Adulthood by toko
Sometimes the rules change, and nobody tells you. 5,773 words.
With grateful thanks to Jain, whose comments on a draft version gave me the momentum I needed to finish this.
—
Things did not happen to Touya Akira before he met Shindou Hikaru.
When he was young, he believed that life was a path: long and complicated, perhaps, but nonetheless a journey, with the Hand of God somewhere far down the road. Every success was earned, every failure or setback traceable to some error.
Shindou's arrival in his life has brought randomness in its wake. Now he walks through a world where things happen inexplicably. Twelve-year-olds who have never held a stone possess miraculous strength. Seemingly dependable waystations -- his father, his prodigious go -- have revealed their weakness.
But more than that, Shindou has made him look up, forced him to see that the path he thought was the whole world winds through a landscape of life and emotion that he has never bothered to observe.
And recently, he has begun to notice that there are things in this landscape on which his attention tends to linger; that there are things in his life besides go and his family which have become essential to him; that there are things he always thinks about in those quiet moments just before he drifts off to sleep; and that all of these things are Shindou Hikaru.
Which is why he does not protest, why, after a moment where a hurricane of thoughts and sensations whirls through his head and he thinks: oh, he welcomes it, when one day Shindou reaches across the goban and runs his hand through Akira's hair.
He raises his hand to Shindou's, holding it in place, treasuring its cool dry touch. Only then does he lift his eyes from the board; Shindou is smiling a satisfied, slightly dubious little smile, the same one he wears when he thinks he has solved a particularly complicated tsumego.
There are no sudden movements. Shindou does not lunge at him; Akira does not shove the goban aside. Quietly, gently, they rise together, Akira now clasping Shindou's hand, and as soon as there is no danger that they will kick the goban or step on one of the goke, Shindou holds his gaze for three heart-stopping seconds and then leans in.
Touya Akira is sixteen years old, and to the best of his knowledge no girl has ever tried to kiss him, and for this he feels a sudden blaze of gratitude, because he cannot imagine any of the shy, demure, pretty girls who bring him unwanted chocolate every Valentine's Day kissing like this.
—
Months pass and, to his surprise, little changes. They play together as they always have; if Shindou begins to spend the night sometimes, this is just the evolution of their usual routine, nothing more. It occurs to Akira to wonder what will happen if Shindou develops the desire to do the things he vaguely understands to be Normal: going to movies, having lunch together, 'hanging out' and talking for hours about nothing-- but it proves irrelevant, as the subject never arises. Their time together is spent before a goban, or, after a while, in Akira's bedroom, and for the most part it is their hands which do the talking.
Whatever it is they have, it proceeds from their go; when Akira considers this, it seems to him to be the perfect arrangement, the perfect partnership, everything he could have hoped for and much more than most people are ever lucky enough to find.
Perhaps a year later, they sit together in Akira's house, recreating their third game of the night. The shouting has not started yet, but if Akira is not mistaken, there is a cut he made a few hands down -- which, on reflection, did end up with him in gote when it need not have -- that will likely set Shindou off. He places white's next hand; when after a minute there is no response, he looks up to see Shindou, shoulders slumped and eyes heavy-lidded, gazing off into the distance. He calls Shindou's name, gently at first, but, when that elicits no response, with a peremptory bark. Shindou starts, blinks, attempts to pull himself together, and, by the looks of it, fails. Sorry, Touya, he mumbles. I just... can we review another time? I'm really...
Akira nods his understanding, and stands up, stretching his legs. It is later than he realized, and now that his concentration is broken, he becomes aware that he is tired, too. As he retrieves the guest futon from its storage closet, Shindou attempts to move the goban, the half-recreated game still on it, out of the way. With his movements dulled by exhaustion, however, he succeeds only in knocking it over and spraying the stones all across the tatami. Akira sighs a sigh he is almost tempted to call fond, sets the futon down, and begins to pick up the stones. Another hand bumps into his: Shindou, still trying to help.
Akira rocks back into a loose approximation of seiza and takes Shindou's hand in his own. It is cool and dry, crisp like a sheet of ricepaper, so unlike the leathery warmth of Akira's own palm, or the cold hardness of the stones pressed between them. This gentle touch of skin on skin is the strangest sensation Akira has ever felt, and yet it feels right: this is where he fits, go and Shindou and something else he's afraid to give its proper name all together. Slowly, sleepily, Shindou smiles, and without any consciousness of doing so, Akira smiles back.
