eeveee | A Practical Reasoning for the Non-existence of the Hand of God (Hikaru no Go: Kurata)

Atsushi Kurata finds himself annoyed with the relative impossibility of predicting a game of poker (short of cheating, and that's like losing on principle). He tries chess, but there's just something too aggressive about it, and shogi works on the same principle. So he asks Kido-senpai in the igo club to explain that one, and finds that the pace of the game is one that appeals much more. There's an elegance to the shapes on the board, a lack of brutality that gives him time to consider and reconsider and make up for mistakes elsewhere.

A guy he sat with a lunch when he took the pro test had laughed at that - he had chosen it for the pace of it? Atsushi hadn't understood why that was so baffling - as long as he was looking for a place to set his skills to test, he could as well do it the way he enjoyed the best. And Go did that beautifully, without coincidences and chance and influences outside the control of the the players.

Go, Sakamoto-sensei tells him, is a game of giving and taking.

Go, Atsushi thinks, is a game where you need to learn to make your sacrifices. There is a lot of tradition and philosophy among the serious players. There are things you just do and things you just don't, there are some motives that are to be admired and some to be despised. Kurata-kun, Sakamoto-sensei tells him, Go is a game about you, and your opponent, and the world you create together. A world? Atsushi thinks, and thinks that Sakamoto-sensei is getting old, after all.

Then he hears the same from Kuwabara Honinbo, and then he starts wondering if, perhaps, there isn't something odd about the whole mythology.

This, Atsushi knows:
that Ogata Juudan does not like admitting that he is as much like Kuwabara Honinbo as he is. Not the obvious things - Ogata is still young, after all, and doesn't have to - well, couldn't even if he wanted to - intimidate his opponents with mind games and age and stories that nobody says they believe in but apparently a lot still do. Ogata is a calm one, but Kuwabara Honinbo upsets him, and Atsushi is pretty sure that for that, Ogata will never admit to how much alike one another those two can be.

Which is silly, but probably kind of understandable: feared and revered as Kuwabara Honinbo might, he's not really a guy that anybody with half a clue would like to compare themselves to these days. It was a shame when Touya Meijin retired; it's kind of one that Kuwabara Honinbo won't, even though he's supposedly doing an impressive job of keeping up with the younger players. Atsushi can kind of appreciate that somebody who has been around for so long is still hanging around with the best of them, but not when he's falling behind - that's just tedious.

It doesn't take him so long to realize that that's not the way most of the pro players think. To them, it doesn't matter if Kuwabara-sensei's age is starting to show in his games, because Kuwabara-sensei isn't only old and clever and one of the most successful players to have lived. To them, those things make Kuwabara-sensei wise, and his words to be respected and treasured.

Atsushi only sees Kuwabara Honinbo as an old man who once used to be very good, and who now enjoys a kind-of-unreasonable reverence for it. And if Ogata Juudan is part of the parish, well, then he's there of his own choice.

Still, Atsushi also respects Kuwabara Honinbo, because Kuwabara Honinbo knows how strength and rivalry works. The man is also one of the more merciless out there, even if that has been taking form of manipulation and intimidation more and more often the last five years, and Atsushi, while seeing the necessity of not terrorizing the beginners, is a firm believer of acknowledging ones skills. With the way Kuwabara Honinbo is clinging to his last seat in the Go world, Atsushi had honestly thought that it was about something far pettier than competition.

So it surprises him the day he walks in on Kuwabara-sensei bullying some kid who was in the Hokuto preliminaries about Shindou. Well, not surprising that it is about Shindou, since Shindou is the hands-down most threatening player around (even if most people are too hung up on Akira Touya being his father's son to quite recognize the talent that Touya chose to measure himself against as something more than that). The kid makes some expected pleasantries and bolts when Atsushi walks up to them, and Kuwabara-sensei looks after him with a slightly puzzled expression, and asks Kurata-kun, who had been with Shindou during that fun tournament, if it was true that the Korean upstart had been taunting Shindou about Honinbo Shuusaku.

