SOURCE: "Tragic Vision in Kawabata's The Master of Go," in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2, 1982, pp. 83-94.

[In the following essay, Bourque analyzes Kawabata's The Master of Go as a modern tragedy.]

At first glance the application of the thoroughly Western dramatic concept of tragedy to an Oriental novel may seem to be critical madness. Both the genres and the traditions are jarringly incongruous: the process may seem a bit like trying to examine a flower with a sword. Yet, unlike most Japanese novels, The Master of Go seems to invite examination from the perspective of Western concepts. At its most accessible symbolic level the novel presents the Go match between the old Master, Shusai, and the young challenger, Otaké, as the objectification of a conflict between tradition and change in Japanese culture, a change intimately associated with Western ideas. Beyond that, the most fundamental level of that conflict is the confrontation of two completely different ways of understanding the nature of human existence at the moment when one is giving way to the other and while both are still vital enough to sustain the conflict's intensity: on the one hand, the traditional Japanese culture's organic view of human beings as emotional and subjective participants in the integrative process of experiencing a complex universe of which they are a functioning element; on the other hand, a systematic view of human beings as objective observers of the universe, categorizing, systematizing, and controlling their experience of a world from which they try to stand apart.

The most obvious precedent for such a confrontation is to be found in the classical Greece of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., where the same kind of conflict took place between an organic, mythological view of humanity as part of the great cosmic cycle and the systematic view of humanity attempting rational control of its own destiny with the beginnings of theoretical science and the reflexive humanism of the Sophists. There, too, a transition occurred from the organic to the systematic at a moment when the conflict was still vital; the human anguish produced by that conflict is expressed in tragedy. The tragic flaw that brings about the hero's downfall is the assumption that he can control his own destiny through the exercise of logic and will, the attributes of rationality. From that limited perspective, the only real tragedy is Greek classical tragedy. Modern Western tragedy is not possible because the confrontation is no longer vital: we have become predominately rationalistic, and the memory of an organic conception of humanity is too dim to provoke a genuine conflict. Humanity still feels anguish, but it is the anxiety of the alienated hero. Yet, if the conflict can be found in its dynamic state once again, as it seems to be in The Master of Go, perhaps we can find there a modern literary equivalent to the Greek classical tragic vision.

There can be little doubt that the implications of the Go match in Kawabata's novel are meant to extend to Japanese culture in general. The contestants are isolated, but their activities are being reported in the newspapers as events of national importance. The game itself is frequently referred to as an art form, and relationships are continually established with music, poetry, history, and the Japanese landscape. It is inextricably entwined with the cultural tradition, the spirit, and the mentality of the Japanese people when Uragami, Kawabata's persona and narrator, plays a game of Go with an American on the train:

One did not of course wish to take a game too seriously, and yet it was quite clear that playing Go with a foreigner was very different from playing Go with a Japanese. I wondered whether the point might be that foreigners were not meant for Go…. One is of course rash to generalize from the single example of an American beginner, but perhaps the conclusion might be valid all the same that Western Go is wanting in spirit. The Oriental game has gone beyond game and test of strength and become a way of art. It has about it a certain Oriental mystery and nobility. The "Honnimbo" of Honnimbo Shusai is the name of a cell at the Jakkoji Temple in Kyoto, and Shusai the Master had himself taken holy orders. On the three hundredth anniversary of the death of the first Honnimbo, Sansa, whose clerical name was Nikkai, he had taken the clerical name Nichion. I thought, as I played Go with the American, that there was no tradition of Go in his country.

In addition, the Master's priesthood contributes to his near-mythical status in a unique and pervasive tradition:

It was his good fortune to be born in the early flush of Meiji. Probably never again will it be possible for anyone—for, say, Wu Ch'ing-yüan of our own day—knowing nothing of the vale of tears in which the Master spent his student years, to encompass in his individual person a whole panorama of history. It will not be possible even though the man be more of a genius at Go than the Master was. He was the symbol of Go itself, he and his record shining through Meiji, Taisho, and Showa, and his achievement in having brought the game to its modern flowering.

But the changes taking place in the game of Go and in Japanese culture are not simply the changes of taste and attitude that are always typical of the difference between one generation and another. They represent the cataclysmic rupture of a centuries-old tradition for the sake of a new one. No subtle transition here, no gradual shading off into other forms and other perspectives. The break is violent and abrupt because it represents a conflict between two incompatible views of humanity. Uragami, the narrator, leaves no doubt about the end of the tradition. He has played chess with the Master a few days before the old man's death, and he remarks: "Those were his last games of the chess of which he was so fond. I did the newspaper accounts of his last championship match at Go, I was his last adversary at chess, and I was the last to take his picture." The word "last" is significantly repeated, and since the Master has been set up in the novel as the last and only exemplar of the old tradition, it dies with him.

