Work Text:
Once, when he was very, very young and still learning intermediate tsumego, he asked his father, then third time Meijin, for an even game. Without handicaps.
His father looked at him gently, though the lines of his face remained stern. "Are you sure, Akira?"
"Yes," he answered gravely, hands clenched on his knees.
"Very well," the Meijin--his father--said as he passed him the goke.
Akira knew that he would lose. A part of him even expected to be crushed, to face a swift and thorough deconstruction of his carefully wrought shapes on the board before they had a chance to connect. Did he anticipate, perhaps, the helplessness he would feel in front of such precise and overwhelming strength? Was it that very helplessness which made his small, clumsy fingers tremble as they placed the first stone?
He was surprised to find that there was no avalanche--no thorough invasion of his territory, no ruthless capture of his stones. His father played as cautiously as he would have against an equal opponent. Akira felt bewildered as he recognized small openings, chances for his stones to survive, and then a little angry, when the thought occurred to him that his father might be holding back.
He did not notice at first the gradual creep of white stones across the corners of the board, the inscrutable placement of stones merging, many dozens of hands later, into a vast net that spanned the stars of the goban. When the pattern became too clear for him to miss, he paused in shock. He bit his lower lip. How--but when--
His mind whirled as he replayed the game in his mind. He saw how his father--no, the Meijin--had slowly but surely taken possession of the board, each of his hands anticipated in advance and assimilated into the strategy of the game. Oh, he thought, like sand eroding rock. Like the movement of glaciers.
He bowed. "I have lost."
"You concentrate so much on the details that sometimes you miss the larger picture," his father said and proceeded to point out his mistakes.
Later, Akira realized that even that game had merely been an exercise in shidougo for his father, but the memory stayed with him for years. It was the first time he understood what it meant to master the game.