“Master of Go” is the most famous novel by Japan’s greatest writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Yasunari Kawabata.
As in Nabokov’s “The Defense of Luzhin,” where real characters and events lie behind the passion for chess, this unexpected and profound book also tells the story of a legendary Go match that took place in 1938 and was described by the author in newspaper reports. For the unbeatable master Süsai Honinbo XXI, this match became his last…