Genjo and Chitoku

 I recently finished playing over the games in John Fairbairn’s big book “Genjo and Chitoku” and I have to say, it is pretty great. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise though.

Honinbo Genjo and Yasui Chitoku were a pair of go players during a period from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. They started playing each other when they were both young and continued for much of their life (although they did stop for some reason well before they had both retired). They were both extraordinary talents and so were natural rivals but they were also friends and held each other in high esteem. At that time, the highest honor in the go world was the title of Meijin but only one person could be Meijin at a time. Neither of them tried to claim this title (although both of them were strong enough) out of respect for the other. Another interesting thing about them is that they had contrasting styles. Chitoku had a more territorial style and Genjo had a thicker more attacking style. For this reason their games are very interesting to study.

This book contains 86 of their games against each other. These are all the games that are known (although of course there are records of their games against others such as in the Castle Games). As is normal for him, Fairbairn’s commentaries are a synthesis of commentaries by strong pros in Japanese that he has digested and presented in English. These comments are in most cases not direct translations although sometimes he does indicate whose opinion he is giving.

One thing to note is that Fairbairn intended this to be a study tool so the remarkable thing is that there are no variation diagrams at all. The variations that are given are usually fairly short and are indicate by marked points on the actual game figures. He will however sometimes indicate that some local result can be achieved. The point of all of this is that reader is meant to analyze and find the variations themselves when he tells them what to look for. I personally didn’t find the lack of variations disturbing. The commentary is sufficiently meaty without them. But admittedly I didn’t do much analysis or variation calculating myself.

The front part of the book contains a preface where Fairbairn explains some of his theories about how to study. He also gives as much info as there is on the biographies of the two players.

One further component of the book that is very noteworthy is a section that he calls Go Wisdom. This is part glossary and part index. Many important terms are explained at significantly greater length than is usual for a glossary though. And each term is indexed to games and even moves that exemplify the concepts. Again, this is representative of Fairbairn’s scholarship. He is synthesizing many years of studying pro commentaries and writings and giving the benefit of that to English speakers. For example, he explains many subtleties of the term “thickness” and its various uses. This is more sophisticated than the usual glossary of Japanese go terms that very briefly define some very simple words such as atari and hane. Fairbairns terms are strategic concepts and ways of talking about what happens on the go board that are available in Japanese but not in English.

As far as negatives go, there were two that stand out to me. The first is a fairly minor complaint and it is that the book is self-published and so there are some spots where editing or proofreading would have improved the text. But I do want to stress that this is a minor complaint. I have seen many books about chess or go that were far worse.

The second complaint is that I was a little underwhelmed by the commentary on the two player’s styles. That is one of the big attractions of this matchup and I feel Fairbairn underplayed this topic some. I really value the idea of style in games as one aspect of the artistic element and was hoping for more on this front. Of course I am sure that the opposite point can be made. Namely that they are top notch pros so they are necessarily well-rounded players whose styles are not exaggerated caricatures. To be fair, Fairbairn does discuss this topic a bit in the preface and does point out moves that are representative of the players’ styles. Perhaps he felt it would be easy to overhype this aspect. But personally I felt a bit of a lack in this department.

Overall, I feel this is a great display of go knowledge and quality commentary that is well worth the price.