Go - Utter Foreignness

A quote from Master of Go, written by a winner of the Nobel prize for literature, Yasunari Kawabata.

He (Kawabata) is playing a game of Go with a foreigner he met on a train.

Quite aside from matters of skill, I sensed no response, no resistance. There was no muscular tone in his play. One always found a competitive urge in a Japanese, however inept he might be at the game. One never encountered a stance as uncertain as this. The spirit of Go was missing. I thought it all very strange, and I was conscious of being confronted with utter foreignness.