The Master of Go, 2

Art, war, and Go


The clouds of the Second World War cast its shadows on Kawabata Yasunari's writing of The Master of Go. The novelist himself acknowledged that the game was "a contest and a show of strength". His news reports appeared in the papers prior to the war, but the narrative was collected and revised during and in the aftermath of the war.

The two sides had an equal opportunity of winning and strategies had to be devised along the way. Much had been made about the differing methods of the two players, and the "violence" with which they made their moves. Like in any combat or board game, rules of engagement ("its conscience and its ethics") had to be followed. But as with an actual battle, "the unforeseeable occurs and fates are sealed in an instant". "This is what war must be like", commented one observer when one of the players made a decisive move that assured his win and his opponent's defeat.
 
The way he described the tension-filled game, the unnerving moves and counter-moves of both sides, the singular purpose and obsession possessing both players, the destructive nature of the game itself, the way it could harm a player physically and psychologically. All these were indications that the sport was a dangerous arena, with sufficient space reserved for madness, cruelty, and perversion.
A notable incident in the book was when the writer played a match of Go with an amateur foreigner – an American and Go enthusiast. While playing, he contrasted his own temperament with that of the stranger's.

He had the forms down well enough, but he had a way of playing thoughtlessly, without really putting himself into the game. Losing did not seem to bother him in the least. He went happily through game after game, as if to say that it was really silly to take a mere game seriously. He lined his forces up after patterns he had been taught, and his opening plays were excellent; but he had no will to fight. If I pushed him back a little or made a surprise move, he quietly collapsed. It was as if I were throwing a large but badly balanced opponent in a wrestling match. Indeed this quickness to lose left me wondering uncomfortably if I might not have something innately evil concealed within me. Quite aside from matters of skill, I sensed no response, no resistance. There was no muscular tone in his play. One always found a competitive urge in a Japanese, however inept he might be at the game. One never encountered a stance as uncertain as this. The spirit of Go was missing. I thought it all very strange, and I was conscious of being confronted with utter foreignness. 

The key words in this passage are evil, competitiveness, and foreignness. Concepts that could be associated with the rise of militarism in Japan during the first half of twentieth century.

The writer went on to conclude that as opposed to Oriental Go which had "gone beyond game and test of strength and become a way of art" and which "has about it a certain Oriental mystery and nobility", "Western Go is wanting in spirit". And then he went on to discuss how Japanese Go had been derived from China, how it had been "elevated and deepened by the Japanese".

The 1938 Go match itself was contemporaneous with the Second Sino-Japanese War. The metaphor was not lost on Kawabata.

There was gunfire. Troops of student reserves were in training. More than a score of acquaintances in the literary world had gone off with the army and navy to observe the attack on Hankow [Hankou, China]. I was not selected for the party. Left behind, I wrote in my Nichinichi reports of how popular Go had always been in time of war, of how frequently one heard stories of games in battle encampments, of how closely the Way of the Warrior resembled a way of art, there being an element of the religious in both.

Perhaps there lay in the perversion of the beautiful game of Go the seeds of fascism, the excessive romanticization of nationalism and cultural supremacy, the way distorted ideology and religiosity could harmfully invade the Japanese psyche and give rise to fascism and militarism.

Kawabata's elegy may not only be directed to the vanishing code of an imperial culture, represented by the board game. He may also be grieving for the defeat of Japan in the war. Interestingly, his chronicle of a famous game of Go provided a window into Japanese perception of their own national culture; how, depending on one's perspective (and actions), it can be perceived (and played) as beautiful art or ugly war.


Again for the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 and January in Japan. An earlier post here.

The Master of Go

The Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (Perigee Books, 1981)



"A sad, elegant piece of reportage" was how the translator Edward G. Seidensticker described The Master of Go in the introduction. It was about an actual 1938 match that Kawabata Yasunari reported in the newspapers. The novelist reworked his narrative during the war and it was finally published as a book ten years after, in 1954. It was obvious from his treatment of the particular game of Go that the story was not merely a straightforward narrative of a battle between two diametrically opposite positions. It was also a meditation on the art of fiction and on cultural tradition, and, less obvious, a glimpse into the psyche of a nation at war.

As with the tea ceremony in Thousand Cranes and the weaving of obi in The Old Capital, the game of Go was here portrayed as "a way of life and art". And like the other two novels, this "chronicle-novel" was suffused with respect for cultural products and artifacts. The Go board and stones were evoked with particular care. The dedication of the players to the craft was but a reflection of the perfectionist builders of Go board.

