The Girl Who Played Go [Hardcover]

Shan Sa (Author), Adriana Hunter (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2003

In a remote Manchurian town in the 1930s, a sixteen-year-old girl is more concerned with intimations of her own womanhood than the escalating hostilities between her countrymen and their Japanese occupiers. While still a schoolgirl in braids, she takes her first lover, a dissident student. The more she understands of adult life, however, the more disdainful she is of its deceptions, and the more she loses herself in her one true passion: the ancient game of go.

Incredibly for a teenager–and a girl at that–she dominates the games in her town. No opponent interests her until she is challenged by a stranger, who reveals himself to us as a Japanese soldier in disguise. They begin a game and continue it for days, rarely speaking but deeply moved by each other’s strategies. As the clash of their peoples becomes ever more desperate and inescapable, and as each one’s untold life begins to veer wildly off course, the girl and the soldier are absorbed by only one thing–the progress of their game, each move of which brings them closer to their shocking fate.

In The Girl Who Played Go, Shan Sa has distilled the piercing emotions of adolescence into an engrossing, austerely beautiful story of love, cruelty and loss of innocence.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In war-torn Manchuria of the 1930s, two lives briefly find peace over a game of go in Shan Sa's third novel, The Girl Who Played Go (translated by Adriana Hunter). The unnamed characters, a Japanese soldier stationed in China and a 16-year-old Manchurian girl, narrate their stories in alternating first-person chapters. For the girl, the struggles of Independent Manchuria take a back seat to her discovery of love and the awakening of her sexuality. For the soldier, his idealized dreams of samurai honor and imperial conquest are slowly displaced by homesickness, troubled recollections of his earthquake-torn youth, and remorse over a lost love. But the solitary concerns of each character are eventually submerged by the tides of war. The girl's first lover, Min, is a revolutionary. His ardor for his virgin conquest is matched by a doomed patriotism. Simultaneously, the soldier comes to relish the girl's home town, Thousand Winds, in Southern Manchuria, and becomes distrustful of his own nationalism. His daily games of go with the young female stranger awaken a new passion in him that becomes entwined with admiration for her aggressive play.

As they hardly speak, the soldier and the girl's views of each other remain clouded in Sa's technically facile narrative maneuvers. Where the soldier sees love, the girls sees escape. By maintaining the first person, Sa (winner of the French Prix Goncourt du Premier) leads the reader not only to experience the Japanese and Manchurian perspectives of the occupation, but also she offers glimpses into the deep failure inherent in cross-cultural and cross-generational communication. Couple with the rich historical detail, Sa's narrative games reward close reading amidst the briskly paced spiral into tragedy. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly

In her first novel to appear in English (her two previous novels, published in French, won the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Cazes), Sa masterfully evokes strife-ridden Manchuria during the 1930s. The first-person narration deftly alternates between a 16-year-old Chinese girl and a Japanese soldier from the invading force. As in the Chinese game of go, the two main characters-the girl discovering desire, the soldier visiting prostitutes, both in a besieged city-will ultimately cross paths, with surprising consequences for both. Sa's prose shifts between lavish metaphor-the girl's sister, grieved by an adulterous husband, is "not a woman but a flower slowly wilting"-and matter-of-fact concision ("We weary of the game and kill them," the soldier says of two Chinese prisoners, "two bullets in the head"). The most absorbing subplot is Sa's careful rendering of the girl's sexual awakening. Though at first intrigued by a liaison with a revolution-minded student, she is reluctant to enter adulthood, a state she views as fraught with injury and falsehood, "a sad place full of vanity." To escape her increasingly troubled life, she becomes a master at go, eventually taking on the soldier, who is in disguise. As the two meet to play, they gradually become entranced, even while war rages around them. The alternating parallel tales add an extra spark of energy to this swift-moving novel, as Sa portrays tenderness and brutality with equal clarity.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (October 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400040256
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040254
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #525,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Startling Game, July 30, 2003

By 

K. Drew (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Girl Who Played Go (Hardcover)

This book is a tale told in dream like prose. Life, love, betrayal and death all float by in short lyrical chapters that seem to be recalled from the dreamer's memory.

The story itself, while being compelling, isn't one that you haven't read before. If you have ever watched any old black and white movie from the 1940s, you know the ultimate ending from page one; but that isn't the point, the telling of the tale, like the game of the title, is about construction and the patterns made - life and art. If the universe is contained upon the surface of a Go board, than the scope of human emotions and relations are pretty much all contained within this book. This "small" tale is told within the context of a greater historical event (in this case the Japanese invasion of Manchuria); but like the game itself, the final shape and totality of those cosmic events are only composed of tiny pieces played one at a time at single points and places.

This is one of those books that Hollywood will probably want to make a movie of; and if they do, it most likely will be very successful. However, they will never be able to match the fragile verbiage that make this book so moving and memorable even when telling of violence, carnage and death.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A softly told story of a horrendous time in Chinese history!, March 15, 2004

By 

M. T. Guzman "squeakychu" (Rockville, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Girl Who Played Go (Hardcover)

A 16-year-old Chinese girl living in Manchuria plays the game of Go with a stranger. This stranger, disguised as a Chinese man, is a soldier in the Japanese army doing a bit of spying in the country he is occupying. His duty is to sacrifice his life for his country of Japan. The young girl is in love with Min, friend of Jing, both of whom are part of the Chinese Resistance to the Japanese invasion of China.

This is a novel with spare prose and a very engaging story. It gives an account of the Japanese invasion of China from both country's perspectives in a very human way. The short chapters alternate between the thoughts of a young girl and those of the Japanese stranger who meets her to play the game of Go. Gentle writing moves the story through war-time China with a grace that at times belies the terror of that time. Showing a human connection between two people who, in all rights, should be enemies, is what gives this story its soul. The violence of that time, even though described, never seems to gain the upper hand over the softness of the prose.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love, War and a Game of Go, December 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Girl Who Played Go (Hardcover)

A very original story of two people drawn together through a game of Go, set in the 1930's Manchuria. One is a young rebellious Chinese girl, the other is a contemplative officer in the Japanese occupation army.

Set against a volatile environment ripe for war is the peaceful, if intense, game of Go. The game is played by placing stones on the intersections of the boards, the objective is to beseige the opponent's stones. As the violence between partisans and Japanese army escalate and the threat of large-scale warfare becoming ever more real, their game seems to become more and more abstract, and takes on greater significance. Can such cherished ritual of civilization survive the rising chaos and savagery all around it?

The story is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of the two characters. The writing is delicate and dream-like, at times it seems to float off the page. Yet some of the things described in the book, such as war atrocities, are as brutal and raw as they can get.

Unlike the previous reviewer, I felt the ending was very fitting and effective. It was the logical final step in the two characters' convergent stories, and as inescapable as the very last possible move in a game of Go.