Manga Blogging Part One Million - Hikaru no Go

[recognito]

I meant this to be a single post, but I think it's going to end up being another multiparter chronicling my journey through sports shounen/WSJ series: one post each for Hikaru no Go (1998-2003) and Medalist (2020-ongoing), and a final post exploring the narrative structure of shounen series that incorporates Akane-banashi (2022-ongoing), which I've touched on before in other reviews and has some new developments and fandom responses that I want to explore in more depth.

I love all three of these series for different reasons, and, looking back on them, I feel like they create a nice set way of thinking about sports and sport-ish cultural/game shounen manga within the Weekly Shounen Jump tradition and shounen manga more generally. Keeping in mind that I'm not a manga scholar, just a casual manga enjoyer who regularly subjects himself to manga he does not like in the hopes it will magically transform into something that he'll enjoy… keeping in mind, too, that I love imposing my rigid standards of narrative effectiveness on works… keeping in mind that I am trying to meet these works on their own terms… keeping in mind that I am a genius and an idiot, etc.

Okay, Hikago time.

Like every teenager who grew up in a certain time period, I read chapters 1-80 in Waldenbooks/Barnes and Noble, then read summaries of Sai's disappearance, then read a few random chapters of Isumi's journey to China from shitty .zips downloaded from MegaUpload, then was like, I'm not sure what's going on here and went back to watching 50 episodes of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (live action).

Hikaru no Go is the story of Hikaru Shindo, who finds a haunted go board in his grandfather's attic when he's eleven years old. The go board has the spirit of Fujiwara-no-Sai, known as Sai, a go player who died under ignominious circumstances during the Heian era. Hikaru is not the first living person Sai has revealed himself to. Sai also haunted Shusaku Honinbo during the Edo era, elevating Shusaku's game to legendary status. Sai loves go; he believes that he was brought back in the Edo era and the present day to obtain the Divine Move. Sai insists that Hikaru act as his proxy, playing out the moves that Sai dictates, even though Hikaru has shown no interest until he meets Sai. Naturally, Hikaru soon discovers that he has a knack for go himself.

Hikaru no Go follows the next four odd years of Hikaru's life, from his last year of elementary school to his middle school go club years to his insei (member of a go school that trains people to become pros) years. Hikaru makes pro, then, not long after, loses Sai. The rest of the series covers the first two-ish years of Hikaru's professional go career at the age of fourteen and fifteen, along with following the careers of Isumi, a talented insei who travels to a Chinese go academy to prepare himself to retake the pro exam, and Toya Meijin, Akira's father, who voluntarily resigns from professional go after losing to Sai in a game of internet go and proceeds to have a vibrant and flourishing non-professional life in Korea and China.

The Sai and post-Sai era of the series divides the series between a quasi-supernatural coming of age where Hikaru's guided to his own greatness while developing Sai's go to a more grounded series about Hikaru as a professional go player who has to think about his ranking, the progress of his career, and the way this career separates him from his former classmates, who continue to play in clubs and attend high school. Hikaru is no longer an unexpected child prodigy, lifted out of obscurity to be showered with praise and attention from adults; he has a record, colleagues, and rivals. It gets harder in the second half to break down games and plays for casual viewers, and, I'm going to be real honest here, despite reading this twice, I'm still clueless about go. It's generally agreed that the post-Sai era is the lesser half of the series. I agree with this assessment: the character motivations make less sense as the series goes on, while the go gets harder to evaluate and understand from a total amateur perspective, which leads to some narrative flailing about.

Almost all of Hikaru's go relationships include Sai, and all of Sai's relationships are purely through go and don't involve speaking or physical form. Sai is the ultimate go player in the present day of the series; everyone wants to play him, challenge him, and learn from him, but the only way they can do that has to involve Hikaru. I think Sai being a ghost is an incredibly clever device on multiple fronts. Narratively, it gives Hikaru the ability to be both a beginner and preternaturally talented, giving the reader multiple perspectives on each game of go and speeding up Hikaru's progress without it feeling "too fast." The switch from Hikaru being eleven and really, really annoying to Hikaru being Sai is exciting for the reader and baffling for the characters around him. And of course there's the amazing way the series plays with identity, talent, and individual aspirations: at first, it's fun for Hikaru to trounce people at go and take them by surprise, but soon, Hikaru realizes that he wants to play for himself. The fantasy of the powerless child getting to dominate the world becomes the tale of a young boy realizing that to be worthy of the praise that his advantages win for him, he needs to obtain knowledge and skills on his own.

