The Girl Who Played Go Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Acclaim for Shan Sa’s

  THE GIRL WHO PLAYED GO

  “Explosive. . . . Poignant and shattering.... While [the] climax is inevitable and the stories lead directly toward it, a reader is still shocked and horrified when it occurs.” —The Boston Globe

  “Shan Sa creates a sense of foreboding that binds the parallel tales of her protagonists. Her measured prose amplifies the isolation amid turmoil that each character seems to inhabit.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Dreamy . . . powerful. . . . This unlikely love story . . . is beautiful, shocking, and sad.” —Entertainment Weekly

  “Compelling. . . . Emotionally charged chapters evoke the stop-and-start rhythms of adolescence. . . . Sa handles the intersection of the personal and the political quite deftly.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “What makes Sa’s novel so satisfying is the deceptive simplicity of her narrative strategy.” —San Jose Mercury News

  “An awesome read. . . . Shan Sa describes the story so well that you almost forget you’ve never visited the places in her book. . . . This book is truly for every reader.” —The Decatur Daily

  “Entrancing. . . . [With] an ending that you won’t predict.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “It has the sweep of war and the intimacy of a love story. . . . Shan Sa is a phenomenon.” —The Observer (London)

  “Spellbinding. . . . Sa’s language is graceful and trancelike: her fights are a whirling choreography of flying limbs and snow, her emotions richly yet precisely expressed.” —The Times (London)

  “One is struck by the economy of the tale, its speed, and the brutality of its calculations. There is never an excess word or a superfluous phrase: each paragraph counts. . . . Fine literary work.”

  —Le Figaro Magazine (France)

  “An astonishing book. . . . Ends up taking one’s breath away. . . . Goes straight to our hearts.” —Le Point (France)

  “Gripping. . . . A wrenching love story. . . . [The protagonists’] shared sense of immediacy and the transience of life is what in the final analysis makes this novel so strong, so intelligent, so moving. . . . You’ll have to look far and wide to find a better new novel on an East Asian subject than this finely crafted story, satisfying as it is on so many different levels.” —The Taipei Times

  SHAN SA

  THE GIRL WHO PLAYED GO

  Shan Sa was born in 1972 in Beijing. In 1990 she left China for France, where she studied in Paris and worked for two years with the painter Balthus. Her two previous novels were awarded the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and the Prix Cazes. This is her first book to be published in the United States.

  1

  In the Square of a Thousand Winds the frost-covered players look like snowmen. White vapor billows from their mouths and noses, and icicles growing along the underside of their fur hats point sharply downwards. The sky is pearly and the crimson sun is sinking, dying. Where does the sun go to die?

  When did this square become a meeting place for go players? I don’t know. After so many thousands of games, the checkerboards engraved on the granite tables have turned into faces, thoughts, prayers.

  Clutching a bronze hand-warmer in my muff, I stamp my feet to thaw out my blood. My opponent is a foreigner who came here straight from the station. As the battle intensifies, a gentle warmth washes through me. Daylight is dwindling and the stones are almost indistinguishable. Suddenly someone lights a match and a candle appears in my opponent’s left hand. The other players have all left and I know that Mother will be sick with worry to see her daughter come home so late. The night has crept down from the sky and the wind has stirred. The man shields the flame with his gloved hand. From my pocket I take a flask of clear spirit which burns my throat. When I put it under the stranger’s nose, he looks at it incredulously. He is bearded and it’s hard to tell his age; a long scar runs from the top of his eyebrow and down through his right eye, which he keeps closed. He empties the flask with a grimace.

  There is no moon tonight, and the wind wails like a newborn baby. Up above us, a god confronts a goddess, scattering the stars.

  The man counts the stones once and then twice. He has been beaten by eighteen points; he heaves a sigh and hands me his candle. Then he stands up, unfolding a giant’s frame, gathers his belongings and leaves without a backward glance.

  I stow the stones in their wooden pots. They are crisp with frost in my fingers. I am alone with my soldiers, my pride gratified. Today, I celebrate my one hundredth victory.

  2

  My little mother barely comes up to my chest. Prolonged mourning for her husband has dried her out. When I tell her I have been posted to Manchuria, she pales.

  “Mother, please, it is time your son fulfilled his destiny as a soldier.”

  She withdraws to her room without a word.

  All evening her devastated shadow is silhouetted against the white paper screen. She is praying.

  This morning the first snows fell on Tokyo. Kneeling with my hands flat on the tatami, I prostrate myself before the altar of my ancestors. As I come back up I catch sight of the port
rait of venerable Father: he is smiling at me. The room is filled with his presence—if only I could take a part of it all the way to China!

