I played Go as a kid. Recently, I watched Bushido and had a good time. The movie was fine. And it got me into a bit of philosophising — albeit not in a way the filmmakers and usual Western reviewers would have intended.
“Every poet misreads and misunderstands his predecessor, and has to if he is to speak with his own voice.”
— Harold Bloom.
You see, being a big fan of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, I bought the ticket immediately after I read the teaser about a revenge story blending the life of a samurai and go. The moody turquoise shot with a protagonist looking steadfast really sold me. As the lights dimmed and the movie started, the original Japanese title 「碁盤斬り」 zoomed in. Two thoughts popped up in my head:
- I was in the wrong theatre.
- This was a joke.
The first one was quickly dismissed as the English title Bushido emerged. For the second one, I had to wait and see, but I realized I had bought into something I wasn’t sold on. For those of you who don’t read Kanji, the title roughly translates to “Go-board Slash”. The arty Bergman movie anticipation dissipated. My memory got transported back to the days when my dad and I played Sega slash-em-up arcade games — not bad conditioning for the movie, actually.
A simplified plot arc goes roughly as follows: Shibata is a borderline Richard III type of villain, who Kakunoshin has to avenge. Both are master Go players. Shibata has a highly unusual Go opening (Senrensei in the real world). They play a game of life and death, with Kakunoshin winning by a trick called Ishi no Shita, or “underneath the stone”. Of course, Shibata, being the villain he is, literally turns the table and gets into a sword fight (there we go) with Kakunoshin before getting finished off. There’s more plot complication and subtle undermining, but that’s largely irrelevant to the Go part, so I won’t pursue that further.
Let me now explain why the above is so absurd.
First, Ishi no Shita. The movie’s core theme is about sacrifice. In Go, you “kill” the opponent’s stones surrounded by your own. It gets more complicated with sacrificial moves: you first let the opponent kill your stones, but that creates room for you to make further moves that would lead to more stones of your opponent being killed, including the stones used to kill your previous stones. The move Ishi no Shita is one example, which beginners, e.g. the six year old me, usually learn within first three months. You would’ve noticed that in a split second. This is the move that finished off Shibata — the Go master. The movie deliberately draws out the reveal, giving Shibata and any Go players in the scene plentiful time until they realize what’s coming.
Second, Senrensei, literally “three aligned stars”, Shibata’s secret weapon opening move, which became popular in the 1970s. Masaki Takemiya developed this into his “cosmic style” while slamming stones loudly on the board, which by the way is the style the villain adopts for intimidation. The viewing effect is similar to Ash Williams in Army of Darkness time traveling back to King Arthur’s court, except that this time his shotgun backfires and shoots him in the foot.
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
…
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
— T.S Elliot, The Waste Land, Part II, A Game of Chess
Chess connotes a game of control and power. Bergman’s knight plays chess with Death knowing he would lose but refuse to stop playing. In contrast, the cultural background of Go is much more subtle. Power dynamics in a high-level Go game are often in a flux. The strong becomes neutralised and the weak rebounds in strength. I think there’s a lot of room to explore this in the spirit of a Samurai movie. The game of Go carries poetic names in Japanese and Chinese traditions, like Shudan in Japanese which literally means “hand talk”. The alias I like the most is “Lan Ke” in Chinese, which means a “rotten axe”. It comes from a myth where a woodcutter stumbles upon two immortals playing Go in a mountain cave. He watches. When he finally looks away, his axe handle has rotted through. He walks home to find his village a thousand years gone. He never played a single stone. There is something beautiful in the suggestion that a game of strategy, whose positions proficient players understand via calculation and the geometry of atsumi, somehow spirals into infinity.
“[A] small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance.”
Smooth E8 Manifold 