The death of that tradition is sometimes blamed on the encroachment of Western influences, especially American ones. We have already encountered the American on the train, and there is a significant passage in which the Master, fallen ill, is taken to St. Luke's, an American hospital: "I went to see him at St. Luke's Hospital during the three-month recess in his retirement match. The furnishings were huge, to fit the American physique. There was something precarious about the Master's small figure perched on the lofty bed." And probably the ultimate irony centers on one of the fussy rules that have become the new way of Go: the practice of isolating the players to prevent outside interference with the match. The process is called "sealing in a tin can." The tin can is the most prominent symbol of the American occupation of Japan after World War II. Cigarette lighters, the first products of the birth of the modern Japanese industrial giant, were made with the metal salvaged from American beer cans.

But it is not the source of the change (if, indeed, that source is ever clearly determined), but rather the nature of the change that really concerns Kawabata:

It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and 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.

To put it as simply as possible, in the Master's tradition the process itself is the substance, but, in the new way, the goal is the substance. Of course Go is definitely an exercise in rationality. It is a game of tactics and strategy, complete with military terms of attack and defense. But in the Master's tradition the process also involves aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical components: there is an appreciation of the board and stones in terms of color, texture, and design; the game adheres to certain time-honored forms and procedures; it is also an expression of an attitude toward existence and a mode of behavior. For Otaké and the new way, there are only three variations of a single concern; to win, to collect the prize money, to become the new Master. Only rational goals and values are worth considering.

The changes are traceable to Western influences: scientific systematization, goal-oriented competition, theoretical abstraction, iconoclastic individualism—all under the pervasive shadow of rationalism. But Kawabata does not waste his time exploring the historical, or philosophical, or economic sources of these changes nor their implications. Rather, he records the effects of the conflicts among them on a people represented in microcosm by Shusai, Otaké, and, of course, Uragami. To that extent, Kawabata's novel achieves the scope of Greek tragedy in that both, using different metaphors as vehicles, constitute a fictionalized record of the culture's development from an organic to a systematic self-conception. Aeschylus's Oresteia provides a good parallel. In that trilogy, the dramatic theme revolves around Orestes's dilemma in the face of conflicting demands posed by the blood-vengeance tradition: he must avenge his father, but he must not kill his mother, an act that constitutes the only acceptable form of vengeance. He is finally vindicated in a court of law especially formed for the purpose by Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and the trilogy becomes a symbolic re-creation of the Greek culture's historical process of transition from the old mythological beliefs to the more rational systems of civil law. Orestes is the objectification, the symbolic embodiment of that transition. In the same way the Go match in Kawabata's novel is the metaphor for the Japanese culture's transition from the old tradition to the more rational systems of the modern world. In fact, it is to a considerable degree the same tradition in both cultures. Not that the Japanese tradition can be characterized as pre-analytical in the same sense as the Homeric tradition which describes warriors as generations of leaves, but both traditions express a remarkably similar view of what humanity becomes when rationality begins to dominate culture and overshadows whatever organic tradition existed before it. And that vision of humanity is an important element in tragedy.

Within the context of that cultural record, the Master can easily be envisioned as a tragic hero, contingent upon the nature of his death. In the meantime, he has all of the aristocratic background and demeanor of that office. He is a man of high stature, noble sentiments, and strength. For a man his age he demonstrates remarkable discipline in his posture and bearing at the Go board. He inspires confidence in his mastery of self; he is calm where others are perturbed, he is energetic where others are lethargic, he displays refined tastes in poetry, music, and art. In short, he is a highly complex individual who assumes heroic proportions in comparison with the people around him.

Uragami, for instance, takes on the aspect of the Greek chorus, commenting on the proceedings as the representative of ordinary people whose fate is encompassed by the heroic conflict they can only observe. Like the chorus, he is often confused about what is actually happening, about the motives of the participants, about the implications of the actions he is reporting. Further, he is often ambivalent about which values are the more legitimate. And, in the final analysis, like the Greek chorus, he is left to report the ending of the tragic hero—this time with a camera.

