Enjoy The Master Of Go : Kawabata, Yasunari Translated By By Yasunari Kawabata Available As Publication

and very wierd! You would probably be lost for the actual Go play if you are an amateur player, like me Strangely, this did not dilute the experience, the excitement, the fine nuances of the duel, the description of the characters, of their physical and mental involvement.
A delicate Exactly what I expected, really enjoyable thanks : I know i know, this book is not a review of the game between Shusai and Otake, It's a book which tries to describe that epoch and the go world of that time and Kuwabata does a good job even though i felt at some points that the information was too much and not that interesting.
My main problem is that i would have

liked information about the styles of play, the meaning of the moves, the strategies that arose from those moves etc, which Kuwabata does but doesn't go in depth, He informs us with the health conditions of the participants, their habbits, the difficulties in organizing such event, the length of the series, the time they spend on the clock, some comments about the mentality of the players and on occasion throws some comments about the positions.
Also the diagramms are too few, It's not a bad book and i'm sure many will enjoy his easy style of writing but i was a bit dissapointed, If you purchase the book with the expectation of getting to know the details of their game and inside info you will be dissapointed as i was but if you are interested in the era of that time in Japan and its implications on go then this is the book.
It is said that Kawabata considered The Master of Go his best novel, I have read and greatly enjoyed his best known work Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, The Sound of the Mountain, The Old Capital, The House of the Sleeping Beauties, Beauty and Sadness, etc.
. I would not recommend The Master of Go except, perhaps, to those who are knowledgeable of this game, Not a difficult read, but for me not as rewarding as his other work, Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each others black or white stones, Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, Go is an essential expression of the Japanese spirit, And in his fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and heretofore invincible Master and a younger, modern challenger, Yasunari Kawabata captured the moment in which the immutable traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the twentieth century.


The competition between the Master of Go and his opponent, Otak, is waged over several months and layered in ceremony, But beneath the games decorum lie tensions that consume not only the players themselves but their families and retainerstensions that turn this particular contest into a duel that can only end in death.
Luminous in its detail, both suspenseful and serene, The Master of Go is an elegy for an entire society, written with the poetic economy and psychological acumen that brought Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature.


Translated from the Japanese by Edward G, Seidensticker.