[No] one can fail to notice the obsession with time modern man exhibits…. To think about the literary masters of this century is to think in large measure about the temporal concerns pervading their work….

[All] have striven to celebrate and describe those moments in which the mind's experience of time is somehow absent, those moments in which it can be said of the mind that it shares in the timeless, in the eternal. Writers in the Orient too have partaken in the quest….

Invariably observed by commentators who attempt to distinguish between the mentalities of East and West is the former's generally subjective and the latter's generally objective outlook on living in the world. (p. 330)

If the generally introspective bent of the East is a symptom correctly diagnosed, such a disposition must have its consequences in the East's vision and handling of time. An introspective propensity would suggest that those under its influence attend more to subjective time, that is, the psychological, personal, and private time an individual mind experiences, rather than to the objective, impersonal, and public time measured by clocks and calendars. Furthermore, any proposed "escape" from time will be determined by the kind of time more deeply and acutely experienced. As a result, any cessation of time the Oriental will point to as desirable will have more to do with its absence in the mind than in the world…. When Western man has conceived of the timeless, he has tended to visualize it, not-withstanding the notions of some Western writers, as a cessation of objective time. Locating eternity not in the mind, in the present moment, in the psychic, eternal "now," he has envisaged it in the stasis beyond death, beyond the world, and ultimately beyond the end of history.

To pursue these distinctions, although foolish and simplistic in certain contexts, cannot be entirely amiss here, for they define the cultural situation in Japan from which [The Master of Go] … draws its concerns.

The Master of Go reconstructs the playing in 1938 of an actual championship Go match between Shūsai, the old "Master of Go," and his young challenger, Kitani Minoru, renamed Otake in the novel…. [The death of the master a year after his defeat] casts its shadow over the entire novel, investing the match for Kawabata, the novelist, with a symbolic significance far beyond what the actual match could have had. The retirement match comes to mean "the end of an age and the bridge to a new age."… The Master's defeat and death represent the demise of that entire traditional way of life the immanent war somewhat more decisively dispatched. Otake, "the representative of a new day" … heralds the approach of a new modernity, largely Western in nature. By pitting the two representatives in a game of Go and charting the Master's deterioration and defeat, Kawabata quietly mourns the passing of an era he considers more amenable to satisfying certain spiritual cravings—especially the desire for the timeless—than the frantic modernism about to replace it.

This clash over the Go board, which is the clash between Japanese tradition and Western modernity, delineates two opposing ways humanity confronts existence. Intuitive, non-rational knowledge, with its subjective experience of time, seems to inform the first. Logical, rational knowledge, with its objective experience of time, seems to comprise the basis of the other method for living with the various limitations and mysteries of existence. The novel sharpens the theme of this cultural conflict by focusing much of its attention on temporality, which plays a considerable role both in the content and procedure of the narrative. (pp. 331-32)

For the Master, for Uragami [the narrator], and for Kawabata, the game of Go is not merely a game…. The reason for its assuming such awesome importance to the Master is that at its deepest level the game of Go is a physical vehicle for a spiritual quest toward timelessness…. At stake, then, beyond merely losing or winning the game is the Master's continued ability to initiate in himself and sustain a state of mind … in which the self, no longer aware of itself as a discrete entity of consciousness separate from the universe, connects, merges, and freely communicates with everything in an undifferentiated reality. In such a state, individual identity disappears, human passions melt away, the physical world ceases to make an impression, and the perception of time too vanishes.

But the Master finds it increasingly difficult to achieve that mystical state, the goal of his high dedication and the justification for his sacrifice of the reality most of us cling to. At the limits of his being, his spiritual resources undermined, the Master arrives at a kind of limbo between, on the one hand, a conventional happiness and, on the other, a life redeemed by periods of mystical ecstasy. (pp. 333-34)

What gradually erodes the Master's potential to appropriate these mystical states, cheating him of spiritual triumph, is that whole complex of relations to human experience called the modern sensibility, a sensibility rooted in and nurtured by scientific rationalism and its veneration of objective time and the practical, physical, everyday world. Already vulnerable to complete physical collapse and death because of the heart disease the ineluctable process of aging has wrought in him, the Master collapses spiritually as well under the relentless pressure applied by the modernity embodied in his challenger, Otake. Contesting the shape of Japan's destiny in the sense of once again reaffirming or finally undercutting a cultural milieu traditionally conducive to the achievement of these states, the Master and Otake as they face each other over the Go board "presented a complete contrast, quiet against constant motion, nervelessness against nervous tension." (p. 334)