But if Shusai is a tragic hero and Uragami is the chorus, what function does Otaké fulfill? It is there that Kawabata expands his tragic vision to bridge the gap between past and present. For Otaké bears all the marks of the alienated hero. And, after all, that is not so surprising, since the alienated hero is no more than the literary culmination of Western culture's logical development into the rational, analytical phase begun with the Greeks. Where humanity's assumption of control over its own destiny can be seen as a positive step from the point of view of the Oresteia—Orestes's acquittal marks the end of the bloodletting—it can be seen pessimistically from the present since the analytical approach has failed to produce a comprehensive world view. If Western humanity has gained its freedom and individuality, it has lost the sense of stability and cohesion. If it has gained mobility and a greater potential for improving its condition, it has also acquired a fear of the unknown future. This is not the place to debate the issue in cultural terms, but it seems evident that modern literature has emphasized the negative elements of that dichotomy and coalesced them in the figure of the antihero who is always as distantly removed from any sense of tradition as we are from the ancient Greeks. But Kawabata had one advantage over the Greek tragedians. With Western culture as a precedent and Western literature as a guide, he could foresee the direction his own culture would take, and display, in one startling contrast: both the inception of the new world view in a tragic vision and its logical culmination in the alienated hero.

Otaké is so completely different from the Master that we are shocked by the comparison. They do indeed seem centuries apart in their attitudes and habits. A few examples merely suggest the extent and depth of the contrast. Otaké has absolutely none of the majesty and dignity that attend the Master. Uragami notes:

Otaké's trouble was more extreme. He was unique among competitors at the grand spring and autumn tournaments. He would drink enormously from the large pot he kept at his side. Wu of the Sixth Rank, who was at the time one of his more interesting adversaries, also suffered at the Go board from nervous enuresis. I have seen him get up ten times and more in the course of four or five hours of play. Though he did not have Otaké's addiction to tea, there would all the same (and one marveled at the fact) come sounds from the urinal each time he left the board. With Otaké the difficulty did not stop at enuresis. One noted with curiosity that he would leave his overskirt behind him in the hallway and his obi as well.

What could be more antiheroic than a winner with a weak bladder and diarrhea? But the Master is very different: "Seated at the board, the Master and Otaké presented a complete contrast, quiet against constant motion, nervelessness against nervous tension. Once he had sunk himself into a session, the Master did not leave the board." Uragami notes, however, that Otaké's nervousness does not detract from the power of his game. Later, when the Master falls ill, suffering from pain in his chest, his face swollen:

Seated at the board, the Master quietly took up a tea bowl in both hands and sipped at the strong brew. Then he folded his hands lightly on his knees and brought himself upright. The expression on his face was like that of a child about to weep. The tightly closed lips were thrust forward, there was a dropsical swelling in the cheeks, and the eyelids too were swollen.

In extreme pain, the Master sits straight and suffers silently, with dignity. Otaké is another type altogether: "Otaké reported that he too was indisposed. His digestion was troubling him. He was taking three stomach medicines and a medicine to prevent fainting as well. He had been known to faint during a match." His weakness, as we discover, is not a sign of failing health. Rather, it is a sign that he is playing badly and running out of time. The Master is a man of many talents and interests; Otaké is a Go player and nothing else. The Master appreciates the process of the game as an art; Otaké emphasizes the outcome of the game as a test of power. The contrasts could be extended indefinitely, but the results are the same: the Master is, above all, master of himself, while Otaké cannot even control his bodily functions. The Master is a many-faceted, nearly legendary figure who seems to carry over from the distant past; his world view has a well-integrated complexity. Otaké is a single-minded rationalist of the immediate present; he is a specialist.

But it is the tragic vision that concerns us here, and the special character of the tragic hero is that he attempts to bridge the gap between two world views. While he is firmly rooted in the traditional past, he is also the hope of the future, predicated upon the action of the present. And, in that respect, there are some remarkable correspondences between Shusai the Master and Oedipus the King. For instance, both seem to achieve, if only briefly, that delicate balance between the two worlds in question. Indeed, that is one of the principal qualities among those that make them heroic. In Sophocles's tragedy the Priest petitions Oedipus, in the name of the people, with these words:

     You are not one of the immortal gods, we know;
     Yet we have come to you to make our prayer
     As to the man surest in mortal ways
     And wisest in the ways of God.

