Word: kawabata
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...YASUNARI KAWABATA...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...