  My family is waiting for me in the living room, sitting on their heels and observing a ceremonial silence. First of all, I say good-bye to my mother, as I used to when I left for school. I kneel before her and say, “Okasama,1 I am leaving.” She bows deeply in return.

  I pull on the sliding door and step out into the garden. Without a word, Mother, Little Brother and Little Sister follow me out. I turn and bow down to the ground. Mother is crying and I hear the dark fabric of her kimono rustling as she bows in turn. I start to run. Losing her composure, she launches herself after me in the snow.

  I stop. So does she. Afraid that I might throw myself into her arms, she takes one step back.

  “Manchuria is a sister country,” she cries. “But there are terrorists trying to sour the good relations between our two emperors. It is your duty to guard this uneasy peace. If you have to choose between death and cowardice, don’t hesitate: choose death!”

  We embark amid tumultuous fanfares. Soldiers’ families jostle with each other on the quay, throwing ribbons and flowers, and shouts of farewell are salted with tears.

  The shore draws farther and farther away and with it the bustle of the port. The horizon opens wide, and we are swallowed up in its vastness.

  We land at Pusan in Korea, where we are packed into a train heading north. Towards dusk on the third day the convoy comes to a halt, and we leap gleefully to the ground to stretch our legs and empty our bladders. I whistle as I relieve myself, watching birds wheeling in the sky overhead. Suddenly I hear a stifled cry and I can see men running away into the woods. Tadayuki, fresh from the military academy, is lying stretched out on the ground ten paces from me. The blood springs from his neck in a continuous stream, but his eyes are still open. Back on the train I cannot stop thinking about his young face twisted into a rictus of astonishment.

  Astonishment. Is that all there is to dying?

  The train arrives at a Manchurian station in the middle of the night. The frost-covered ground twinkles under the streetlamps, and in the distance dogs are howling.

  3

  Cousin Lu taught me to play go when I was four years old and he was twice my age. The long hours of contemplating the checkered board were a torment, but the will to win kept me there.

  Ten years later Lu was considered an exceptional player, so famous for his talents that the Emperor of independent Manchuria2 received him at his court in the new capital.† He never thanked me for propelling him to this glory: I am his shadow, his secret, his best opponent.

  At twenty, Lu is already an old man, and the hair that falls over his brow is white. He walks with his back hunched over and his hands crossed, taking small steps. A few pubescent hairs have appeared on his chin, a baby-beard on a centenarian.

  A week ago I received a letter from him.

  “I am coming for you, my little cousin. I have decided to talk to you about our future . . .”

  The rest of the letter is an illegible confession: my painfully discreet cousin must have dipped his pen in very weak ink because his cursive ideograms are strung out between the watermarks like white storks flying in the mist. Endless and indecipherable, his letter written on a long sheet of rice paper undid me.

  4

  It is snowing so heavily that we have to stop training. Trapped by the frost, the cold and the wind, we spend our days playing cards in our rooms.

  Apparently the Chinese who live out in the country in northern Manchuria never wash, and they ward off the cold by coating themselves in fish fat. As a result of our protests, a bathhouse has been built in our barracks, and officers and soldiers alike queue up outside it. Inside the bathhouse, through the haze of steam, the walls can be seen trickling with condensation. In the doorway, molten snow boils furiously in a huge vat. Each man draws off his ration in a cracked enamel bucket.

  I undress and wash myself with a towel dampened in this cloudy liquid. Not far away the officers have formed a circle, and as they scrub each other’s backs, they discuss the latest news. As I go over to them, I recognize the man speaking: Captain Mori, one of the veterans who fought for Manchurian independence.

  This morning’s newspaper tells us that Major Zhang Xueliang has taken Chiang Kai-shek hostage in the town of Xian,3 where he and his exiled army have sought refuge for six years. In exchange for the generalissimo’s freedom, Zhang Xueliang has demanded that the Kuomintang be reconciled with the Communist Party to reconquer Manchuria.

  “Zhang Xueliang is unworthy of his good name and he’s an inveterate womanizer,” Captain Mori says dismissively. “The very day after September 18, 1931,4 when our army had surrounded the town of Shen Yang where he had his headquarters, the degenerate weakling fled without even attempting to resist us. As for Chiang Kai-shek, he’s a professional liar. He’ll welcome the Communists with open arms, the better to throttle them.”

