10¹⁷⁰ Possibilities, One Path

I discovered Go the day a college friend brought over one of his anime: Hikaru no Go (Thibault, if you're reading this). He had the complete series on CD, in Japanese with English subtitles. Up to that point, the only anime I'd ever watched were the Club Dorothée staples of my teenage years in France — the ones everyone knows: Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Captain Tsubasa, City Hunter. Otherwise I was more of a comic book reader, and I'd left manga and anime behind in favor of Lanfeust de Troy, Universal War One, and the occasional comic my brother was into.

I wasn't prepared for what that simple discovery would set off, years later, while walking to a café with a friend for a game of pool. We stumbled on a club of people playing Go. That's where I fell in — like Obelix into the cauldron of magic potion. I told my friend: sorry, we'll play pool another day. I sat down at one of the players' tables — he quickly became one of my closest friends, and lives in Japan too these days — for my first game of Go. The first of many.

That budding passion later led me all the way to Tokyo, and to the door of a scruffy little Go salon deep in Kabukicho — where, as I told it in Lost in Kabukicho, I was politely turned away. But that's a different story.

Heaven and Earth

Before I go any further, I should explain the basic rules of Go, and why this game reaches well beyond the usual boundaries of a board game. Legend has it that the square board represents Earth, while the round stones evoke Heaven — one allegory among several in the ancient cosmology tied to Go.

In the manga, which I obviously encourage you to read (its artist, Takeshi Obata, was already at the heart of The Manga Was Right About This Place), Hikaru, an ordinary, slightly restless middle schooler, stumbles on a haunted goban that reveals the ghost of a Go master, Sai, who becomes his teacher and his friend. Without giving too much away: the reason Sai stayed bound to that board was that he was searching for the Divine Move — the perfect play, or sequence of plays. His unfinished quest keeps him from resting, until he meets Hikaru.

If the subject intrigues you, Hikaru no Go is published in French by Kana — an excellent entry point into the series, also available in its Japanese edition if you're already here.

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One Game, Three Names, One Long History

Back to the game itself: it first appears in China in its original form, Weiqi (围棋), several millennia ago — the earliest written references date back to at least the 6th century BCE. The game then traveled to Korea, where it became baduk, and to Japan, where its presence is attested as early as the 7th century — igo (囲碁) simply being its Japanese name, not a different form of the game. Three names for the same family of game, but three traditions each with their own history — it's not just a matter of translation.

Particularly favored by the elite and the Japanese court, the game developed its own traditions over the centuries, gradually converging toward the Go we know today, with its modern rules. To keep it simple: Go is played on a 19x19 goban, on one of 361 intersections where stones are placed, one player at a time. Black and white stones are played one by one, like in chess, and the goal is to build a larger territory than your opponent.

What's fairly interesting is that, at a certain level of mastery, the strongest players focus mostly on the influence of a single stone to shrink or attack an opponent's territory. Some legendary games have seen a stone placed in the opening moves — seemingly innocent, even useless — end up deciding the entire game near the very end.

The Illusion, Broken

Go was long considered "superior" to chess because of its sheer number of possible positions — more than the number of atoms in the observable universe — which seemed to make it impossible for a computer to ever beat a human, unlike chess, which had already surrendered to machines much earlier (Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, in 1997).

That illusion shattered in 2016, when AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, beat Lee Sedol, one of the strongest South Korean players in the world, over a five-match series. AlphaGo won 4 games to 1 — Lee Sedol still managed to save some honor, clawing back a win in the fourth match. His move 78 in that game became legendary, sometimes nicknamed the "God's Touch" — a nice echo, in hindsight, of the Divine Move Sai had spent so long searching for. Another human stronghold had fallen, showing machines' now-obvious edge over even the best players — though that takes nothing away from the game's nobility.

Go was especially prized among Japan's elite and its warrior class, tied to strategy and culture alike — a pursuit of perfectionism not unlike the one Musashi wrestled with in The Sword and the Tea Whisk.

Today, the game has largely fallen out of fashion compared to shogi, which is more widely played in Japan. It still runs deep through Japanese pop culture, though, and keeps its full pedigree through its history and its presence in Japanese literature — and even French literature, with Shan Sa's La Joueuse de Go, winner of France's Prix Goncourt des lycéens in 2001.

Onegaishimasu

Naturally, coming to Japan, I wanted to test myself against local players in a Go salon, to walk in the hero's footsteps and find that same singular atmosphere — that buzz, that fever even, that grips any passionate player the moment they step through the door of one of these sacred places, sit down at a table, pick up the box of stones, and place the first stone on the empty goban after saying the traditional onegaishimasu — the Go equivalent of a handshake in chess.

The most symbolic place to try it is the Nihon Ki-in, in Ichigaya — the official headquarters of the Japan Go Association, and the very building anime fans will recognize as they approach, since it's the one that appears in the show. It has a salon open to the public, a museum tracing the game's history, and a shop. It's actually one of the four spots I take readers to in my guide, Entre fiction et réalité — the best proof, once again, that fiction leads straight back to the real thing.

If the chance ever comes your way, and, armed with the basic rules, you walk into a Japanese Go salon with a copy of Hikaru no Go in hand, spare a thought for me, who, twenty years ago now, walked through the door of my first Go salon — with all the emotion of first times, and first loves.