For Otake, the modern artist governed by rationality and logic, the game of Go assumes the aspect of a race with time. His every move on the Go board the result of careful and even crafty deliberation, he finishes the game with an expenditure of time almost twice that of the Master. Dictated by the obsession with clock time, his style of play is assiduous, and although seemingly passive, it is actually sustained by an "undercurrent of aggression and an unshakable confidence,"… partaking more of an egoistic will to power than any Oriental ideal of self-negation. (p. 335)

Otake's relationship with mundane reality, in conformity with his attitude toward time, is firmly earth-bound. Acutely conscious of the social proprieties, he is appropriately devoted to wife and children, and gathers about him an army of disciples. But if Otake's worldliness generates a congeniality laudable by ordinary standards, it encourages at the same time behavior not necessarily admirable. Unlike the Master who remains loftily unconcerned about his health, Otake resorts for his digestive difficulties to an extensive collection of medicinal palliatives. And in contrast to the Master's tranquility, Otake is frequently restless and impatient, ravaged by inner tensions. The absentmindedness which causes him on one occasion to forget and leave his hakama in the hallway, and on another to return to the board with it tied backwards, resembles more the commonplace professorial variety than the absentmindedness, as literal as it is spiritual, at the heart of the Master's vagueness.

Just as the game assumes a spiritual significance for the Master far beyond any metaphoric or symbolic inflation a Western reader might at first be willing to grant it, so the game for Otake, Uragami hints, assumes a significance far beyond any mundane humiliations of defeat or the various gratifications of victory. The passion for victory is so intense that Uragami does not preclude an insanely hysterical end for Otake…. Unlike the Master whose spiritual ambition exercised through Go is directed toward dissipating his consciousness in the universe and so losing the sense of time, Otake's ambition begins to approximate an almost Promethean defiance, a ravenous craving that on the spiritual level reveals itself as an imperious desire to subsume the universe in one's time-ridden consciousness.

The void Go unveils before the Master is "not the nothingness or emptiness of the West." And face to face with this void, the Master sustains an appropriate serenity. Otake's tremulous nerves, however, quiver with an anxiety only the disclosure of an entirely different sort of void could evoke. On the evidence of Otake's response it would seem reasonable to identify this void as resembling the Western variety, the secular meaningless nothingness someone like Nietzsche, for instance, predicted would confront man after all those justifications of human existence based on the belief in a reality beyond the ordinary had been discredited. (pp. 335-36)

Kawabata's vision of Otake's ending in hysteria suggests that … rationalism will end in insanity. A nihilism dug so deep cannot be climbed out of with the tools used to excavate it.

Therefore it is rationalism to which Kawabata points when he wonders what has happened to the nobility and mystery of Go…. And it is rationalism's subservience to objective time that Kawabata blames for robbing the game of Go of its spiritual overtones. (pp. 336-37)

The general tragedy, beyond the particular tragedy of the Master, is that the game of Go itself has been corrupted, no longer capable of functioning as a spiritual exercise to instigate and sustain in those who play it that mystical state of union with the universe. (p. 337)

Although the analogy cannot be entirely apt at every instance of possible comparison, the book could be visualized as the making of a Japanese garden whose rocks, sand, plants, grass, and trees are gradually arranged and distributed within a certain space, seemingly randomly, but actually designed to communicate a unified impression without violating the essential nature of the given topography.

Kawabata's particular way of breaking up chronology, although in the end it may reinforce whatever spiritual and cultural views he entertains concerning man, serves initially as an aesthetic strategy to present convincing portraits of his characters…. (p. 338)

The events memory recollects do not necessarily occur in a sequence corresponding to that in which they originally transpired. Associations other than those bound by chronology seem to decide the course of their unfolding. Since The Master of Go is a piece of the narrator's remembered past, his disclosure of the past, if it is to reflect human psychology, must likewise proceed discontinuously. And Kawabata had to paint a "realistic" portrait of Mr. Uragami, the narrator, because the significant function he performs in the scheme of the novel is to furnish the consciousness that reveals, distinguishes, and sets at variance the conflicting attitudes on which the novel turns. Uragami must faithfully reflect the human if the conflict he so subtly delineates is to possess the general relevance Kawabata certainly wanted to give it. (pp. 338-39)

Uragami's intense memory of the Master's death similarly focuses his vision to see with a special perception the poignant beauty of an era on the point of supersession….

However, it is not Uragami but the Master who dominates this book, and reasons involving the "realism" of his depiction, probably more than that of the narrator, must have been more decisive in leading Kawabata to the particular treatment of time we find in the book.