For a moment, they remain like that, unmoving; then Akira releases Shindou's hand and goes back to collecting the spilled stones. It takes him a few minutes to gather them up, sort them into the goke, right the goban, and place all three out of the way by the screen. When he turns back, he cannot help but smile again: Shindou is sprawled across the folded-up futon, fast asleep.
Akira is very tired; he knows that he should wake Shindou and unfold the futon, and then he should go down the corridor, get out the futon in his own room, change into his sleeping-clothes, and go to sleep, and he will do all of these things, but first, just for a moment, he will sit here and rest his... eyes...
He wakes to the soft light of the morning, diffused through the washi paper of the screens. His back and neck are sore, the collar of his shirt is damp with sweat, he has a foul taste in the back of his throat, and there is a heavy weight on his chest. Mumbling darkly and wriggling in an attempt to get more comfortable, he looks down.
Oh.
Shindou has shifted during the night. His outflung arms bracket Akira's shoulders in a sleepy pantomime of an embrace; the heavy weight on Akira's chest is Shindou's head. A breath catches in Akira's throat as he studies the deep black of Shindou's hair; gently, carefully, not really conscious of his actions, he threads his right arm under Shindou's body and joins his hands at Shindou's waist.
As Akira gazes at Shindou's sleeping face, he feels as though his heart is swelling to such a size that it will burst out of his chest, and Shindou wakes.
Shindou lifts his head, blinks, once, twice, and fixes a gaze still fuzzy with sleep on Akira. He opens his mouth, closes it again, twitches it into a smile, and lets himself sink back down onto Akira's chest. Akira settles himself into a more comfortable position, tilts his head back, and closes his eyes, as Shindou murmurs something into Akira's chest.
This is... I really like this, Touya. He pauses for a moment. I wish there were girls like you, he adds in a sadder tone, and Akira's eyes fly open, staring upwards.
—
Akira slides his phone back into his trouser pocket. He is a quick learner, and it has not taken him long to infer the true meaning of the sudden, random phone-calls saying I can't play this afternoon, Touya. He has not met any of the girls, and he does not expect to; none of them, after what seems to have been a total disaster with a girl who lives in Shindou's neighborhood, play go.
He doesn't understand, Shindou says.
Of course they have never talked about it, but Akira had believed this was because they did not need to. Shindou, he has now discovered, has not talked about it because because he has not seen that something existed to talk about.
Shindou's parents would freak out, Shindou says.
Touya loves his father and believes in his father, but even so, he's thought about it. He's thought about what it's like when they play each other, Shindou driving himself to catch Akira, Akira tapping secret reservoirs of strength, finding new parts of himself as he struggles to stay ahead; he's thought about the exhilaration of being chased and those brief, amazing moments when Shindou pushes ahead of him; he's thought about what the price of that feeling might be, and he's decided: it's worth it. Akira would have fought his father for Shindou, but he can't fight Shindou for Shindou.
Shindou never meant it like that, Shindou says.
He would have given up everything if he could only keep go and Shindou.
Shindou's sorry, Shindou says.
Hirose-san is at the counter, speaking quietly to Ichikawa-san. Fragments of their conversation float at the edges of his hearing: murmur murmur murmur young sensei. Murmur murmur Touya-sensei. Murmur murmur worried-sounding sigh.
He can feel Ichikawa-san's eyes on him, but he does not acknowledge them. With a firm, confident hand, he places a white stone, then sits back to examine the kifu and contemplate black's next move.
—
When Shindou Hikaru gets married, Touya Akira gets drunk.
The link is not obvious, in the same way that Shindou's formations look innocuous and disconnected just before he pounces on you. Akira attends the wedding in good spirits, and sincerely wishes the couple well. At Shindou's request, he even makes a speech.
Two weeks after his wedding, Shindou visits Akira's house to play go and discuss the third game of Akira's successful challenge for the Gosei title. As he is getting up to return to his new young wife, Shindou gets that mischievous, calculating look in his eyes that he only shows to Akira, drops back into a squat, and reaches for the zipper of Akira's trousers. Akira makes a strangled noise of desire, and Shindou's departure is postponed for a long bout of hungry, vigorous, almost violent sex.
Later, as they lie on the tatami, stuck together by sweat and other things, Shindou breathes into Akira's neck: It doesn't change anything between us.
When Shindou is gone, Akira rises on wobbly legs, bathes, and goes to bed. In the morning he is present at the appointed time for his match in the third round of the Meijin preliminaries, where he obliterates a washed-up 7-dan overdue for retirement and secures his entry into the Meijin league, one step closer to challenging Ogata.