Which, well, it actually had been. 'Shindou's a Shuusaku fan. Hadn't pegged him as that kind of thick-headed, but he took it awfully personally. So I decided, hell, why not let the boy play? Pride works as well as anything'.

Kuwabara-sensei nods to that, and asks what the young Touya had thought about giving up the first board for Shindou.

Which is a good question, and one that Atsushi never bothered asking. So he admits as much as he can: that Touya didn't protest - didn't protest when Shindou first made the request, didn't say anything when Atsushi later assigned Shindou to his place. Took it better than some - better than most, maybe, but who really knows what the kid was thinking. He has been raised better than Shindou and Yashiro, after all.

Kuwabara-sensei assures him that it wouldn't be anything like that, since Shindou and Akira Touya are that kind of rivals.

Atsushi hadn't know that there were more kinds than one, at least not when it got to Go. That is when Kuwabara Honinbo tells him that Shindou and young Touya are the kinds or rivals that will take the game one step closer to the Hand of God, and leaves to find a taxi. Atsushi remains standing by the cigarette machine to scratch his head, and wonder if that silly story had been the thing driving Kuwabara-sensei for all these years.

The one thing that Atsushi never understood about the Go community is the oft-unspoken, taken-for-granted fascination with the Hand of God. What is the Hand of God? Sakamoto-sensei hadn't known the answer. He had made some vague, philosophical explanations about the game and the self and the community, but none of it answered Atsushi's question - although it did confirm his suspicion about this not actually having any influence on the game itself. So he hasn't bothered looking any further into it, and only shrugs it off late at night when the bottles are mostly empty and half the party has stumbled off to bed. 'God', it says, so it must have something to do with the divine, but Atsushi has never much been one for that - and certainly not when it comes to games.

Like a fairy-tale for children, then, but if even Kuwabara Honinbo believes in it, it clearly has more to say for the players than he previously had thought. Atsushi certainly never believed in it - he started playing Go for the challenge, and then just never stopped once he got good at it. Of course, that's probably not how it goes for people who were as good as raised into the profession, like he has the feelings that half of the pros around more or less were, but even they shouldn't be immune to independent thinking.

The Hand of God is a fiction, and not a particularly convincing one, and the stories he hears about Shindou and Touya and their "rivalry" all sounds like the same kind of bogus that people think that they believe in. Rivalry is about skill, not about instant obsession, so Atsushi does not for a second believe that that was what Akira Touya was thinking about back when whatever it was that happened between him and Shindou happened. So it surprises him that even Kuwabara Honinbo, who he always had thought was too old and too cynical for that, talks about it like fact.

Atsushi doesn't believe in the Hand of God, and he doesn't believe in fated rivalries. He doesn't bother arguing about it when the topic comes up, and he wonders if Sakamoto-sensei ever realized that tradition doesn't actually help you win games. They aren't so few who play Go, and once you are good enough, there is plenty of competition for titles and trophies and media mentions. Atsushi plays to be good, and with the way things have gone this far, he is pretty sure he can play to be the best. He isn't the only one out to do that, and he's not interesting on picking out one particular opponent to beat more than all the others. For if Kuwabara-sensei was great yesterday, then Ogata-sensei is great today, like Shindou will be tomorrow, and Touya-sensei and a great number of people overseas always will be.

Atsushi is there when Saeki 5-dan makes some rambling and not entirely coherent confession to Ashiwara 6-dan, and is pretty sure that some things just works better in theory than they actually do in practice, at least if all it takes to ignore them is five shots of vodka. So Ogata Juudan glares nastily at Kuwabara Honinbo's back and Shindou 2-dan gets into a screaming argument with Touya 3-dan in the kifu archive, and if that is the way that kind of rivalries work, it might as well just be. Stories and gossip and legends and myth make for good entertainment, but Go is a game that has nothing to do with chance.

Atsushi Kurata, 7-dan, spends twenty minutes explaining the guy who wrote a piece for Go Weekly that with kids like Ko Yongha around, that insufferably smug An Tenson should be watching his back instead of giving snide interviews, and then forgets about it as he goes home to prepare against his game against Ichiryu 9-dan, who might still be something if he just gets over losing to a fifteen-year-old.

Written for