Summary
For Kawabata, Go was not simply a game; at its best, and especially as played by the Master, it was an art with a certain oriental nobility and mystery. As with Japan in the immediate postwar years, the game was changing (though begun earlier, this book was not published until 1951). "From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled," Kawabata wrote. "Everything had become science and regulation.
Today, the Japanese writers most familiar to western readers, from the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe to Haruki Murakami, are internationalists in style, attitude and ambition, their politics largely leftist or liberal and their familiarity with popular culture - with Hollywood, the American vernacular, pop and the buzz of new technologies - obvious.See the full content of this document
Extract
The Month of Cherry Blossom
In 1938 Yasunari Kawabata was commissioned by a Tokyo newspaper to write about a championship game of Go between the best player in Japan, the Master, and a young, talented challenger. It was no ordinary game of Go: the aged Master, believed to be unbeatable, is portrayed in The Master of Go - Kawabata's book based on the 1938 match, which has just been reissued in a fine edition by Yellow Jersey Press - as the embodiment of a traditional and hierarchical Japan that is threatened by the forces of change and modernity, a Japan of ceremony and ritual to which the conservative and nostalgic Kawabata is deeply attached. The Master as reimagined in this non-fi...
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