A few days later, when there is a two-day gap in his schedule, he buys an inexpensive bottle of Suntory on the way home from the train. He carries it back to his big, empty house, sits with it in front of his goban, and crawls into it.
Touya Akira drinks until the board before him blurs into the tatami because Shindou Hikaru's marriage changes nothing between them.
—
The small rectangle of thin cardboard in his mail announces that Akira is scheduled to play a 3-dan whose name means nothing to him in the second preliminary of the Honinbou tournament.
His opponent plays soft go, passive and yielding, almost serene in the way he allows Akira to direct the flow of the stones, and so it is not until the last stages of yose that Akira suddenly realizes: even though he has felt in complete control the whole time, he is going to lose.
He can't quite believe it, and they play out the last few hands in a tense silence. A low hiss of amazment passes around the spectators as it is confirmed that Touya Akira, 8-dan, Gosei, has lost by a moku and a half playing black. As they murmur, Akira runs briskly through the game in his head, considers the most significant strategic moments, rereads the alternatives, and realises that he has no idea why or how he has lost.
He recreates the game later with Shindou, sitting before his father's goban in his father's house, and they are both subdued, searching in the gentle tapping of the stones for the mistakes which must be there, which somehow explain how the reigning genius of Japanese go lost to a mere 3-dan. And at length Shindou finds one. It's as subtle as a whisper, secreted in the middle of a complicated ko fight in the upper left. Akira remembers this hand. It was simple, mechanical, unremarkable; he responded without pause, knowing there was only one right answer. It's fitting that Shindou, with his affinity for wild, seemingly terrible moves, should find this; Akira's straightforward, perfectly correct response turns out to have critically weakened his position, and cost him fully six moku later.
Akira stares at the board and wonders if this is what it feels like to be told you are going to die, until Shindou, for lack of any other way to comfort him, reaches over and gently unfastens his belt.
—
When a year later he finally takes the Meijin title from Ogata Seiji, Touya Kouyo's oldest pupil grudgingly passing the crown to his most brilliant, it is the emptiest victory in Touya Akira's entire career.
Akira remembers the anticipation, even excitement, with which his father and the other masters awaited the rise of his generation of go players; remembers how they welcomed the challenge. For his own part he can summon only white-knuckled fear. He is Meijin now, proven a worthy heir, but he knows that in the darkness below, isolated from the upper dans by the Ki-in's regimented tournament structure, there are players against whom he is doomed as soon as they seat themselves before the goban. He can feel his steps along the path to the Hand of God growing slower and less sure; his go has always been cold, but now a different kind of chill is setting in.
Go is the oldest constant in his life, more permanent even than his father, whose ashes have resided beneath the bleak stone marker that Akira does not like to visit for five years now. For a time he thought he might have found another in Shindou, but they have grown older, acquired reputations and duties and complications, and though they still play and argue, the elemental energy of their youth is dissipating. Sitting across from Shindou at the go salon, or in his father's house -- for Akira has never played go at any of the places Shindou has called home -- he has come to realise that their paths are diverging, that the days when the Hand of God was the one and only goal are gone. Akira knows that Shindou does not want what Akira wants.
Touya Akira, 9-dan, Meijin, Gosei, thought Shindou Hikaru was destined to be his eternal rival and constant companion; but fate has assigned demons of his own mind to those roles instead. Sitting alone at his hotel's polished black marble bar, he raises his finger to signal the barman.
—
Before long, Shindou Hikaru wins the Honinbou crown, as Akira, like the entire go world, has always known he would.
Akira is not clear how the traditional night of drinking to celebrate a title victory came to take place in an expensive hostess club in Roppongi. The Shindou he knew would, he thinks, have called the establishment lame. Akira himself might choose a different word, but in sentiment he agrees.
He is surprised at how large the group is. There are old friends of Shindou's he has met once or twice, some prominent pros he did not know Shindou knew more than casually, a couple of lower dans who study with Shindou, and some people he does not know at all. They are mostly loud and exuberant, like Shindou himself, and they swarm around him, congratulating him and cheering him and making fun of the second game, which Shindou lost.
Akira drinks his tea quietly, thinking about the only two people he has ever wanted to celebrate his go, and feeling almost pathetically grateful for the presence of the hostess at his elbow. He is almost as practiced at making polite small talk as she is, which gives him a way to distract himself from the rising intoxication overtaking the rest of the party.
