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their guest feel abandoned or paranoid. (I’ve realized it’s common to feel others
are talking about me when they are carrying on a conversation in a different
language. Almost certainly, they are not.)
I have grown to like Japanese cooking
very much and have even begun to adequately use ohashi (chopsticks). When we
have finished, I thank my hostess with, “Oishii, desu nei?”(delicious, was it not?).
“Hai! so desu,” (Yes! So it was)Nakeno-san replies. With our towels, now cold,
all wash hands and faces, then rise from the table. Nakeno-san directs me to
another room while, I assume, his wife and daughter clear the table, wash the
dishes, and do assorted chores.
Nakeno’s house seems spacious and well appointed with high quality
materials and items. Everything has the patina that objects can only acquire after
years of skilful, loving care. The tatami floors are evidently a better quality than
those in Randy and Yoshimi’s apartment. I conclude that Nakeno-san has
prospered; his reward for years of hard work and careful management of personal
and business affairs. Nakeno-san and his family have patina.
We bow and sit before the Go-Ban which is placed in the middle of the room
on its own low table. On either side sits a one quart wooden pot with a matching
wooden lid turned upside down beside it. One pot contains white “stones”; the
other pot contains black “stones”. I am about to play with a Go master!
I was introduced to Go by Barry Musgrave, the Englishman living with his
English wife, Sandra, in an apartment on the main floor of Randy and Yoshimi’s
building. Barry and Sandra had come to Japan travelling east from England on
motorcycle. Although owning their own conveyance insured more certain progress
than Randy had experienced, their trip had not been without mishap:“We had to
flee for our lives when one morning a tribesman in Afghanistan found the Koran in
a bag with our shoes,” Barry had recounted. I imagined bullets fired by enraged
Muslims had wizzed past their ears as Barry gunned the motorcycle to speed away.
How adventuresome we are when we are young!
“Go is a board game that was invented in China about three thousand years
ago,” Barry explained. “It was brought to Japan through Korea maybe thirteen
hundred years ago and over the centuries the Japanese have made it their own. Go
is a game two people play on a board the Japanese call a ‘ban’. The board has
nineteen lines across it. These are intersected at right angles by nineteen other
lines. That creates three hundred sixty one intersections on the board plus another
seventy-six on the edges for a total of four hundred and thirty seven places. The
board is empty when the game begins. Then, players alternately take turns placing
by Morley Evans