The dramatic action is a demonstration of that balance. Oedipus is firmly committed to the spiritual values of his heritage. When the oracle indicates the cause of the plague and its cure, Oedipus dedicates himself totally to fulfilling its terms. Within the context of that spiritual heritage, he exercises his rational powers, which are definitely superior to those of ordinary people, in a detective-style search for the culprit. To that extent Oedipus is entirely heroic: his balanced approach certainly succeeds in discovering the guilty party, and, in Oedipus, the culture seems to have achieved its finest flowering—even if it is an imperfect blossom and lasts but a moment. With Oedipus humanity has learned that it can act effectively, with the guidance of spiritual authority, to achieve a measure of control over its own destiny: after all, the Thebans are rescued by Oedipus's action. It is only Oedipus himself who is destroyed, and his destruction is certainly not due to the thoroughly honorable action we see him take in the play as rational human investigator of a divine orderliness. It is the result of actions that have occurred prior to the present time of the play. And what is the nature of those actions? Excessive reliance on human logic. When the first oracle predicted Oedipus's fate, he simply fled, basing his flight on the logical assumption that Polybus was his father—obviously a false assumption. Relying on his own logic, he tried to change destiny. But, since the way of divine authority is not to justify itself but to maintain order, the oracle had foreseen the excessive reliance on logic, the excessive confidence in self that comes from an imbalance toward the side of rationality. That is the hubris of Oedipus. And the ever-increasing reliance on human logic in developing Western culture's attempt to control destiny becomes an iconoclastic individualism, already hinted at by the Greek tragedians, that eventually produces the alienated hero without roots, without tradition, and without a cohesive world view; the individualism produces only theoretical and rational systems that constantly break down.

The Master, like Oedipus, is firmly committed to the values of his heritage, and, like Oedipus, he is the best that his culture can produce. He possesses the ability to achieve the fine balance between two world views. On the one hand, he is himself a priest, and he has the sensibility that transforms a mere game into an artistic and spiritual achievement. On the other hand, Go is the supreme exercise in rationality, and Shusai is indeed the Master. But what is it that makes the last game so different? As in the ancient tragedy, we know the outcome from the very start. We are shown the images of the dead man, and we are told: "One may say that in the end the match took the Master's life." The remainder of the novel is the working out of that inevitable fate. The dramatic strength of the action lies not in the suspense over the outcome of the match—that would require a focus on Otaké and his values—but in the anguish generated by the vision of a great man working toward his own destruction. And since the Master himself does not know the outcome, as we do, the novel produces the same kind of dramatic irony that we find in the tragedy of Oedipus.

Moreover, like Oedipus, the Master has brought his own fate upon himself by extending the rational elements of the game beyond the boundaries of the traditional, thereby destroying the delicate balance. The fatal error in this case is his conceding to, rather than resisting, all of those very things that Uragami told us were the result of modern rationalism, not the least of which is the profit motive. Uragami tells us: "It may in fact be said that the Master sold his last match to a newspaper at a price without precedent. He did not so much go forth into combat as allow himself to be lured into combat by the newspaper." With his acceptance of that sponsorship come all the "fussy rules" such as the sealed play and the extended time limit that eventually conspire to destroy the Master's commitment to the match. By giving in to modern rationalism, Shusai has made what seems to be the logical choice, but it is a logic that is not informed by the spiritual nature of his art.

There comes a moment, of course, when the Master realizes his fatal error and the destiny that awaits him, but that moment does not occur when the wrong play has been made, the play that decides the logical outcome of the game. Rather, the Master's enlightenment occurs when Otaké has made a wholly unexpected play that is not, however, decisive. After that day's session the Master says to Uragami:

The match is over. Mr. Otaké ruined it with that sealed play. It was like smearing ink over the picture we had painted. The minute I saw it I felt like forfeiting the match. Like telling them it was the last straw. I really thought I should forfeit. But I hesitated, and that was that.

Of course, there is never any real possibility of forfeiture for a man like the Master; that is only a passing temptation. He may be tempted to stop the inevitable workings of fate. He could simply disengage, as Oedipus could do, when he begins to realize what his destiny will be; but he must continue. And he, too, is betrayed by anger and his own commitment. Though he maintains his composure, the rapidity of his next move betrays his attitude:

I had not been aware, at the moment of play, that the Master was so angry and so disappointed as to consider forfeiting the match. There was no sign of emotion on his face or in his manner as he sat at the board. No one among us sensed his distress. We had been watching Yawata, of course, as he was having his troubles with the chart and the sealed play, and we had not looked at the Master. Yet the Master had played White 122 in literally no time, less than a minute.

