Edward George Seidensticker was a distinguished scholar and historian, recognized as a preeminent translator of both classical and contemporary Japanese literature in the post-World War II era.
Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each other's black or white stone. In this fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and invincible Master and a younger, more progressive opponent, Kawabata captures the moment when traditonal imperial Japan meets the twentieth century.
Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress’ rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949 Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded. In this delicate novella he uses the ceremony as a powerful vehicle for loneliness, yearning and loss of history.
This memoir is by a translator who has introduced two generations of English-language audiences to the masterpieces of classical and modern Japanese literature. His patient rendering of novels ranging from the 11th-century Tale of Genji to works of such modern masters as Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima and Nobel-Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata has earned him the National Book Award as well as the Order of the Rising Sun, Japan's highest honour for foreigners.