I don't remember when it was, but I once saw a Go board of lacquer. It wasn't just lacquer-coated, it was dry lacquer to the core. A lacquer man in Aomori made it for his own amusement. He took twenty-five years to do it, he said. I imagine it would take that long, waiting for the lacquer to dry and then putting on a new coat. The bowls and boxes were solid lacquer too.

It would not be a spoiler to mention that this was a portrait of the magnanimous defeat of the Master at the hands of his challenger Otaké. The elegiac tone of the narrative seemed to extol the passage of an era and old traditions – represented by the Master – and to herald the entry of new, fresh blood who would take over the reins of the new era – represented by Otaké. The rivalry between tradition and modernity was a constant in Japanese literary novelists. The old inevitably paving the way for the new was there in the works of Sōseki, Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and Mishima. Kawabata's version of this conflict was through his characteristic elegant elegy for the "dying" art of the game and the traditional culture and values associated with it.

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. ... Perhaps what had happened was natural, Go being a contest and a show of strength.

The novel described the extreme discipline and dedication of the two players to their craft. Several times, Kawabata referred to the game as "art" or to the Master as an "artist". The game, which was fought in several sessions at specified intervals and which lasted for half a year, was almost elevated to a life and death situation. The players, especially the Master, were constantly plagued by health problems and psychological stress.

Although based on facts, the novelist's presentation of the story often courted the apocryphal. The account of the events felt more like an annotation of a written piece, with some details added in to embellish the story. There were details that were deliberately falsified either because Kawabata wanted to distance himself from his story or because he was trying to achieve a dramatic effect. (The translator's introduction and detailed notes at the end of the novel were particularly useful in determining which parts of the narrative are factually incorrect. Here the translator also played the role of fact-checker.) In any case, it was refreshing to see the novelistic side of Kawabata prevailing over journalism, how he treated reality as bendable, how he practiced creative nonfiction wherein objective reality was falsified, misused, and betrayed imaginatively. – "Since I was reporting on a match sponsored by a newspaper, I had to arouse interest. A certain amount of embroidering was necessary."

Being largely a "mental" game where a single move of a stone was inscrutable, where the meaning of that move was never fully revealed but only hinted at, Go was a perfect representation of Kawabata's literary medium. In the mysterious exchange of moves in Go lay his art of the novel – the art of uncertainty and vagueness.

It would seem that the mistake [in the game] resulted from more than an outburst of the anger the Master had felt all morning. Yet one cannot be sure. The Master himself could not have measured the tides of destiny within him, or the mischief from those passing wraiths.

Kawabata often interjected a lot of things from the gestures and comportment of the two players. But in every case, he was almost reduced to conjectures and assumptions, to make an uncertain ("one cannot be sure") interpretation of the proceedings of the game. He often acknowledged this uncertainty; he always put "perhaps" in his commentary on the game. "Vagueness" was Kawabata's fictional aesthetic.

"It seems strange that I've come as far as I have. I'm not much of a thinker, and I don't have what you might call beliefs. People talk about my responsibility to the game, but that hasn't been enough to bring me this far. And they can call it physical strength if they like—but that really isn't it either." He spoke slowly, his head slightly bowed. "Maybe I have no nerves. A vague, absent sort—maybe the vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go. That sort of thing." The Master seemed to savor the word as he spoke, and I savored it as I listened.

In this piece of nonfiction, Kawabata was surprisingly not a mystical observer of inexpressible actions but a mediator of an exciting game. However vague and humble he could be, he was truly invested in the game, watching it with a sense of immediacy and profound interest.


Read for the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 and January in Japan.

Thousand Cranes (Kawabata Yasunari)

Thousand Cranes by Kawabata Yasunari, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (Perigee, 1981)


When Kikuji's father died it seemed he inherited not only his material properties--the house and the antique tea bowls. His father's mistresses seemed to claim their hold onto him too. At the beginning of the novel, his father's first mistress Chikako sought him out to participate in a tea ceremony. But it seemed there was more to her invitation than tea drinking. She was arranging for Kikuji to meet a young beautiful woman as a marriage prospect. Mrs. Ota, his father's second mistress, with whom his father had had a longer lasting affair, was also present in the tea ceremony, together with her daughter. Her presence turned out to be a prelude to sexual relations with her former benefactor's son, with Kikuji himself.

