Beautiful Writing, The Girl Who Played Go, a Novel
The Girl Who Played Go, a Novel - by Shan Sa, translated by Adriana Hunter
There are two main characters in the story, a Manchuria girl and a Japanese soldier. The girl lived in Manchuria, and the Japanese soldier was sent to colonize Manchuria before 1931. The back drop of the story was in the era of the Japanese invasion of China in 1931-1937.
They met in the Square of a Thousand Winds, and played Go on a checkerboard which was engraved on a granite table. The girl was an excellent Go player, and the Japanese soldier, who spoke fluent mandarin, was undercover spying on the resistant activities in the public gathering places of the city. In the end the Japanese soldier fell in love with this young Chinese girl, when she was arrested he risked his life to protect her from torture and rape by other Japanese soldiers.
Though the author—Shan Sa was born in 1972, long after the era of War Against Japanese, she described the era with such accuracy. She is a respectable painter and writer.
The book is a well written novel first published in France 2001 and later translated and published in Great Britain in 2003. The author shows her readers a story frame by frame through each chapter like in a movie, which allows her readers to evaluate each of the characters’ inner worlds.
More commentary can be found here, here, here, and from Word Without Borders you can read an excerpt.
