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The Master of Go
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407064512
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

The Master of Go

Formats & editions
Paperback
20 Oct 2026
Paperback
2 Oct 2006
EBook
1 July 2010
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Experience a BRIEF ENCOUNTER with Nobel Prize-Winner Yasunari Yawabata, and his remarkable fictional account of a world about to be cleft in two as two men battle to become the master of the strategy game, Go.

Luminous, suspenseful and serene, The Master of Go is a compelling portrait, quietly devastating of two men – and a whole society – facing defeat.

Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, the strategy game Go is an expression of the Japanese spirit. But when a revered Master is challenged by a younger, more modern upcomer, their match, waged over several months and layered in ceremony, pits imperial Japan against the twentieth century.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407064512
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

About the author

Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of Japan's most distinguished novelists. Born in Osaka in 1899, he published his first stories while he was still in high school. Among his major novels published across the world are Snow Country (1956), Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). Kawabata was found dead, by his own hand, in 1972.
YK

Also by Yasunari Kawabata

The Sound of the Mountain (National Book Award Winner)
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Praise for The Master of Go

Kawabata's narrative spirals through the book's events in ruminative glides and turns... There is a kind of low-key daring, an austere, autumnal nobility, in Kawabata's tale

Time

An archetypal saga... there are storms and landscapes as cool, as luminous, as any in Japanese paintings and woodcuts

The New Yorker

This novel is one of modern literature's greatest, most poignant elegies

Washington Post