The novel was another slippery haiku performance from Kawabata. As with his earlier novel Snow Country, nature and culture functioned as more than backdrops to sexual encounters. They were the very settings on which human frailties and beauties were heated to bubble up to the surface like steam on a tea kettle.

Over fiery coals the tea boils to perfection. The smoke couldn't hide the hushed desires, meaningful evasions, and raging passions of the characters. The elaborate tea ceremony at the opening almost obscured the all-too-civilized catfight between two mistresses soliciting the attention of a young man.

Thousand Cranes was a work of high symbolism and lyricism. It could be seen as a novel of cultural inheritance, the transference of culture through the generations, like a valuable heirloom in a family.

Before Mrs. Ota's ashes it [Shino tea ware] had been a flower vase, and now it was back at its old work, a water jar in a tea ceremony.

A jar that had been Mrs. Ota's was now being used by Chikako. After Mrs. Ota's death, it had passed to her daughter, and from Fumiko it had come to Kikuji.

It had had a strange career. But perhaps the strangeness was natural to tea vessels.

In the three or four hundred years before it became the property of Mrs. Ota, it had passed through the hands of people with what strange careers?

"Beside the iron kettle, the Shino looks even more like a beautiful woman," Kikuji said to Fumiko. "But it's strong enough to hold its own against the iron."

The novel could also be seen as a description of "cultural niche" (cf. ecological niche), the unique functions and inherent values of products and artifacts like tea bowls, in which the essence of culture dwells since immemorial time. There was a kind of mutual agreement between tea bowls and tea drinkers: the drinkers maintain the beauty of the bowls; the drink rejuvenates its drinkers.

"It's a great waste not to use Shino [sixteenth century ware] for tea. You can't bring out the real beauty of a tea piece unless you set it off against its own kind."
...
In black enamel touched with green and an occasional spot of russet, thick leaves of grass encircled the waist of the bowl. Clean and healthy, the leaves were enough to dispel his morbid fancies.

The proportions of the bowl were strong and dignified.

One appraised the value of tea vessels in terms of their aesthetic qualities and utility. Beauty and function defined their place in the world. The tea bowls were a valuable inheritance and were acquired at a high price. One left one's soul in them, like the stain of a lipstick that couldn't be rubbed off a teacup's rim.

The Shino was reddish to begin with, but Mother used to say that she couldn't rub [her] lipstick from the rim, no matter how hard she tried. I sometimes look at it now that she is dead, and there does seem to be a sort of flush in one place.

There was coevolution between cultural artifacts and people. As with The Old Capital, Kawabata was concerned with how cultures and traditions are transferred like genetic traits, like birthmarks. The imprint of culture was consistent to the way a birthmark was imprinted on a person. In the novel, Chikako had a birthmark on her breast. This mark, one character had noted, could leave a lasting impression on a child suckling on it.

From the day it was born it would drink there; and from the day it began to see, it would see that ugly mark on its mother's breast. Its first impression of the world, its first impression of its mother, would be that ugly birthmark, and there the impression would be, through the child's whole life.

As for the figure of the "thousand cranes", it was the striking pattern on a young woman's kerchief. It had so affected Kikuji's perception of her (the Inamura girl, the marriage prospect) that she came to embody it, becoming for him the "girl of the thousand cranes". The pattern could symbolize the vitality of youth, or the exhilarating freedom in flying. In the flight of the thousand cranes, flapping wings bring bird blood into the bristles of every feather. She probably inherited this piece of cloth from someone.

Read for Tony's January in Japan.

Snow Country (Kawabata Yasunari)

Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (Vintage International, 1996)

Set in the perennially snow-cold region of western mainland of Japan, Snow Country features one of the coldest characters in fiction. Shimamura is a wealthy Tokyo-based gentleman who from time to time visits a mountain hot spring and his geisha lover Komako. He only appreciates the beauty of nature and culture (music and the art of Chijimi weaving), and his carefree aristocratic attitude cannot conceal his insensitivity to other people’s emotions. However much Komako expressed her deep feelings for him, Shimamura does not reciprocate. As the story progresses, Shimamura’s snow-like passivity and Komako’s fiery love intensify.

The novel is an evocation of “inexpressible beauty” and passionate human nature. This is achieved through an ecological aesthetic that relies on a powerful sense of place and culture. Kawabata Yasunari describes landscapes and gestures with the pithy ruthlessness of a haiku poet, imbuing words with lyricism and care. The insidious cold is effectively evoked through the inhabitants’ clothes (mountain trousers), skin (reddened and cracked), and comportment. The ecological and cultural values are woven into the fabric of the prose.

