Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #5

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18. 

From Edward Seidensticker's obituary in the New York Times 8/31/07:

"Tanizaki wrote clear, rational sentences," Mr. Seidensticker wrote [in his autobiography Tokyo Central]. "I do not, certainly, wish to suggest that I disapprove of such sentences; but translating them is not very interesting. There was little I felt inclined to ask Tanizaki about."

 Not so with Kawabata. "Do you not, sensei, find this a rather impenetrable passage?" Mr. Seidensticker recalled asking him, ever so gently, during the translation of Snow Country.

 "He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: 'Yes,' " Mr. Seidensticker wrote. "Nothing more."

The Master of Go – Kawabata Yasunari (tr. Edward Seidensticker)

In the late Thirties, Kawabata was hired by the Mainichi newspaper group to cover a championship match between the master of Go, the elderly unwell Shusai, and the younger, lower-ranked Otake. Kawabata uses in this novel some excerpts from his reporting, but adds much fictionalizing, since for Japanese modernists the genre “shosetsu | novel” was all about experimentation with literary techniques.

The Go championship emerges as a great mirror reflecting conflicts between the generations, between tradition and modernity, between East and West, between stoical and expressive. Go, for master Shusai, is a competition in which the old and traditional people can wield their whimsical and arbitrary prerogatives, as they have done for literally centuries. It’s been so long since he lost he can’t imagine not being invincible. Otake does not see Go as a pure and ineffable art form that requires detachment from mundane cares and concerns. He believes in Western gimmicks such as logic and productivity and efficiency. He quibbles about process and tweaks rules to his advantage, because the more rules proliferate, the more ingenuity humans bring to bending them. The master feels and intuits. Otake thinks and schemes.

With the master’s defeat and subsequent death, magnificently rendered by Kawabata, traditional Japan passes from the scene, withering due to contact with the West. Like Kawabata’s other novels, this is an elegy. Seidensticker points out in the introduction that while Kawabata didn’t give much thought to wartime xenophobia and austerities, he didn’t think much of democracy and science either.

And reading it in 2025 the reader confronts the remote. A tournament for a board game being covered by a major national newspaper. The rarefied world of professional Go where fans notice in silent consensus both spectacular moves and outrageous gaffes. People born in the Meiji Era who are not only traditional but feudal, with disciple-students that live with the master’s family, like apprentices in the Tokugawa era.

About a lost, elusive world. We think we are getting a bead on how life is, but conditions change, we age, other people don't stay the same and in all this flux the old ways gradually fade from memory. Kinds of products vanish and so do kinds of people and the way they thought and acted.