Rustle of Wind

By Christopher Porterfield

THE MASTER OF GO

by YASUNARI KAWABATA

Translated by EDWARD G. SEIDENSTICKER 208 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Judging by the travails of this book's title character, Boris Spassky has seen nothing yet. Defending his championship in the ancient Japanese game of Go, fighting a losing battle with a heart ailment, the aging master enters a final match that takes six months to complete. Along the way he endures adjournments, squabbles over the ground rules and three changes of venue. In the end, the master's game falters, and he loses to a brash opponent half his age. Not for him the shadow of Siberia; his art having dwindled, the master also dwindles and dies a year later.

This is the fourth novel to reach the U.S. by Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 Nobel laureate who committed suicide last April at the age of 72. American readers may find it the most rarefied so far. Besides displaying Kawabata's customary casualness about plot and characterization, it lacks the eroticism and cosmopolitan settings that helped make his Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) accessible to Westerners. Moreover, it requires at least a crude grasp of the technicalities of Go (for which a certain number of charts are provided). But in this book as in the Orient, a little discipline is the way to enlightenment. Any reader who can respond, for example, to Chekhov's plays will rise to the austere, autumnal nobility in Kawabata's tale.

The master of Go is a living anachronism in the aggressive Japan of the years just before World War II. He plays the game in the old courtly way, making it a ritual as steeped in aristocratic value as the Japanese tea ceremony or the No drama. His young challenger, a fine player and engaging fellow, nevertheless embodies the raw modern spirit. His game is tense and cheerless, "an inexorable gnawing."

Age and youth, tradition and change --the oppositions are saved from abstractness by Kawabata's sense of the old man's tragic nature. The master is a martyr "so disciplined in an art that he [has] lost the better part of reality." At just 5 ft. and 70 Ibs., he barely causes any displacement in the tangible world. His trancelike absorption in Go is, in human terms, chilling. Out of place in the Western-style lounge of a resort hotel where he is competing, he gazes indifferently at the panorama of golf courses outside; of the strolling honeymooners he can only murmur tonelessly: "They must be bored." What throws his game off more than anything else is a glaringly unaesthetic move by the challenger ("like smearing ink over the picture we had painted").

The character of the master is closely modeled on the great Kitani Minoru, who actually played a similarly notable match in 1938--a match that Kawabata covered as a correspondent for Tokyo and Osaka newspapers. The Master of Go is thus not so much a novel as a fictionalized meditation on a real event. Kawabata deliberately dissipates the drama of the match by splintering its chronology. His narrative spirals through the book's events in ruminative glides and turns, ending where it began, with the master's death. Commonplace images--a girl on a bridge tossing bread to carp, a long white hair in the master's eyebrow --take on a subliminal life through calm, patient repetition and minute elaboration. There is a kind of low-key daring about such writing: either it exerts a spell or it is nothing.

"You paint the branch well, and you hear the sound of the wind." The words of Chinese Painter Chin Nung were quoted by Kawabata in his Nobel Prize speech. Here, despite Translator Seidensticker's efforts, Kawabata's language does not come across as Japanese readers say it should--like strung-together haiku. Yet, even stripped of some of its verbal blossoms, the bare outline of the branch emerges. For readers willing to listen intently, there is the unmistakable rustle of the wind.

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