   It was clear, from the familiar way she had talked to the station master the evening before and from the way she wore “mountain trousers,” that she was a native of this snow country, but the bold pattern of her obi, half visible over the trousers, made the rough russet and black stripes of the latter seem fresh and cheerful, and for the same reason the long sleeves of her woolen kimono took on a certain voluptuous charm. The trousers, split just below the knees, filled out toward the hips, and the heavy cotton, for all its natural stiffness, was somehow supple and gentle.

Culture and arts seem to embody the harsh cold environment. As with his later novel The Old Capital, Kawabata appears to be delineating the relationships between man and woman and nature. Harmony with nature is the desirable objective; love is most desired. The way the samisen string instrument sounds, the powerful way of playing it, can be dictated by a clear sky over snow.

“The tone is different on a day like this.” The tone had been as rich and vibrant as her remark suggested. The air was different. There were no theater walls, there was no audience, there was none of the city dust. The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.
   Practicing alone, not aware herself of what was happening, perhaps, but with all the wideness of nature in this mountain valley for her companion, she had come quite as a part of nature to take on this special power. Her very loneliness beat down sorrow and fostered a wild strength of will.

Kawabata’s writing is a delicate balance between expressing overwhelming beauty and containing it. The novel suggests that both the purity of art and the ability to master one's self can be derived from and conditioned by nature. One's destructive feelings, however, get in the way of fully achieving the harmony between human beings and nature. Although Shimamura's coldness does not hinder him from appreciating the traditional arts of weaving and samisen music playing, his disengagement from other people and his shallow intellectual curiosity are probably sufficient causes for his "estrangement" from nature.

In this novel in which the souls of the characters seem to be blanketed in snow, love is unrequited. “Do you understand how I feel? ... If you understand, then tell me. Tell me, if you see how I feel”, Komako at one point implores Shimamura. The question reveals the gulf between two different persons.



RELATED POST: The Old Capital (Kawabata Yasunari)

The Old Capital (Kawabata Yasunari)

The grove of cherries inside the main gate to the left of Ninnaji was overflowing with blossoms.

Whenever I see the lovely straight cedars at Kitayama, my spirit feels refreshed.

A small tree stood at the water's edge on the far side; the reflection of its crimson leaves shivered in the flow of the river.

If a novel can be built on haikus, then The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by J Martin Holman, is one. The sentences have the profound simplicity of the form. The narrative is broken by short paragraphs. The paragraphs usually contain a single sentence or two or three. The descriptions are charged with the beauty of the natural world, its concentrated essence. The sentences unfold in painterly scenes, flowering into the greenery of the forest and red orchard.

The novel's backdrop and setting are delicately described. The viewing of weeping cherry blossoms, the parade of cultural festivals, the weaving of the most exquisite obi - everything is evoked precisely. In sinuous sequence, the details appear with the transcendence of calligraphy.

Chieko, a young woman, was in search of her identity. She was a foundling, left behind by her true parents when still a baby. She grew up comfortably being cared for by a couple who ran a business selling fabric cloths. Her adoptive parents treated her like their own, but her broken connection from her biological parents seemed to weigh on her more and more. It was as if there was something lacking in her, a part of her nature that was also reflected in her seeming disconnect from and yearning for the natural world.

The novelist's theme seems to be the attempt to reconcile human beings to the natural world. There was a broken pathway that the characters are trying to bridge. They were restless, not content with the way things have so far progressed in their lives. If only this hidden something, an ecological connection, is found, then perhaps they will learn their rightful place, their niche, in their surroundings. And this knowledge will free them from their apprehensions.

As substitute for the beauty of the natural world, the fine arts of painting and weaving became significant expressions of it. Here is Chieko's father Takichiro on a painter that he used as inspiration to create a pattern for weaving:

   "He [Paul Klee] is a painter who was in the forefront of the abstract movement. His paintings are gentle, exceptional. You might say they have the quality of the dream, a quality that would speak even to the heart of an old Japanese like me. I studied them over and over until I came up with this pattern. It's unlike any traditional Japanese design. "

Flowers, wood trees, festivals, and fabric were the motifs in the books. They were the sources of inspiration to create works of art. The flowers and the trees were used to come up with the design for weaving an obi. The numerous Japanese festivals described in the book usually involved elements of nature appreciation.