He is jolted out of his reverie by an elbow in his ribs. We should do something to celebrate, Touya, Shindou says drunkenly, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. Jus' you and me. Eternal rivals! He takes a voluminous swig from his glass, repeats eternal rivals with an inflection that sounds like amazement, and begins to giggle.
Akira scowls and wishes he could drink, but he has promised himself that he will not; one drink, he knows, will become many, and at the bottom of the bottle there is that awful, angry truth that he will not let out, not tonight. He owes Shindou nothing and less than nothing, but tonight, in a way requiring no conscious decision on his part, he can no more think of taking Shindou's happiness away than he can of never touching another stone.
Nonetheless, he lacks any interest in 'celebrating' with Shindou Hikaru, so he decides that it has been too long since he visited with the players of the Kansai Ki-in, and leaves on the Shinkansen the next morning, in the sleepy half-light just after sunrise, with a bottle of single malt scotch in his bag.
—
Akira learns the hard way that his father's weak heart is hereditary during his second defense of the Meijin title.
His opponent this year is Ochi, whose pro exam Akira tried to use to measure Shindou's strength when understanding that strength seemed like the only thing that mattered, and Akira allows himself a smile of petty satisfaction when he hears the league results. He may at last have learned fear at the goban, but he has never been, will never be, afraid of Ochi. He takes the first two games with a calm efficiency that reminds him of his much younger self. Ochi's aggressive, overbearing go has not matured; he peaked, below Akira, long ago.
Early in the third game, he sits back, pleased with the emerging shape on the goban, and reaches for the tea at his side, when suddenly there is a wrongness in his chest and he can no longer quite focus his mind; amongst the panicked-sounding blurs, all he can clearly see is the contents of the overturned teacup seeping into the tatami floor of the Yuugen no Ma.
He wakes with a small start in what he quickly recognises as a hospital room. Since a glance reveals that he shares it, at present, only with a pile of gifts neatly stacked on one of the chairs, he lies back in the bed and remembers his father's first collapse: the trip in the ambulance, how full of terror and worry he felt, how he sat quietly in the hospital and tried not to get in the way, and the moment when he finally knew that everything would be all right: when his father sat up in bed and played go with him, on an improvised 9x9 board.
Without really realizing that he has slept, he wakes again, disturbed by the awareness of another presence in the room, and when he blinks the bleariness out of his eyes, he sees Shindou standing quietly below the foot of his bed, studying him. Shindou is wearing a suit, and even though suits have been his standard attire for more than a decade, here, today, Shindou Hikaru in a suit seems somehow ridiculous. Touya, I-- he starts to say.
The door opens with a quiet clatter, and Akira's wife enters. She blinks at Shindou's presence, but greets him politely with kind words and a shallow bow that Shindou returns. Akira reads Shindou's expression, the vulnerability, the fear and worry strange interlopers on a face that is just beginning to show lines, sets his shoulders, and pointedly does not ask his wife to give them a moment.
There is a pause.
Shindou reaches into his pocket. I brought this with me, he says, holding up a battered magnetic pocket goban, if you want to play. Akira looks down at where his worn, callused hands rest on the hospital sheets, and shakes his head. Before either of them can say more, the door clatters again, to admit a doctor and a pair of nurses. Oh, Touya-sensei! You're awake! They insinuate themselves next to the bed with an ease that Akira supposes comes from long practice, murmuring politely about tests, examinations, and procedures, closing Shindou out behind double walls of white linen and medical jargon. Over the doctor's shoulder, Akira watches as Shindou processes this, as a cloud of some unknown emotion passes behind his eyes.
I should go, he says. Get better quickly, Touya. Get out there and defend your title. I don't want to have to beat Ochi for it -- that would just be embarrassing. The bravado and the brash arrogance is like listening to the fifteen-year-old Shindou again, but Shindou at fifteen never sounded so hollow. He inclines his head to Akira, bids a polite farewell to Akira's wife, and walks out the door perhaps a little too briskly.
Akira stares after him while one of the nurses pierces his skin with a needle and his blood wells out into a small glass tube. His wife reaches over and gently takes his hand.
—
Just as Shindou bade him, he emerges from the hospital to crush Ochi in the fourth game of the Meijin title match. By the time of the fifth he is discharged, and brushes his opponent aside with something not far from outright contempt. He knows that the chatter among the pros and on the Internet forums is all about the new vicious streak in his go, and he ignores it.
