Shan Sa - The Girl Who Played Go

Hayashi takes me over to the nearby temple, while two soldiers carry the girl and throw her to the ground. They shut the door, giggling to each other.

She is shaking from head to toe. I take off my tunic to cover her bare legs.

“Don’t be frightened,” I say in Chinese.

My voice seems to disturb her, she opens her eyes wide and scrutinizes me. A terrible agony floods across her features and suddenly she spits in my face before falling back to the ground in tears.

“Kill me! Kill me!”

Hayashi knocks on the door and I can hear him sniggering.

“Hurry up, Lieutenant. My soldiers can’t wait much longer!”

I hold my Chinese girl in my arms. She bites my shoulder and, despite the pain, I hold my cheek next to hers. Tears spill from my eyes and I whisper, “Forgive me, forgive me…”

Her only reply is to scream hysterically, “Kill me, please, I beg you. Kill me, don’t let me live!”

“Lieutenant,” Hayashi calls from the other side of the door, “you’re taking your time. Hurry up. Don’t be so selfish!”

I grab my pistol and I hold it to the Chinese girl’s temple. She looks up at me and there is no longer any fear in her eyes. I see the indifference she had always accorded to strangers.

I shudder and press my weapon a little more firmly.

“Do you recognize me?”

She closes her eyes.

“I know that you hate me, I know you can’t forgive me. At this moment, I couldn’t care less. I’m going to kill you and then myself afterwards. For your sake I’m going to turn my back on this war and betray my own country. For your sake I will shame my own parents, I will sully my ancestors’ honor. My name will be uttered only as a curse, never to be inscribed in the Temple of Heroes.”

I cover her in kisses and now I feel tears on her cheeks. And she lets me kiss her.

The ground trembles as the men drum it with their rifle butts.

“Lieutenant? I’m going to count to three! One…”

There is no time to ask her why she left her country, why she cut her beautiful hair. I have a thousand questions for her but I’ll never learn the answer to a single one of them.

“Two…”

“Don’t worry,” I whisper in her ear, “I’ll follow you. I’ll care for you in the afterlife.”

She opens her eyes and stares at me:

“My name is Song of the Night.”

But I have already pulled the trigger. Her dark eyes quiver, her pupils dilate, the blood spurts from her temples. With her eyes still wide open, she falls backwards to the ground.

The door opens and I can hear footsteps behind me. I realize with despair that I don’t even have time to cut open my entrails as would befit a samurai.

I put the blood-splattered pistol into my mouth.

A loud noise, the ground trembling beneath my feet.

I fall onto the girl who played go. Her face looks pinker than it did earlier. She is smiling.

I try very hard to keep my eyes open so that I can look at my beloved.

Shan Sa was born in Beijing, China, to a scholarly family. Her real name is Yan Ni Ni; she adopted the pseudonym Shan Sa, taken from a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. At age 8, she published her first poetry collection, and went on to obtain the first prize in the national poetry contest for children under 12 years, an event that created a public upheaval. After graduating from secondary school in Beijing, she moved to Paris in August 1990 thanks to a grant by the French government. Settling there with her father, a professor at the Sorbonne University, she quickly adopted the French language. In 1994, she finished her studies of philosophy. From 1994 to 1996 she worked as a secretary of painter Balthus. Thereafter she published her first two novels and a collection of poetry, meeting with great critical acclaim. In 2001 she reached the top of her success with the publication of her most famous book so far, "The Girl Who Played Go" (a.k.a La Joueuse de Go). The book received good feedback from readers and was awarded a number of prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (Prix Goncourt of the High-school students).

[1] My family is waiting for me in the living room, sitting on their heels and observing a ceremonial silence. First of all, I say good-bye to my mother, as I used to when I left for school. I kneel before her and say, “Okasama, [1] I am leaving.” She bows deeply in return. I pull on the sliding door and step out into the garden. Without a word, Mother, Little Brother and Little Sister follow me out. I turn and bow down to the ground. Mother is crying and I hear the dark fabric of her kimono rustling as she bows in turn. I start to run. Losing her composure, she launches herself after me in the snow. I stop. So does she. Afraid that I might throw myself into her arms, she takes one step back. “ Manchuria is a sister country,” she cries. “But there are terrorists trying to sour the good relations between our two emperors. It is your duty to guard this uneasy peace. If you have to choose between death and cowardice, don’t hesitate: choose death!” We embark amid tumultuous fanfares. Soldiers’ families jostle with each other on the quay, throwing ribbons and flowers, and shouts of farewell are salted with tears. The shore draws farther and farther away and with it the bustle of the port. The horizon opens wide, and we are swallowed up in its vastness. We land at Pusan in Korea, where we are packed into a train heading north. Towards dusk on the third day the convoy comes to a halt, and we leap gleefully to the ground to stretch our legs and empty our bladders. I whistle as I relieve myself, watching birds wheeling in the sky overhead. Suddenly I hear a stifled cry and I can see men running away into the woods. Tadayuki, fresh from the military academy, is lying stretched out on the ground ten paces from me. The blood springs from his neck in a continuous stream, but his eyes are still open. Back on the train I cannot stop thinking about his young face twisted into a rictus of astonishment. Astonishment. Is that all there is to dying? The train arrives at a Manchurian station in the middle of the night. The frost-covered ground twinkles under the streetlamps, and in the distance dogs are howling. “Mother,” in respectful Japanese.

[2] Ten years later Lu was considered an exceptional player, so famous for his talents that the Emperor of independent Manchuria [2] received him at his court in the new capital. † He never thanked me for propelling him to this glory: I am his shadow, his secret, his best opponent. At twenty, Lu is already an old man, and the hair that falls over his brow is white. He walks with his back hunched over and his hands crossed, taking small steps. A few pubescent hairs have appeared on his chin, a baby-beard on a centenarian. A week ago I received a letter from him. “I am coming for you, my little cousin. I have decided to talk to you about our future…” The rest of the letter is an illegible confession: my painfully discreet cousin must have dipped his pen in very weak ink because his cursive ideograms are strung out between the watermarks like white storks flying in the mist. Endless and indecipherable, his letter written on a long sheet of rice paper undid me. Pu-Yi, the last Emperor of China. He abdicated when the Chinese Republic was created in 1912. In 1932, with Japanese help, he fled from Tian Jing, where he had been living under guard. In order to legalize their occupation of northern China since September 18, 1931, the Japanese then put him on the throne of Manchuria and proclaimed its independence in March 1932. †Xin Jing, the capital of independent Manchuria, which is now the town of Chang Chun.