Hikaru no Go
Oct. 1st, 2007 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraIn a tenuous connection to actual work I’ve been reading back issues of the journal Children’s Literature, which turned up a useful article on Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War that explains much of why I found it so discomfortingly repellent by viewing it as a book in which there is no moral agency held by any of the characters, rather than as the more conventional interpretation of “rebel versus corrupt system”. Another essay on Lurlene McDaniel’s dying teens series focusing on death/illness as an alternative to adulthood, specifically female adulthood that made me think about the physicalities of illness in fiction. And this, from an essay on Maurice Sendak’s “Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, there must be more to life”, a quote from Sendak:
which leads me, inevitably, to all the manga I’ve been reading. The more I’m enjoying it the slower I go, and the more I fall into these spaces between text and image, these areas of tension where the story happens.
Hikaru no Go, v1-23. Obata Takeshi, Hotta Yumi. An irresponsible school kid is possessed by the ghost of a former Go instructor, who only wants a chance to play again. I have accepted that it is impossible to describe the concept for this series without making it sound wildly unappealing (or else dramatically re-enacting the entire plot and, really, this entry is going to be way too long anyway) so I’ll just say here that it’s extremely good and I love it, far, far more than I was expecting to after reading the first few chapters. It’s also the first manga to make me cry (and only the second ever comic) and every time I try and check something in it (for example, trying to work out where I got hooked – I think I decided Shindo was not a complete lost cause in chapter 3 of v1, and realised I was completely hooked during the tournament in v3) I end up either reading large chunks or just beaming at (most of – I will never gaze fondly at Ogata, and I’m okay with that) the characters, neither of which has made this entry any easier to finish. It is, basically, a sports manga about a board game, complete with passion and knowledge about the game (ever since I’ve finished I’ve been having urges to re-read Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit, which is a favourite book of mine with a similar passion for chess, although it is equally about self-destruction and addiction), as well as excellent art, and a large and organic cast of characters that I cannot help describing as well-drawn.
Technically, I read v1-16 in scanlation, then broke for imminent exams plus emotional breathing space, and then re-read v1-16 and read 17-23 in scanlation. Then I read v1-10 (minus 4 and 9 – currently on order) in the Viz translations, which is as far as they go, with v11 due out next year on an insanely slow release schedule. Then I re-read v17 and 19-20 in scanlation (v18 is side stories). Then I went a tiny bit crazy (some might claim this happened earlier) and ransacked the internet, which, amongst other things, turned up two specials, one of which is Sai’s viewpoint on his second game with Touya, and one post-series.
Ahem. So. I love this series, for many reasons, which I could summarise as a) characters b) plot and c) art, but this is somewhat lacking in specificity. What I should comment on are the things it does well that I particularly like. I’ve seen commentary elsewhere on the net (my habit of not bookmarking again fails to serve me well) talking about the series’ idea of rivalry, of how having a rival (and not just any rival – there are plenty of examples in the series of bad competition, of skills used to crush rather than encourage) is crucial in driving you forward (and how part of the tragedy of Touya Kouyo is that he meets his ideal rival – Sai – too late, although I think his retirement is, in many ways, his solution to that, which gives him back the enjoyment and challenge he’d lost before). And it’s a series where winning is important, but it’s not everything, Here, you can give everything and still fail to get what you want; it’s how you react to that matters, whether you’re Kaga or Nase or Isumi or, really, anyone in the series, as I realised once I started listing names. Even Sai loses, although he takes on an unbelievable handicap to do so. Enough games are lost in this series that, in the final match between Ko Yonha and Shindo I had no idea who was going to win, but a lot of passionate feeling, involving a certain amount of swearing at the screen at about 2am when the chapter finished without a territory count. And I’ve said “final match” but one of the themes of the story is that there is no ending, there’s always another fame; a concept that reverberates back through the series, through unfinished games and those that are still awaited.
I like fantasy where, when a thing is changed, the implications of this are worked through thoroughly, rather than just establishing a change and having it sit there, unexamined. Diana Wynne Jones does this particularly well where a lot of other fantasy authors will make a change without following through (names omitted to protect the guilty). Hikaru no Go does too, working through the consequences of Sai’s existence, and the realism of the world grounds this impossibility at the same time as it creates increasing problems. Where this really begins to bite is when Shindo starts becoming a player in his own right, wanting to play games, and the tensions this sets up between the games he plays as himself, and those he plays as/for Sai. Going onto the internet is a neat real-world solution – that, like all the best solutions, creates its own escalating problems. Shindo giving his sho-dan game with Touja Meijin to Sai shows how far Shindo’s come, but it also shows how many options he and Sai have run out of. It’s too late – and unfair – Shindo to take Torijiro’s option of allowing Sai to play all the games, and it’s this recognition, along with Shindo’s own talent that leads, ultimately, to Sai leaving. Even with the foreshadowing I wasn’t expecting his departure, or at least not like that; again, it’s the right choice and the right time, no matter how much I wish it weren’t.