I've been thinking a while about child prodigies and how, in the real world, it's actually a little uncanny dealing with someone with those types of talents. Like, extreme talent in sports still have to contend with the physical fact of the human body and the advantages that come with age, but dealing with an eight year old who can play Beethoven at a high degree of proficiency or who instantly understands multivariable algebra or whatever exposes what we'd prefer to not see: the ability to create beauty is not distributed equally, and some people can master in their youth what takes decades for others to even attempt. It must also be profoundly alienating to be the prodigy, too, confronting the combined envy and admiration from all quarters.

Akira Toya fulfills this role of a conventional child prodigy in the series. His father holds the prestigious Meijin title in go and is referred to almost exclusively as Toya Meijin until his retirement. Akira plays go with his father daily, has been seen as a go prodigy from a young age, and has a loving family that supports him. He's composed, pleasant, and peerless both among children in his age group and all but the most skilled adult go players. In that respect, Hikaru at eleven, when Sai is still using Hikaru as a proxy to further his own game, is something of a wish fulfillment for Akira: here he is! Someone even better at playing go than Akira—but someone who has been untouched by the fawning and jealousy from others that Akira's had to manage his whole childhood.

Akira's attraction to Hikaru is both for Sai and, I think, real yearning to have someone who can be his partner. By the time Hikaru reaches pro, Akira has, in some ways, moved on. He acknowledges Hikaru's go as real and strong in its own right, going as far as to train one of Hikaru's insei rivals to try to defeat Hikaru, a clever mirroring of how Sai uses Hikaru to play games. The new relationship is objectively "healthier" for Akira and Hikaru, who are now friends, rivals, and colleagues, but one cannot help but yearn for some of the psychodrama of the first half...

Akira and his father, Toya Meijin, are both obsessed with Sai, who, of course, can only be embodied by Hikaru. Let's set aside the psychosexual subtext of this whole situation. One of my favorite stretches of the series happens after Hikaru makes pro. Every newly promoted player gets to play an exhibition match with a high ranked player in their association. Toya Meijin requests Hikaru, to Hikaru and Sai's delight. Although Hikaru wants to play Toya Meijin, he realizes that the Meijin doesn't actually want to play Hikaru: he wants to play Sai. Hikaru allows Sai to play the Meijin, a game that excites and enlivens both Sai and the Meijin, who knows that Hikaru is playing with a handicap. Later, after the Meijin has a heart attack, Hikaru arranges for the Meijin and Sai to play a game of internet go with each other head-on. Toya Meijin says he'll resign from professional go if he loses… and meanwhile, as Toya Meijin and Hikaru are setting up the match, Akira is in the hallway listening and going, "I KNEW Hikaru knew Sai!"

On a reread, I'm really struck by how moved I am by Sai, both by the kind of goofy plot device elements of his character (the Diviiiine Moooove) and by the real human ones: his frustration with his incorporeal existence, his resentment of Hikaru being, well, twelve… and how it brings out an often funny childish side of Sai in turn. Shounen Jump loves to milk a good mentor death scene, and Sai's is as poignant as it gets. After Hikaru arranges a match between Sai and Toya Meijin, Sai realizes that he was not brought back to the present to leisurely play go until he obtained the Divine Move; his return is for the sake of showing the path to others. It's a marvelous stroke of unfairness and mortality in a series with an apparently bulletproof supernatural premise: fate may have brought Sai back to play go again and again, but Sai still can't control when his time is up or if he'll get to finish what he sees as his life and afterlife's work.

The bond between Sai and Hikaru is one of the most plainly realistic relationships between a dying adult and his beloved protege I've seen in manga, period: "You'll regret not playing one more game of go with me when I disappear!" Sai thinks to himself when he realizes his time is nearly up, then regrets it immediately. He knows Hikaru will be saddened by it, and when we see Hikaru searching for Sai, frightened by Sai's disappearance and his regrets for not appreciating Sai's genius, we don't feel vindicated on Sai's behalf or enjoy Hikaru's suffering…. I guess I can't assume that. I don't! I was bummed the fuck out!