His response does not conform to the situation. Black 121, the opponent's smearing tactic, has been so unusual that it should require considerable thought and adjustment on the Master's part, especially since the Master has not yet spent even half of the time allotted him for the match. Yet the Master plays without any thought whatsoever. And by the end of that day's session he has made the fatal play, White 130, that ensures his defeat. Once again, we are reminded of Oedipus who has first betrayed his spiritual nature by fleeing from the oracle and then betrays his rational nature by giving in to a fit of anger on the road to Thebes. Likewise, the Master has betrayed the spirit of his art by agreeing to the conditions of his match and then betrays his rational nature by reacting emotionally in a burst of anger. In this case, his anger is directed at himself as well as at Otaké, because he realizes that it is his own concession that has made possible the system in which Otaké makes the sealed play that so angers him.

And there is little doubt that the Master finally makes the only response possible to that realization. In a move somewhat less dramatic than Oedipus's blinding, the Master makes the only choice left to him under the circumstances. A victory for him in this match would mean that he has become what his opponent is already: dedicated only to winning without regard for the spiritual value of the process. After Black 121, he could still win, logically; but now that the match has lost its artistic and spiritual value, it can have no meaning in the Master's tradition. He must lose in order to assert the validity of humanity's attempt to find the balance even as he fails himself. And so he deliberately and knowingly makes the move, White 130, that destroys him. Uragami asks: "Another puzzle: why did the Master play White 130 and so ensure his own defeat?" Just as the chorus in Oedipus Rex asks: "What god was it drove you to rake black / Night across your eyes?" But we know. And just as the Master has made the fatal move, the sound of a flute comes drifting into the room. The next morning he has begun the final ritual: "I do not know when he had called a barber, but this morning he resembled a shaven-headed priest."

The world goes on, of course, just as it does in Sophocles's play, though not in the same way. The people of Thebes are rescued from their plague by Oedipus's action, while the people of Japan seem condemned to the insecurity of modern rationalism in Kawabata's novel. Otaké is fundamentally a good man, and he deservedly reaps the rewards of his victory: he lives well, and he can afford to keep disciples, along with his family, in a large home. But his real fate is expressed in one of Uragami's typical observations:

The fact that today, a decade after the Master's death, no method has been devised for determining the succession to the title Master of Go probably has to do with the towering presence of Honnimbo Shusai. Probably he was the last of the true masters revered in the tradition of Go as a way of life and art.

But while Sophocles seems to revert to tradition and Kawabata plunges us into rationalism, the difference in prospects for the future is not surprising, nor is it crucial. It is the tipping of the balance in either direction by a human being's willful action that produces the tragic destruction. Oedipus's reliance on logic reveals the inadequacy of logic alone. Antigone's total commitment to tradition precipitates her destruction. Creon's excessive attention to political expediency is equally destructive. Haimon, who cannot find the balance between the two, is crushed. Phaedra's excessive passion destroys her, while Hippolytus, with his excessive self control, is ground up in a complex of fates and curses. Only Aeschylus's Orestes seems to live on, precisely because Athena has chosen to provide him with what seems to be the ideal balance: the rational human institution of law and justice under the guidance and protection of the gods. Significantly, Orestes is not the typical tragic hero. For Kawabata, who had the precedent of Western tradition to observe, the balance must tip in the direction of rationalism. In his tragic vision excessive rationality provides both the loss of equilibrium that leads to a tragic fate and the projection of its effects on humanity. And that excessive rationality takes the metaphoric guise of Western rationalism's most pervasive characteristic: analytical systematization.

Yasunari Kawabata has written a tragedy of the modern era, using the only context in which tragedy is still possible: a fundamental shift of emphasis from one world view to another, with humanity, in the person of the tragic hero, attempting to maintain a delicate balance between the two. Such a balance is impossible, of course, and one in which the hero can finally choose only to assert his humanity with his destruction. Kawabata's tragic vision is vitally alive, and it is faithful to the Greek conception, not because it attempts to imitate the earlier form, but because it is based on a similar cultural crisis. Tragedy has interested Westerners since its inception; they have always felt a fundamental dichotomy between the demands of the soul and those of the intellect, and tragedy has objectified that dichotomy. But perhaps the most vital tragedy can only be written when the vehicle, the living metaphor, is derived from a culture that is itself on the balance midway between the two. In that sense, tragedy transcends the limitations of genre and of time.