I like the art, too – Obata-sensei does amazingly detailed backgrounds, and I always know where I am at any given time. It did take me a while to get used to Shindo being so cartoonish in the earlier volumes, but watching him change over time is fascinating, as is watching Touya Kouyo actually become younger throughout the series, after he retires from the pro lifestyle. The cast of characters is huge and operates in a convincingly organic way – the way people move in and out of each others’ lives, how Shindo moves from the Kaze go club to the insei school and into the pro world, gaining and losing friends; the way characters come back, at just the right or wrong times. When Shindo gives up Go all the obvious suspects – Akari, the Kaze Go club members, Touya Akira – all confront him, but it’s Isumi (who I hadn’t expected) who gets him playing again. And it’s the right person, because it’s not a game Shindo wanted to play, this re-match; it’s not just that Isumi cheated (or attempted to) but Shindo’s reaction to this that has to be made up for, where he wanted the win rather than being prepared to fight it out himself (and there’s also that heart-crushing moment, where Shindo comes racing up to his room knowing there’s someone there –and finds Isumi, rather than Sai, but if I dwell on this whole sequence I will start getting tearful again).
And it’s an obscure fondness to have – and it doesn’t usually work well in straight text – but I do like storylines where translation, or the lack of it, becomes as much a part of the plot as anything else going on. There’s a moment in Robert LePage’s play Seven Streams of the River Ota, which involves at least four languages (it’s been almost ten years since I saw it, but sizeable sequences are in Japanese, Dutch and French (Canadian) as well as English), where the action on stage is being translated by two translators, one at each side; not quite characters, not quite plot convenience. Midway through a multilingual argument one of the characters on stage turns to their translator and corrects them, and the others join in, trying to find the truth of it all, and it’s a brilliant moment that collapses boundaries – between actors and translators, characters and audience – at the same time as it shows how much barriers still exist, at the fundamental level of language. Anyway. I liked Isumi’s trip to China, partly because he runs into the language barrier and fails (initially) to deal with it (although on the first read I was desperate to get back to Shindo’s storyline Isumi’s story ended up sucking me in) and Ko Yonha’s accidental insulting of Shuusaku via an inadequate translator is okay as a plot point (it’s one of those ones where I feel embarrassed for the characters), but it’s later in the North Star Cup, where the series picks up both those plot threads, where it all comes together for me. The interactions between and within teams, Ko Yonha’s manipulation of translators, language barriers coming up and down, deliberate and accidental misunderstandings; and then, finally, Shindo, who is trying to say something he hasn’t been able to put into words all series.
Characters – I have not gone on yet about Touya Akira, possibly my favourite character in all his scary sweater-wearing intensity. I like his stubbornness to the point of selfishness about Go – joining his school’s Go club, knowing how it will destabilise it, just to play Shindo again, or drawing against those four businessmen rather than lose diplomatically, and there are so many other tiny moments that I love – needling Yoshiro about his ability at Speed Go, arguing with Shindo (too many times to list), almost - but not quite - guessing about Sai in his pro game with Shindo. Shindo himself, and his moments of unexpected kindness, as well as his moments of complete lack of tact. I love Shindo’s mother’s cluelessness about Go, and his grandfather’s refusal to take a handicap even once Shindo is a pro; I find Ochi a revoltingly effective manipulative creep (particularly with what he does to Isumi in the pro test), but then when he asked for a play-off with Yoshiro in the team selection games I developed a tiny shred of fondness for him. The school Go club members, and the way Shindo’s becoming an insei affects them, and Kaga pointing out that he can’t fix everything, can’t keep Mitani happy and move forward at the same time. I could, possibly, want more female characters, but I do like the ones who are there – and Nase’s great, with a painfully accurate side story in v18, as is Kaneko. And I’ve missed out Waya, who is all too often aware of how he’s being overlooked in Go, and Hon Suyon, Yang Hai, Kurata, the guy from Weekly Go who gets all sentimental over the New Wave…
And Go itself, which runs through this whole series as a theme and a metaphor and as itself - "all you are is the Go you play." I learnt Go twenty years ago on a school holiday workshop and hadn't played since, but it's nearly impossible to read this without thinking about trying it again. (which explains, without justifying, the small bunch of Go websites and problems I currently have bookmarked. The intervening time period does not seem to have corrected my impressive inability to notice the obvious...)