His doctors explain what happened in words he does not entirely understand. All he can clearly gather is that it, whatever it was, involves a slight deformity in his heart. He says nothing, asks no questions, and waits for what he knows is coming: the long, detailed list of things he needs to do to prevent it happening again. First he has learned that his go is weak and mortal, and learned to fear its failure. Now he is being told that the same is true of his body, and it fills him with anger.
—
Touya Kouyo won the Meijin title six times before retiring undefeated. Before him, Kobayashi Koichi won it for the first time the year before Akira was born, and then, while Akira was very small, won it again and held it for seven years. Last year at this time, they asked Akira for his thoughts on becoming the longest-reigning Meijin in the history of the title; two years ago, no-one dared ask him what it felt like to surpass his father's record.
This year, once again, the questions are few. So many of the journalists to whom Akira has been giving courteous and measured answers since his first professional games have retired. Only the Yomiuri's go correspondent, a grizzled old man to whom even Akira's father deferred, remembers the days when Touya was a prodigy. The rest of them are young, and either resentful of the need to spend time reporting on this "old man's game", or slightly strange in the way of those obsessed with a pursuit for which they have no inborn talent -- and this year, all of them have eyes only for Akira's opponent.
It has been a long time since a Kansai pro challenged for one of the three big titles. And though this is, out of respect for Akira and for the name Touya, never said, with the score tied at three games each it seems more possible than it has for many years that a Kansai pro might win one of the three. No-one has ever won three Meijin games against Akira before.
Good morning, Touya-sensei, Yashiro Kiyoharu says as he steps into the elevator.
Akira starts. He has been reluctant to talk to Yashiro, for fear of being forced to dwell on things he would prefer to forget, and so he has avoided meetings like this. When they play, of course, words are not necessary, and when they discuss the games they speak -- as is the go world's way -- only of white and black, simple abstractions without names, or personalities, or memories. But now, only moments away from the deciding game, his strategy has failed. Akira does not know what he fears Yashiro will say, but he fears it all the same.
In the event, Yashiro says nothing, and somehow this is worse. No sooner has he turned to face the elevator doors than his face becomes a blank mask, not of concentration but simply of absence. When the doors open, Akira trails slightly behind, marveling at the way Yashiro walks as though the world around him does not exist. It is not until they have seated themselves before the goban that Yashiro looks up and it seems as though there is once again a person behind his eyes.
As they play out the opening hands, Akira studies Yashiro, puzzled and fascinated. A part of his mind sorts through half-remembered gossip of the kind he tries to ignore. Yashiro, he remembers, has no wife, nor girlfriends -- nor boyfriends nor anything else. No real friends, inside the go world or out. He gives no interviews. He has no students, and, ever since he started winning enough tournament money to support himself, takes on none of the scutwork which brings professionals into contact with amateurs and younger pros. Akira knows his own reputation: the polite ones call him aloof, the more resentful call him arrogant. Yashiro's is not like that. If they call him anything at all, they call him a monk.
Yashiro's parents don't want him to become a pro, Shindou told him once.
Akira wonders what that must be like: to have the people on whose love you depend totally opposed to everything your life is about. But at last he understands. Yashiro gave his family up for go. Yashiro has given everything up for go. Yashiro is alone with his go, but he seems to thrive on it; whereas Akira, who realizes at last that he, too, is alone, can only seem to think about the absence across the goban.
But he plays on. What else is there to do? And many hands later, once his strategies have unfolded, confident that he has played strong, deep, thoughtful, and innovative go, he studies the board with great care, reading the path through yose all the way to the end, then straightens, bows, and says quietly: I resign.
—
The morning after he loses his title, he drinks his tea and, like any other morning, opens his mail. As a professional go player, he is one of the last Japanese who regularly has mail to open; even the government has belatedly stumbled into the electronic age, but the Ki-in maintains a stubborn attachment to tradition.
He has known for some months that he has won his pool in the Kisei league, but, preoccupied with his gruelling Meijin defense, he has not been paying attention to the results of the other pool. He sips his tea and stares at the game card, with its small, tidy row of seven characters recording the name and rank of his opponent in the match to decide Kurata Kisei's challenger.
Shindou Hikaru 9-dan.
As Akira settles into his seat in Yuugen no Ma, he thinks about the many things which have happened since the last time they played each other professionally. Shindou has had a son, who is three years old and who addresses him as Touya-sensei with a solemn, unprompted propriety that he cannot imagine comes from the flesh and blood of Shindou Hikaru. Akira has won the Meijin and protected it for eight years, even as Shindou has won the Honinbou, defended it twice, lost it, regained it, and lost it again.