The fact that the events Kawabata wished to describe formed a part of his actual experience and the fact that he wished at the same time to communicate something of a cultural and spiritual nature, something that could not necessarily be inferred from a description of "raw" events, lodged him in a dilemma—that of divided loyalties between the reality of what actually happened and what truth he wants to convey by means of that reality. Sacrificing neither his experience by distorting what actually happened for the purpose of more sharply delineating his message, nor his art by diluting his artistic effects for the purpose of retaining a sense of verisimilitude, he extricates himself from the dilemma by breaking up chronology. In short, something the real Master may have said near the end of the match, suffering from his failing health, Kawabata may have felt "artistically" to belong near the beginning of his fictional account. (p. 339)

This fragmentation of chronology serves a further, and certainly the most important, function: to reinforce the spiritual theme of the novel. Kawabata's segmentation and arrangement of time into a progression that is not consecutive attempts to suggest the same aspirations toward the timeless the Master exercises through Go. It is to reflect in the very creation of his fictional world the same indifference to objective time, and also the same vagueness toward reality, which the Master exhibits…. But just as the Master weakens, becomes more and more conscious of the objective time and mundane reality he had previously been able to keep at bay, so Kawabata's unchronological narrative procedure gives way to a more rigorously chronological depiction of events.

The juggling of chronology, coupled with Kawabata's distaste for rational discourse, produces a narrative style that lacks the connective tissue associated with the typical Western novel…. Kawabata's fictional world is one of discrete physical and mental notations with little effort exerted to establish discernible relations between them. It is not a totally irrational world, not the radically surreal world the fragmented language of a William Burroughs creates, but neither is it stringently rational. Grammatical conventions within sentences continue to be observed (and so the rationality behind syntactical rules), but any one sentence neither necessarily follows from the previous nor leads into the next. The method reflects an Eastern bias against rationally and logically looking at the world. Each sentence can be regarded as a mirror reflecting some aspect of the chaotic world, and the spaces between the sentences as windows which allow us to look through that world into that emptiness discussed before, that emptiness where everything connects with everything else. (p. 340)

How the Master comes to lose this ideal world Kawabata presents in a structure vaguely resembling the structure of a traditional two-part Nō play, an art noted for its cavalier handling of time and space. (p. 341)

His previous distaste for speaking about the game evaporates and after the match turns into a willingness to comment repeatedly. Finally he publishes a volume containing his reflections about the game. But no longer being impervious to the world brings with it a susceptibility to the rule of human passion…. He becomes impatient, easily annoyed, finally exasperated. Otake's persistent quibbling over technical matters, however justified, sincere, and in the spirit of fair play, offends the Master's sense of Go as an art sullied by rationalistic haggles, and he is heard to grumble for the first time during a title match. His irritation culminates in the flash of anger that results in his defeat.

Uragami's terse observation that after his hospital stay the Master, as he plays, constantly consults his watch clearly betrays to what extent the impact of objective time now impinges on him, to what extent it has undermined his reliance on subjective time—in short, to what extent he has come to participate in the kind of consciousness Otake exemplifies….

Still puzzling Uragami is what both players say in their published reflections about the sealed play that assures victory for one, defeat for the other. Otake remarks: "I had been thinking that the time was ripe for Black 121 one of these times."… The Master observes: "Now was the time to make effective use of Black 121."… The puzzle involves Otake's "one of these times" and the Master's "now." Otake's uncharacteristic vagueness and the Master's uncharacteristic definiteness, while confirming the Master's contamination by objective time, also hints at a corresponding tendency (although in the other direction) on the part of Otake to rely more on subjective time. Conclusive evidence that Otake has learned something from the Master in this respect is perhaps provided by Uragami's description of him during the last session:

Otake seemed in a state of rapture, in the grip of thoughts too powerful to contain. The round, full face had the completeness and harmony of a Buddha head. It was an indescribably marvelous face—perhaps he had entered a realm of artistic exaltation. He seemed to have forgotten his digestive troubles.                                    (pp. 342-43)

[Provisional] expressions of hope forestall a mood of complete and unrelieved sadness in this novel. Yet unmistakable is Kawabata's sorrow in the face of a future bound gradually to choke off a tradition's power to inspire a culture's deepest responses to existence, a future bound to disown a heritage so thoroughly that to Japanese ears as well the sound of such phrases as "the way of Go" will ring as hollow as they do to most Western ears now. (p. 343)

Yoshio Iwamoto and Dick Wagenaar, "The Last Sad Sigh: Time and Kawabata's 'The Master of Go'," in Literature East and West (© Literature East and West Inc.), Vol. XVIII, Nos. 2-4, March, 1974, pp. 330-45.