“You must not ever be doing the same thing. Must not ever be illustrating exactly what you've written. You must leave a space in the text so the picture can do the work. Then you must come back with the word, and the word does it best and now the picture beats time. . . . [The pictures and text] become so supple, that there's this interchangeableness between them and the words, and they're both telling two stories at the same time.”
which leads me, inevitably, to all the manga I’ve been reading. The more I’m enjoying it the slower I go, and the more I fall into these spaces between text and image, these areas of tension where the story happens.
Hikaru no Go, v1-23. Obata Takeshi, Hotta Yumi. An irresponsible school kid is possessed by the ghost of a former Go instructor, who only wants a chance to play again. I have accepted that it is impossible to describe the concept for this series without making it sound wildly unappealing (or else dramatically re-enacting the entire plot and, really, this entry is going to be way too long anyway) so I’ll just say here that it’s extremely good and I love it, far, far more than I was expecting to after reading the first few chapters. It’s also the first manga to make me cry (and only the second ever comic) and every time I try and check something in it (for example, trying to work out where I got hooked – I think I decided Shindo was not a complete lost cause in chapter 3 of v1, and realised I was completely hooked during the tournament in v3) I end up either reading large chunks or just beaming at (most of – I will never gaze fondly at Ogata, and I’m okay with that) the characters, neither of which has made this entry any easier to finish. It is, basically, a sports manga about a board game, complete with passion and knowledge about the game (ever since I’ve finished I’ve been having urges to re-read Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit, which is a favourite book of mine with a similar passion for chess, although it is equally about self-destruction and addiction), as well as excellent art, and a large and organic cast of characters that I cannot help describing as well-drawn.
Technically, I read v1-16 in scanlation, then broke for imminent exams plus emotional breathing space, and then re-read v1-16 and read 17-23 in scanlation. Then I read v1-10 (minus 4 and 9 – currently on order) in the Viz translations, which is as far as they go, with v11 due out next year on an insanely slow release schedule. Then I re-read v17 and 19-20 in scanlation (v18 is side stories). Then I went a tiny bit crazy (some might claim this happened earlier) and ransacked the internet, which, amongst other things, turned up two specials, one of which is Sai’s viewpoint on his second game with Touya, and one post-series.
Ahem. So. I love this series, for many reasons, which I could summarise as a) characters b) plot and c) art, but this is somewhat lacking in specificity. What I should comment on are the things it does well that I particularly like. I’ve seen commentary elsewhere on the net (my habit of not bookmarking again fails to serve me well) talking about the series’ idea of rivalry, of how having a rival (and not just any rival – there are plenty of examples in the series of bad competition, of skills used to crush rather than encourage) is crucial in driving you forward (and how part of the tragedy of Touya Kouyo is that he meets his ideal rival – Sai – too late, although I think his retirement is, in many ways, his solution to that, which gives him back the enjoyment and challenge he’d lost before). And it’s a series where winning is important, but it’s not everything, Here, you can give everything and still fail to get what you want; it’s how you react to that matters, whether you’re Kaga or Nase or Isumi or, really, anyone in the series, as I realised once I started listing names. Even Sai loses, although he takes on an unbelievable handicap to do so. Enough games are lost in this series that, in the final match between Ko Yonha and Shindo I had no idea who was going to win, but a lot of passionate feeling, involving a certain amount of swearing at the screen at about 2am when the chapter finished without a territory count. And I’ve said “final match” but one of the themes of the story is that there is no ending, there’s always another fame; a concept that reverberates back through the series, through unfinished games and those that are still awaited.
I like fantasy where, when a thing is changed, the implications of this are worked through thoroughly, rather than just establishing a change and having it sit there, unexamined. Diana Wynne Jones does this particularly well where a lot of other fantasy authors will make a change without following through (names omitted to protect the guilty). Hikaru no Go does too, working through the consequences of Sai’s existence, and the realism of the world grounds this impossibility at the same time as it creates increasing problems. Where this really begins to bite is when Shindo starts becoming a player in his own right, wanting to play games, and the tensions this sets up between the games he plays as himself, and those he plays as/for Sai. Going onto the internet is a neat real-world solution – that, like all the best solutions, creates its own escalating problems. Shindo giving his sho-dan game with Touja Meijin to Sai shows how far Shindo’s come, but it also shows how many options he and Sai have run out of. It’s too late – and unfair – Shindo to take Torijiro’s option of allowing Sai to play all the games, and it’s this recognition, along with Shindo’s own talent that leads, ultimately, to Sai leaving. Even with the foreshadowing I wasn’t expecting his departure, or at least not like that; again, it’s the right choice and the right time, no matter how much I wish it weren’t.
