The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice.

This is an interesting and touching novel by the Nobel Prize winner from 1968 Yasunari Kawabata. His win is perfectly well-deserved as he’s a great writer, but I get the sense that the Nobel committee perhaps felt like they missed their chance with Junichiro Tanizaki dying a few years earlier, not necessarily wanting to risk giving the prize to Mishima. And Kawabata became a worthy if modest prize winner.

This novel is not wholly a novel, and according to the introduction, was more of a kind of loosely interpreted novelistic form. The narrator might as well be Kawabata and I think he gives a name, a different one, but it’s not super important. Instead, the novel focuses heavily on the final match and the final days of a grandmaster Go player. This grandmaster has agreed to play a match with a young and perfectly worthy opponent whose playstyle simply represented a kind of “next generation” of styles moving forward. The game still follows the traditional rules and setup for Go matches, but as it drags on, the master becomes increasingly wary.

Kawabata is narrating this match, giving a lot of background of the game itself (although not really telling much about how to play — there’s an innate sense you’re supposed to know. In fact, we meet an American player down the line in the novel and while he’s earnest, it’s clear that Kawabata doesn’t respect his outsider status, as if he plays both sloppily and thoughtlessly).

The novel also spends a lot of time contemplating the role of an aging master of any talent, and how that talent becomes a target for the young, who may very well show respect, but also represents life’s fleetingness.

This novel reminded me a lot of Stefan Zweig’s amazing novella “Chess Story”, which you might also read.

(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Master-Go-Yasunari-Kawabata/dp/0679761063)