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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED GO is placed in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo (as it was known at the time), a time and place I know only from stamps and a few scenes in The Last Emperor, a place that was China, but also wasn't, of people that are Chinese but also Manchu.
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED GO tells the story of a growing love between a Japanese soldier and a Chinese-Manchurian girl, and of the love-hate relationship between China and Japan, two peoples and cultures that are in some ways so close as to be joined at the hip, yet whose relationship has all too often been destructive.
The 16-year old girl in question is an expert at the ancient game of go: she challenges all comers in the Square of a Thousand Winds, and defeats them all. She also goes to school, gets involved with the local resistance, falls in love ... and ends up playing a game of go with a Japanese soldier in disguise, a game which mirrors her life and ultimately becomes indistinguishable from it.
The (deceptively simple) story is told in ninety-two short chapters, with girl and the soldier alternating as narrator, sometimes quickly, sometimes with aggression, sometimes with deliberation. Yes, the book itself mirrors the game -- a trifle too obviously, perhaps, for if the book has a defect, it is that it sometimes drifts uncomfortably close to such cliches as go as a metaphor for life.
Nevertheless, given the black and white of the go board, and the black and white way in which Chinese usually portray Japan and the Japanese actions of the period, SHAN SA shows surprising subtlety and even sympathy for the individuals caught up in events that they cannot control and to which they end up sacrificing their humanity.
This is the third novel from SHAN SA, a young Chinese writer who has been living in France since 1990 and who already has a Prix Goncourt under her belt. I knew nothing about her, but I suspect we'll be hearing more: the success of Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has clearly reminded publishers that not all expatriate Chinese authors choose to write first in English.
One reads this book through a double filter, the first that of the author herself, who is not writing in her native tongue and second that of the French-to-English translation. One must therefore be careful in drawing too many conclusions.
Both the story and the language have certain drawbacks. The latter is simple to the point of being simplistic and relies on footnotes to explain historical and cultural references. The former is not entirely credible: surely the protagonist's proficiency at the game, unusual in mere a slip of a girl, would have been remarked on. And the soldier's own continued presence at the board sits uncomfortably with his duties as a soldier.
But complete verisimilitude and exactitude of technique are not necessary, nor perhaps even desirable, in all works of art. SHAN SA has created an atmospheric world filled with a wealth of detail on the lives of Japanese soldiers and ordinary people in Manchuria at a dramatic -- and, for English-speakers, gap-ridden -- period in history.
Peter Gordon
06/05/2003
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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