Sei Shonagon was also a lady in the Heian court. She was born around 966, a little earlier than Murasaki, and seems to have died a little later than her
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| Sei Shonagon |
It is hard not to entertain the suspicion that this book is well known in the west mainly because that title makes it sound like a porn novel. The Japanese name, Makura no Soushi, refers rather to Wisps of Grass kept under my Pillow (and, to add injury to insult, the pillow would have been a small block of wood, not a fluffy, puffy sack). Sei Shonagon recorded her thoughts on anything and everything in (usually) short paragraphs, on topics such as "hateful things", "shameful things," "things that have lost their power," or musings on nature or late-night episodes. Well worth reading even without the porn.
The section we will look at is Section 107, though this number cannot be used for other translations. Unlike the Tale of Genji, the Pillow Book survives in several rather glaringly different versions, no doubt because it has no internal structure.
This is what she says there about go:
In our discussion of men and women Tadanobu and I often used the terminology of go.
Thus, when we wanted to imply that two people were on intimate terms, we would say that
they had 'yielded their hands' or 'filled up the spaces'. Or again we would use expressions
like 'he's going to keep his hand' or 'the time has come to part the pieces' (meaning
'so-and-so has become far too familiar'). In this way we could understand each other
without letting anyone else know what we had in mind.
A person called Nobukata hears about this and tries it on Sei Shonagon:
Nobukata now anxiously awaited a chance to display his new knowledge. One day he came to
our building and asked to speak to me. 'Is there a go board here?' he began.
'What would you say if I too wanted to play? Would you yield your hand to me? I am
just as good as Tadanobu, you know. You shouldn't discriminate against me.'
'If I played like that,' I replied, 'people could well speak of a roving eye.'
In his notes Morris says go is a "fascinating, complicated game" and for "to yield one's hand" he gives a definition "to place one's pieces without too much attention to one's opponent's strategy; a daring style of play in which one occasionally risks one's own position in the expectation of later successes and in the hope that one's opponent will not be able to take advantage of one's temporary weakness."
For "to fill up the spaces" he has "to fill in the points that neither player can claim as his own territory. These spaces are known as 'false eyes' and the process of filling them alternately with black and white stones is one of the last stages in a game of go. For "to keep one's hand" he says it is the opposite of to yield one's hand, and is a style of play in which one is "constantly on one's guard, closely observing one's opponent's moves." For "to part the pieces" he has "the final stage in the game is to determine which of the players controls the larger territory, that is, has secured the greater number of visible 'eyes'. In order to facilitate the counting, the players 'break up' the position, re-arranging the pieces in such a way that the territories controlled by the two sides are clearly visible." In lovers' terms, this is 'intolerable familiarity'.
Here, too, there seems to be a fundamental go error. It is clear, though, that Morris at least made a good attempt to understand the process by consulting a go player rather than a dictionary. Also his reference to a 'roving eye', although not strictly accurate, is a clever way to render a pun (on false eye), and as Morris explains it himself we will leave the reader to consult his work.
We can infer he was not a go player himself from his confusion of dame with false eyes. Easy enough a confusion to make when you consider that the characters for dame could be rendered as "useless eyes" (though this is probably a folk etymology). And filling these dame ("filling up the spaces") is not really the last stages of a game in any meaningful way.
In any case, the term used by Sei Shonagon is kechi, and it is easy to see how much better the term yose (coming together and binding together) is for the action secretly meant by the lady.
The explanation for "yielding the hand" sounds very convincing, not just because it is so long and detailed. Indeed, it sounds like a good definition of amashi strategy. The problem with that is that it is hugely anachronistic. Go Seigen gives the credit to Huang Longshi for discovering amashi strategy, ahead even of Honinbo Dosaku, that is in the middle of the 17th century. But just as big a problem is that the terms used by Sei Shonagon are too similar to old ways of describing who plays first, in both China and Japan. The roughly contemporaneous games in the Wangyou Qingle Ji in China show who is Black and White by using the phrase 'yields' (rao) 'first move and Black', and Chinese books also talk of 'receiving first move' (shou xian). Te is both 'hand' and 'move' in Japanese and so teyurushi surely just means ceding first move. Teuke (Morris's "keep one's hand") likewise just means receiving it. Both these meanings fit Sei Shonagon's secret language perfectly.
For "part the pieces" the term is oshikobochi. This precise term is not in Genson's Igo Shiki but kobochi is and it is defined as pushing away the stones, i.e. ending the game. The oshi- prefix, which also means 'push' is familiar to go players today in the very old phrase chuu-oshi, said when one player resigns, before the counting stage. One (possibly also folk) etymology of this phrase is that it refers to pushing the stones towards the middle of the board (chuu) to show one is giving up. Again, this normal go usage fits Sei Shonagon's secret usage to a T.
Resigning a game is not something beginners usually do, and so this term could imply a fairly advanced level of play at the time. Sei Shonagon ceding her hand, or first move, also implies that she was stronger than the two men, and that the idea of first move being a big advantange was not only known, but there were players around strong enough to exploit that advantage.
The idea of players measuring themselves against each other is also inherent in another technical term used by Nobukata - hitoshi-go (an even game) - when he compares himself to Tadanobu.
It is tempting to think that Sei Shonagon was perhaps also comparing herself to Murasaki Shikibu. She would probably have read Tale of Genji. Whereas Murasaki cleverly shows she is familiar with advanced go, Sei Shonagon shows not only that but that she is stronger than the men, and can use the technical terms as a secret language to boot. That, at least, would seem to fit her waspish character.
There are many other go references in the books looked at here. For that reason alone they may be of interest to go players, but as Royall Tyler says in the notes to his Genji, go is a "sophisticated game", and so we may assume that its players would also find enjoyment in both these high-class works for the parts not about go. They are worth your attention.
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