Go Game´ should be reissued

´The Master of the Go Game´ deserves a reprint. This fascinating novella by Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) is in danger of falling into oblivion. The book is only available second-hand and in a few antiquarian bookshops. 

Literature needs no topicality. Yet: this spring, South Korean Go world champion Lee Seedol played a Go match against the Google computer Alpha Go. The machine won 4-1. It was the first time a computer beat a top professional in a Go match.

That computers can beat people in a game is old news. But for Go, this was long thought to be impossible. The classic Eastern board game involves encircling your opponent's stones. Millions of moves are possible, making Go much more complex than, say, chess. Moreover, human intuition plays an important role during the game.

A few days after the duel, I met an acquaintance who is an avid Go player. He was stricken by the loss of humans against computers. As if the soul, the intuition, had now disappeared from Go. He then inquired whether I had ever read ´The Master of the Go Game´.

End of an era

Those who want to see the parallels: they are there. ´The Master of the Game of Go´ tells of a match between 64-year-old grandmaster Shusai and his 35-younger opponent Otake. The actual match took place in 1938 and lasted 14 sessions, spread over six months. Kawabata reported on it as a journalist for the sponsoring newspaper. In 1951, he published his experiences as fiction.

It is clear from the start that the old, traditional, deathly ill grandmaster is going to lose the match. The match marks the end of an era. A fault line in history.

"One could say," notes Kawabata, "That in his last game, the master was plagued by modern rationalism, for which finicky rules were everything, which made all the grace and elegance of the Go as an art form disappear."

The confrontation is obviously more than a Go match. The party is a clash between generations, between ideals, between an old and a new society.

Much more than a match report

´The Master of the Game of Go´ is also a match report. It describes in detail the moves made and shows in diagrams the position on the board. For a layman, all this is hard to follow. Yet this does not disturb for a moment while reading. Which begs the question of why this is such a special book and I fervently call for a Dutch reprint.

First of all, there is the raging structure. A Go game fans out across the board (so I have come to understand). The battle is fought on many fronts simultaneously. This is also how Kawabata has structured his novella. The story is not built up linearly, but jumps between times, places and events. Only at the end does it chronologically follow the course of the party. This is the least interesting part of the story. Just as, for many connoisseurs, the endgame is also the least interesting part of the Go game. Often hundreds of moves are played in a short time. Ragingly clever, but the imagination is then gone from the game.

The book also offers an introduction to an unknown world. A second reason why it is such a fascinating story. This concerns not only the rituals of a Go match in the 1930s, but more importantly a choice Kawabata makes when writing. Right at the beginning of the story, he places a fragment in which the grandmaster has died. The first-person is asked by the widow to photograph her husband's face. Relative to the short size of the story, many pages are spent on this. It is an honourable assignment. The narrator fears that the photos have failed. Fortunately, his fears are unjustified.

".... Closer up, I saw that the lower lip was in shadow and the upper lip was exposed, and in between, in the deep shadow of the mouth, a single upper tooth was visible. White hairs protruded from the short moustache. There were two large birthmarks on the right cheek. I had caught their shadows, as well as the shadow of blood vessels on the temples and forehead. Horizontal wrinkles bisected the forehead. Only a single tuft of short-cropped hair above it caught the light. The master had stiff, sturdy hair."

A long white hair in the left eyebrow then gets all the attention. Imagine a Dutch novel in which the face of a deceased person is described in such detail. Its picture so important. Unthinkable.

Poetic observations

Kawabata's style is the third reason why ´The Master of the Go Game´ should be available to any lover of literature. Although the novella is more than 60 years old, it does not feel dated for a moment. The author's journalistic background is never far away. Big, emotional, themes are combined with banal elements. For instance, the young challenger Otake suffers from indigestion and this is reported more than once. And then there are sometimes unexpectedly poetic observations.

"... I went to the veranda and saw that an azalea by the pond was in bud, and had even produced two blossoms out of season."

Kawabata was the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. In the Netherlands, he gained some fame through translations of ´Sneeuwland´ and ´De schone slaapsters´. Both books are also out of print.

The Japanese Nobel laureate considered ´The Master of the Go Game´ his best work. A final reason why this fascinating novella deserves a reprint.