SOURCE: A review of The Master of Go, in The New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1972, pp. 4, 24.

In the following review, Friedman asserts that Kawabata's "The Master of Go may not be a novel, but it is a journalism recollected in tranquility."

The Chess Match of the Century is over. Bobby Fischer's chair and Boris Spassky's pride have been pulled to pieces and reassembled. But what if The Times, say, had presumed upon Vladimir Nabokov's well-known passion for chess and had managed to persuade our most illustrious novelist to travel to Reykjavik to cover the match? And what if Nabokov had then given us a book, not only analyzing chess strategies, but dissecting with all the tender mercy of his art the two players themselves, together with their families, friends, managers, judges, lesser chess masters and lesser reporters, while everywhere viewing the event as a scene in the...