  “No Chinese army can take us on,” threw in one of the officers while his back was energetically scrubbed by his orderly. “The civil war has ruined China. One day, we’ll annex the entire territory, another Korea.5 You’ll see, our army will follow the railway that runs from northern China to the south. In three days we’ll take Peking, and six days later we’ll be marching through the streets of Nanking; eight days after that we’ll be sleeping in Hong Kong, and that will open up the doors to Southeast Asia.”

  Their comments confirm various rumors, already rife in Japan, in the heart of our infantry. Despite our government’s reticence, the conquest of China becomes more inevitable every day.

  That evening I go to sleep relaxed, and happy to be clean.

  I am roused by a rustling of clothes: I am sleeping in my own room, and Father is sitting in the next room, wrapped in his dark-blue cotton yukata. Mother is walking up and down, the bottom of her lavender-gray kimono opening and closing over a pale-pink under-kimono. She has the face of a young woman; there is not a single wrinkle round her almond-shaped eyes. A smell of springtime wafts around her—it’s the perfume Father had sent from Paris!

  I suddenly remember that she has not touched that bottle of perfume since Father died.

  5

  Cousin Lu is becoming more and more stooped. He tries to seem nonchalant, indifferent, but those dark unsettling eyes peer out of his emaciated face, watching my every move. When I look into his eyes and ask him, “What’s the matter, Cousin Lu?” he says nothing.

  I challenge him to a game of go. He turns pale and fidgets on his chair; his every move betrays his volatile mood. The territory he is trying to defend on the board is either too cramped or too sprawling, and his genius is reduced to a few strange and ineffectual moves. I can tell that he has again been reading ancient tracts on go; he gets them from his neighbor, an antique dealer, and a forger of the first order. I even wonder whether, after reading so many of these manuscripts, which are said to have sacred origins and are filled with Taoist mysteries and tragic anecdotes, my cousin is going to end up succumbing to madness, as players used to in the past.

  “My cousin,” I say when, instead of thinking about his position, he is staring at my plait and daydreaming, “what’s happened to you?”

  Lu flushes immediately as if I have found out his secret. He gives a little cough and looks like a doddering old man.

  “What have you learned from your books, my cousin?” I taunt him impatiently. “The secret of immortality? You look more and more like those dithering old alchemists who think they hold the secret of purple cinnabar.”

  He isn’t listening to me. He isn’t looking at me either, but at his own last letter to me, which I have left on the table. Ever since he arrived he has been waiting for my reply to his illegible demands. I am determined not to breathe a word.

  He goes home to the capital, full of flu, a broken man. I go to the station with him, and as I watch the train disappearing into the swirling snow, I have a strange feeling of r
elief.

  6

  At last, my first mission!

  Our detachment has received orders to track down a group of terrorists who are challenging our authority on the ground in Manchuria. Disguised as Japanese soldiers, they attacked a military reserve and stole arms and munitions.

  For four days we follow a river locked under ice, with the wind against us and the fallen snow swirling round our knees. Despite my new coat, the cold slices through me more sharply than a saber, and I can no longer feel my hands or feet. The marching has drained my head of all thought. Laden like an ox and with my head tucked down inside the collar of my uniform, I ruminate on the hope that I will soon be able to warm myself by a campfire.

  As we reach the foot of a hill, gunshots ring out. Just in front of me several soldiers are hit and fall to the ground. We are trapped! From their positions up above, the enemy can shoot down on us and we cannot return their fire. A sharp pain twists my gut—I’m wounded! I’m dying! I feel tentatively with my hand: no wound at all, just a cramp produced by fear—a discovery that covers me in shame. I look up and wipe the snow that has stuck to my eyes, and I can see that our more experienced soldiers have leaped down onto the frozen river, where they are sheltering behind the banks and returning fire. I leap to my feet and start to run. I could be hit a thousand times, but in war the difference between life and death depends on a mysterious game of chance.

  Our machine guns open fire and, covered by their powerful barrage, we make our assault. To make up for my earlier cowardice, I launch myself into battle at the head of the platoon, brandishing my saber.

  I have been brought up in a world dominated by honor. I have known neither crime, poverty nor betrayal, and here I taste hatred for the first time: it is sublime, like a thirst for justice and revenge.

  The sky is so charged with snow that it is threatening to collapse. The gunmen are sheltering behind huge boulders, but the smoke rising from their weapons gives away their position. I throw two grenades and when they explode, legs, arms and shreds of flesh fly out from a whirl of snow and flames. I scream with triumphant pleasure at this hellish sight and, leaping towards a survivor who is taking aim at me, I strike him with my saber. His head rolls in the snow.