Book Review: "The Master of Go"
Some thoughts on a Japanese classic written by Yasunari Kawabata and a February News Roundup
The Book
The Master of Go is a book released in 1951 that follows the drama of the 1938 match between Honinbo Shusai and Kitani Minoru. This game was the Honinbo’s final match before retirement and took nearly six months to complete, given Shusai’s worsening illness and each player’s allotted forty hours of thinking time.
The match was sponsored by a newspaper by whom the writer, Kawabata, was employed to cover the events and progress of the game. The tradition of the time required that the players were ‘sealed in’ with the game for its duration in order to protect the sanctity of the competition—quite the commitment for such a long match.
The players met for sessions each day, and at the break for lunch and the break to end the day, the player whose turn it was to play a stone would seal their move in an envelope to be opened at the set of the next session. During some of the sessions play would advance only one or two moves.
If you are like me and fascinated not only by the game of Go but also the culture and history surrounding it, this book is a must-read. I was fascinated to imagine the amount of time focused on a single match, not to mention the public interest of weekly newspaper columns and intricate ceremony that came with this game. It is so vastly different from today, where a game with more than an hour of thinking time for each player is considered quite a long game—I think I would not be wrong in guessing that the most popular time settings for casual play are somewhere in the range of 5-20 minutes main time.
If you are more interested in technical books, this one may not be for you. There are some portions of technical talk about the game and occasional diagrams to communicate the flow of the match, but Kawabata spends more time describing the events surrounding the match and the emotions he feels watching the players play.
The sky was dark with the squall Otaké had called a tempest, and the lights were on. The white stones, reflected on the mirrorlike face of the board, became one with the figure of the Master, and the violence of the wind and rain in the garden seemed to intensify the stillness of the room. 1
Kawabata has a fantastic talent for showing how the Go board both pulls in and projects itself onto the outside world. It has gravity. Each man dedicated most of their waking lives during the match to best representing themselves and the generation from which they emerged.
The clash of ideals is a running theme through the entire book. I believe that the author identified with and respected the old way of thinking more, but he creates a wonderful tension in the narrative with his reports of Kitani and his modern ideas as respectable and admirable in his actions.
It could be a difference in culture, but I certainly like “Otaké”2 more than I like the Master. I respect his ability and dedication to playing through sickness, but I have a hard time admiring him. It could be that Otaké is more relatable, or that he represents an underdog or the ‘new wave’, but my impression is that he is the protagonist of the story.
I think Kawabata would disagree.
From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation… 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. The fault was not Otaké’s. Perhaps what had happened was but natural, Go being a contest and a show of strength.3
It makes sense. He was mourning Shusai when he wrote the novel, No doubt he mourned the loss of the old way of Go as well. It makes me wonder the book he would have written for Lee Sedol if he witnessed the dawn of AlphaGo. I think many Go players who learned pre-AI have felt the conflicting emotions of awe and quiet sadness that emerge with the turn of an era.
One thing I think Kawabata and I would agree on is that the Go world certainly lost something interesting when matches of this style went out of fashion. It simply is not practical any more, but I would love to read of even a week-long match where players played not multiple matches but a single, extremely long match, playing only some of the moves each day and marinating with the positions over breaks for lunch and days end.
I know there are Japanese domestic titles where the finals are played over two days, but to my knowledge there are none longer. I would enjoy this, and if the NAGF, AGA, EGF, or any organization revives the tradition and needed someone to report the match in English I would be quick to volunteer. 4
To conclude, if you are at all interested in the history of Go, you will not find a more eloquent example than this. Kawabata witnessed at a personal level one of the most important matches in our game’s history, and tells the story beautifully. It is a quick read and well worth your time.
February News Roundup
The Match, a film
There is a new movie coming out, incidentally covering another massively important figure in the history of Eastern Go. The Match is a movie about Lee Changho taking his first of many titles from his teacher Cho Hun-hyun, who forced Korea into the Baduk conversation by winning the first Ing Cup finals in 1989. Lee Changho, “the Stone Buddha” as he would eventually be called, rose to meet Hun-hyun far more quickly than anyone expected.
Chicago Open begins registrations
The 2025 Chicago Open will take place over Memorial Day Weekend, May 24th-25th. Early bird pricing is in place until May 4th. There is a free youth section on Saturday only. I’ve only heard good things about the Chicago events run by Albert Yen, so if you have a chance to go don’t miss out!
2025 Western Server Challenge
This challenge, run each year by Clossius, aims to increase activity on OGS. Success requires participants to play 100 ranked games during the month of March in one of the three main board sizes. The minimum time settings are:
1m + 3x10s for 9x9
3m + 4x10s for 13x13
5m + 5x10s for 19x19
Equivalent fischer time settings are also acceptable. See the forums thread for more details and the registration link.
I’ll be participating! The goal is to play a lot of 9x9 games. I don’t like 9x9 very much, but I have been looking for motivation to play it more often because I want to work on my close-quarters fighting skills.
I’ll definitely play some games of 19x19 and 13x13 as well. Drop me a message here if you’d like to play a game, I’ll need as many as I can get!