I've mentioned before that the character motivations fall off in the second half of Hikago, and I think it's because of the way Sai's absence/presence dominates the rest of the series. Everything comes to revolve around Sai: Hikaru plays go to feel connected to Sai, he's motivated to play in the under-18 Japan, China, and Korea tournament because a mistranslation made it sound like a Korean player was dissing Sai, and the adult players are still thinking about Sai and/or the Divine Move, too. Compared to the more intricate web of personal and social motivations of Hikaru's quest for professional status, it falls flat. The problem of being alive is that eventually, even if you obtain the Divine Move, right, you still have the whole rest of your life to attend to. After all, Sai loves playing go, but he didn't commit suicide in the past just because he couldn't play anymore: he despaired because his reputation had been smeared and he was banished from the court and to the countryside, branded as a cheater and a dishonorable man.

The final chapters of the series has Hikaru state his reason for playing go out loud after losing in the under-18 international cup: he plays to connect the far past with the far future. This is a nice suggestion, but I don't think that's Hikaru's real purpose: it's the purpose of Hikaru no Go, which argues that go is part of the Japanese cultural legacy, and that there's real value in learning and continuing these traditions. Hikaru, age fifteen, may play go to feel connected to Sai, but it's almost too pure, you know? Like, it's the discovery you arrive at ten years later, when you're playing go to make rent and so you can scrape up enough money to fly to a tournament in Thailand or something. You can feel the series struggling against the WSJ constraints as Hikaru's friends go onto high school while he goes on to play more matches, never really growing more complex motivations besides doing well as a pro.

I don't think having characters obsessed with the Divine Move is a bad move, but I do think the series misunderstands what's obvious about the Divine Move: it's more like a runner's high or a state of mind than an actual technique. Whenever people feel like they're approaching the Divine Move, it's always in the context of a supremely challenging match. Sai and Toya Meijin are fated for one another in the same way that Hikaru and Akira Toya are for each other. True love is approaching the summit of your profession with someone, over and over again.

Okay, time for some bullet points.

• Hikago famously shares an illustrator with Death Note. Ogata really does have some Light vibes…
• The fashion of this series is impeccable. Great clothes and fits.
• HIKARU REALLY IS SO SO SO ANNOYING in the early chapters… but it's fine. because he's eleven.
• One of the most exciting narrative integrations of real world technology in a supernatural premise comes from Sai getting to play internet go, allowing him to play against people without having to use Hikaru's face. The emergence of Sai in the world of internet go attracts international attention and becomes a set piece of its own: people try to suss out Sai's location, and there's even a sequence where Hikaru's friends almost catch Hikaru logged in as Sai. There's no question that the internet go player, Sai, is a human person, which feels like an unusual quality in a work today. Looking at the dates, Hikago takes place more than a decade before AlphaGo, and the use of the internet cafe and the anonymous-but-populated-by-humans quality of the internet make it almost impossible to imagine Hikago taking place in any other time besides the late 90s/early 00s.
• The latter half of the series introduces more Korean and Chinese characters to bring the manga closer to the actual go scene at the turn of the century—and also brings in an uneasy note of nationalism that's hard to completely set aside. Does the future of go lie outside of Japan? Does Japan have a legitimate claim to the soul of this sport? Nationalism in most Shounen Jump series is often taken for granted, but it bubbles up to the surface here. Also, lmao, one cannot help but go, "what on earth" with the squinty eyes for some of the Chinese and Korean characters.
• The misogyny of Shounen Jump is present even here, both in Hikaru's treatment of his childhood friend and in just like... the absence of women, generally. I am Gritting My Teeth through it
• The Viz online reader includes the extras from the collected volumes, which include some funny bits of Yumi Hotta lamenting how Obata sometimes translates her rough sketches or character designs very literally. Sorry, Hotta!!
• Sensei's Library (https://senseis.xmp.net/), a website devoted to go, is still up and actively being updated, and still has its super charming 00s design. Strong recommend to click through!!