Yet none of that seems important as they bow to each other across the goban, as they nigiri, and as they play out the first cautious, courteous fuseki. If he allows himself to become just slightly distracted by his go, it is as though Yuugen no Ma melts away around them, and they could be playing anywhere. This game could be just another played at his father's go salon, with the sunset painting abstract colors on the walls and the sound of stones clicking all around them.
Akira's sixteen-year-old self reaches out with a hand twice that age and tentatively places a black stone.
There is a pause.
He senses rather than sees his opponent's smile, and Shindou -- not Shindou Hikaru, the seasoned pro, but just Shindou, the boy he used to know so well -- answers.
Their hands are bold, daring, alive with their passion for the game, yet also closer to flawless than Akira has ever thought possible. They grapple with each other all the way through yose, and when they stagger to a halt at last, Akira does not know who has won.
Akira's eyes watch Shindou's fingers as they rearrange white's territory for the count. He knows without needing to check that Shindou's gaze is following his own hands as he does likewise for black.
Black seventy-three moku; white sixty-seven. Plus a five and a half moku komi, and the game is black's by half a moku. In the go salon of many years ago, Touya Akira, teenage go prodigy, slumps slightly in his chair, filled with relief: he has stood up to the challenge and, if just barely, held on.
But they are not teenagers. They are middle-aged men, both past thirty, in the twilight age of a go player's tournament career. And when they were sixteen, the Ki-in increased the komi from five and a half moku to six and a half, which means that Akira's half-moku win is in fact a half-moku loss.
Thank you for the game, Shindou says, politely.
—
The Ki-in is pitiless; in less than a week he must play again, this time in the Honinbo preliminaries. His opponent is an 8-dan, the rank a reminder that, five years ago, he held the Tengen crown for a year -- and also that he has achieved little since.
Exhausted, embittered, Akira plays poorly; though he wins, the ugliness of his victory leaves a bad taste in his mouth. He receives his opponent's concession politely, and, thanking him, is about to rise to record the result when the other man says, Touya-sensei, can you explain your strategy here? It took me completely by surprise.
Akira blinks, taken aback. Then he settles into a more comfortable position and begins to explain.
—
Years can pass like that, he discovers; decades, even.
Many young players ask to be taken on as his disciples, but he finds himself without the energy or the patience to establish a full-scale dojo, so he forms a study group instead, and invites young players whose ability catches his eye. Before long an invitation to a study session at the Touya residence is once again one of the most coveted commodities in Japanese go.
He watches the next generation of go players as they battle each other in the room where his father taught him to play. Some of them are talented. A few will go on to great things. But none of them are Shindou Hikaru. None of them are Touya Akira.
But then, it comes to him suddenly, Shindou Hikaru and Touya Akira, who defined themselves when they were younger by their dogged march towards the Hand of God, gave that search up long ago. Even Touya Akira is not Touya Akira any more.
The thought stays with him as for the second time in his life he feels a violent wrongness in his chest, and topples slowly to the tatami like a fallen willow tree.
—
When he wakes in the hospital, hating that his surroundings no longer startle him, he is alone in his quiet, airy, sunlit room. Alone, that is, but for the board and stones some thoughtful soul has left beside his bed. He draws the table to him and places a stone, then another, and another, five, a dozen.
After one of white's hands, he stops, and examines the board. He knows this game, knows the shape, knows the flow of the stones; without realizing it, he has been recreating a game he played long ago. But which?
It comes to him, after a moment. The first time he played this game, the stones were only pictures on a computer screen.
sai.
sai, the other Shindou, the eternal riddle to which he has given up seeking an answer. sai, who he once thought might hide the explanation for how Shindou Hikaru could so completely unravel his life.
sai, who is gone.
He wishes he could ask this person, whoever he was, so many questions, but he no longer has the words for them, if indeed he ever did. He stares at his fingers, at the black stone hovering above the goban, a next move that was made long ago but which still feels new. Over the years he has reread this game many times, this and a few others like it, but no matter how great his skill he has never yet found the path to life, the path that he knows must be there, the one right answer in the midst of all the wrong ones. And now he is so tired, so worn out. He lets his hand fall, silently resigning this game one more time.
A fan descends from out of nowhere, lightly tapping the board at the spot where black's stone should go, and Touya Akira looks up, staring in amazement into its owner's smiling face.
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