The mountains were neither high nor deep. The trunk of each individual tree was visible even on the tops of the mountains. The cedars were used in the construction of tearooms so the appearance of the groves themselves had the elegant air of the tea ceremony.

The cedar grove evoking the elegance of a tea ceremony was the perfect statement of culture relying on nature. The utility of trees evoking, at the same time, the function of form and the form of function.

The old capital is Kyoto, after the designation of Tokyo as the new. The foundation of its art, crafts, and trades was the natural surroundings. Its old patterns had the vitality found in nature. Nowadays, though, the old men perceived that the increasing materialism and capitalism are affecting the quality of the artworks.

   "My eye just isn't accustomed to them [flowers]. I wouldn't like an obi or kimono cloth in a tulip pattern, but if a great artist were to create such a painting, even tulips could become a work with an eternal life," Takichiro said, looking aside. "Some of the ancient designs were like that. Some of them are older than this capital city itself. No one can create anything like that anymore. They can do no more than copy them.... Aren't there even trees here, still living, that are older than the capital?"

Like Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata seemed to eulogize the fading past. The ushering in of modernity signaled the encroachment of Western views, the increasing reliance on mechanization and mass production. They seemed not to bode well for the fate of pure art.

The old capital seemed to represent a last stand for the "old", while the new was stealthily modifying the traditions and values built on ancient nature and art. Open lands were converted into industrial zones. Houses were giving in to construction of inns. While in the mountains, in a tree plantation ("surrounded by the straight cedar trunks of uniform size") the place of man in nature was put into question, perhaps the central question raised by the novel.

"These [man-made trees] are about forty years old. They'll be cut and made into columns or the like. Left alone, they would probably grow for a thousand years ... wide and tall. I think about that occasionally. I like virgin forests the best, but in this village it's as though we're growing flowers for cutting."
[...]
"Were there no such thing as man, there would be nothing like Kyoto either. It would all be natural woods and fields of grasses. This land would belong to the deer and wild boar, wouldn't it? Why did man come into this world? It's frightening ... mankind."

What is the place of men and women in that natural canvas? The supremacy of nature is fleeting when it is us who eventually manipulate it at our own bidding. Takichiro turned to Western painters like Klee who were inspired by orientalism in order to come up with a flower pattern for his daughter's obi. He sought harmony and yet Hideo, a young master weaver, saw through the artifice of the design and dismissed it as lacking in "harmony". Hideo recognized that, ultimately, an artistic design for an obi can mimic the color of the flowers, yet it can never capture the true beauty of nature.

One after the other, the Kyoto festivals were described in the novel in detail, a seemingly endless profusion of ceremonies. The Gion festival, the bamboo cutting ceremony at Kurama Temple, the Daimonji fire-lighting festival, the Festival of the Ages. In these moments the novel seemed to transform into a cultural guide to festivals.

By interspersing these cultural events with nature viewings, the novelist seemed to contrast the activities of man in unbuilt nature and in his built environment. Rainer Maria Rilke, in the first of his Duino Elegies, seemed to have voiced the same perpetual listlessness of the novel's characters, as they move in the world interpreted for them:

... Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

The cedars and willows are always at home in the natural world. In contrast, the fine art of painting, the wearing of colorful obis, and the festivals - all are mere "interpretations" of nature, all subject to human appreciation. They exist as a culmination of inspiration, having been shaped after the likeness of trees and flowers.

Kawabata said in his Nobel Prize speech that his goal is to seek man's harmony in nature. In The Old Capital, the novelist manipulated nature and conducted a "natural experiment" to observe a person discovering her natural (biological) identity. The novelist set up questing identities, selves, and cultures in their natural surroundings and from there sought to define their feelings for it.

Chieko preferred camphor trees over mountain cedar trees presumably because the former are natural forest trees while the latter are man-made plantations. It cannot be denied that the gulf between landscape and man widens whenever land use decisions led to alteration and modification of nature.

To repair a broken connection is a difficult thing. Because the forest trees possess some great power, a "weird power", that holds sway over the characters, they have the capacity to strike them to the core, to restore them to their selves, who were born naked in the face of the elements. From a delicate sequence of sentences and passages as slender as cherry branches, Kawabata produced a beautiful work of ecological realism. One that questioned the rootedness of man in the natural environment and in this, our interpreted world.