I like the art, too – Obata-sensei does amazingly detailed backgrounds, and I always know where I am at any given time. It did take me a while to get used to Shindo being so cartoonish in the earlier volumes, but watching him change over time is fascinating, as is watching Touya Kouyo actually become younger throughout the series, after he retires from the pro lifestyle. The cast of characters is huge and operates in a convincingly organic way – the way people move in and out of each others’ lives, how Shindo moves from the Kaze go club to the insei school and into the pro world, gaining and losing friends; the way characters come back, at just the right or wrong times. When Shindo gives up Go all the obvious suspects – Akari, the Kaze Go club members, Touya Akira – all confront him, but it’s Isumi (who I hadn’t expected) who gets him playing again. And it’s the right person, because it’s not a game Shindo wanted to play, this re-match; it’s not just that Isumi cheated (or attempted to) but Shindo’s reaction to this that has to be made up for, where he wanted the win rather than being prepared to fight it out himself (and there’s also that heart-crushing moment, where Shindo comes racing up to his room knowing there’s someone there –and finds Isumi, rather than Sai, but if I dwell on this whole sequence I will start getting tearful again).
And it’s an obscure fondness to have – and it doesn’t usually work well in straight text – but I do like storylines where translation, or the lack of it, becomes as much a part of the plot as anything else going on. There’s a moment in Robert LePage’s play Seven Streams of the River Ota, which involves at least four languages (it’s been almost ten years since I saw it, but sizeable sequences are in Japanese, Dutch and French (Canadian) as well as English), where the action on stage is being translated by two translators, one at each side; not quite characters, not quite plot convenience. Midway through a multilingual argument one of the characters on stage turns to their translator and corrects them, and the others join in, trying to find the truth of it all, and it’s a brilliant moment that collapses boundaries – between actors and translators, characters and audience – at the same time as it shows how much barriers still exist, at the fundamental level of language. Anyway. I liked Isumi’s trip to China, partly because he runs into the language barrier and fails (initially) to deal with it (although on the first read I was desperate to get back to Shindo’s storyline Isumi’s story ended up sucking me in) and Ko Yonha’s accidental insulting of Shuusaku via an inadequate translator is okay as a plot point (it’s one of those ones where I feel embarrassed for the characters), but it’s later in the North Star Cup, where the series picks up both those plot threads, where it all comes together for me. The interactions between and within teams, Ko Yonha’s manipulation of translators, language barriers coming up and down, deliberate and accidental misunderstandings; and then, finally, Shindo, who is trying to say something he hasn’t been able to put into words all series.
Characters – I have not gone on yet about Touya Akira, possibly my favourite character in all his scary sweater-wearing intensity. I like his stubbornness to the point of selfishness about Go – joining his school’s Go club, knowing how it will destabilise it, just to play Shindo again, or drawing against those four businessmen rather than lose diplomatically, and there are so many other tiny moments that I love – needling Yoshiro about his ability at Speed Go, arguing with Shindo (too many times to list), almost - but not quite - guessing about Sai in his pro game with Shindo. Shindo himself, and his moments of unexpected kindness, as well as his moments of complete lack of tact. I love Shindo’s mother’s cluelessness about Go, and his grandfather’s refusal to take a handicap even once Shindo is a pro; I find Ochi a revoltingly effective manipulative creep (particularly with what he does to Isumi in the pro test), but then when he asked for a play-off with Yoshiro in the team selection games I developed a tiny shred of fondness for him. The school Go club members, and the way Shindo’s becoming an insei affects them, and Kaga pointing out that he can’t fix everything, can’t keep Mitani happy and move forward at the same time. I could, possibly, want more female characters, but I do like the ones who are there – and Nase’s great, with a painfully accurate side story in v18, as is Kaneko. And I’ve missed out Waya, who is all too often aware of how he’s being overlooked in Go, and Hon Suyon, Yang Hai, Kurata, the guy from Weekly Go who gets all sentimental over the New Wave…
And Go itself, which runs through this whole series as a theme and a metaphor and as itself - "all you are is the Go you play." I learnt Go twenty years ago on a school holiday workshop and hadn't played since, but it's nearly impossible to read this without thinking about trying it again. (which explains, without justifying, the small bunch of Go websites and problems I currently have bookmarked. The intervening time period does not seem to have corrected my impressive inability to notice the obvious...)
