[In the following review, Friedman asserts that Kawabata's "The Master of Go may not be a novel, but it is a journalism recollected in tranquility."]

The Chess Match of the Century is over. Bobby Fischer's chair and Boris Spassky's pride have been pulled to pieces and reassembled. But what if The Times, say, had presumed upon Vladimir Nabokov's well-known passion for chess and had managed to persuade our most illustrious novelist to travel to Reykjavik to cover the match? And what if Nabokov had then given us a book, not only analyzing chess strategies, but dissecting with all the tender mercy of his art the two players themselves, together with their families, friends, managers, judges, lesser chess masters and lesser reporters, while everywhere viewing the event as a scene in the play of art and history?

The Master of Go is the improbable Oriental equivalent, mutatis mutandis, of that improbable book. Yasunari Kawabata, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, was considered until his recent death the Master of Japanese letters. A novelist of a peculiarly penetrating subtlety, he was also a lover of the game of Go. In 1938 the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun asked him to attend the Go Match of the Century as a newspaper reporter. It was a classic match, a contest between two men and at the same time two cultures, between the Old Japan and a New one, between conservative tradition and dynamic ambition, between a polite, ailing Master and a young Challenger, neurotic, fussy, complaining and unpredictable.

The game took months, and to help the reader follow it, The Master of Go is well furnished with diagrams of the board, notes at the back of the book, and frequent analyses by Kawabata of the tides of battle. Since I used to play Go myself—however ineptly—I was fascinated. But no doubt a good number of readers will skim over such data as: "a space removed on the 'S' line from Black 87." Similar details of play are given in abundance, for this is a log of the match—or is it? Edward G. Seidensticker, whose translation flows elegantly, calls the work a "chronicle-novel" but "rather more chronicle than novel." A tad less particular, the dust jacket labels it simply "a novel." Well, there is an honorable blur between fiction and nonfiction, nowadays and earlier, but my point here is that the reader who opens this book expecting a novel may be in for a surprise. Kawabata, loving Go as Nabokov loves chess, keeps one eye on the board. If the reader expects a chronicle of the match, however, he will be amazed.

For Kawabata has two eyes, and everywhere his vision of the board makes him see more. The progress toward death, the unity of adversaries, the veils of pride and the shadows of enlightenment are never far from the foreground of the match. "It was a wholly unexpected play. I felt a tensing of my muscles, as if the diabolic side of the Master had suddenly been revealed." Or again: "The waves that passed through his shoulders were quite regular. They were to me like a concentration of violence, or the doings of some mysterious power that had taken possession of the Master…. I wondered if I was witness to the workings of the Master's soul as, all unconsciously, it received its inspiration, was host to the afflatus. Or was I watching a passage to enlightenment as the soul threw off all sense of identity and the fires of combat were quenched?" Reading passages like these, one thinks of other Masters, those of Hesse, Mann, Bulgakov, even James, and of other contests in the soul, and of the differences that illuminate.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Kawabata spoke feelingly of the underlying spirit of Zen in Japanese poetry. That spirit—the emptiness that enlightens—rises to the surface here in Go. "I was presently able to feel not only interest in the match but a sense of Go as an art, and that was because I reduced myself to nothing as I gazed at the Master." Still, one of the most gratifying things about Kawabata's work elsewhere is his genius for empty spaces. As one reads between his lines, the spaces he deliberately leaves there seem to widen. Here is a brief passage from the novel, Thousand Cranes:

Fumiko had no way of knowing her mother as a woman.

To forgive or to be forgiven was for Kikuji a matter of being rocked in that wave, the dreaminess of the woman's body.

It seemed that the dreaminess was here too in the pair of Raku bowls.

Fumiko did not know her mother thus.

In The Master of Go this delicate directness gives way to plain explicitness. Kawabata intended, I think, to treat the ritual of Go and the death of the Master here as he treated the tea ceremony in Thousand Cranes and as Junichiro Tanizaki treated the Bunraku puppets in Some Prefer Nettles: to convey in single human beings, and therefore at the deepest levels, an entire culture slipping away. In The Master of Go such matters are apt to be stated quite badly, not subtly: "the end of an age and the bridge to a new age." And yet, since this work lies somewhere between reportage and fiction, one hesitates to carp. "The Master had put the match together as a work of art." The Master of Go may not be a novel, but it is journalism recollected in tranquility.