Le destin de la joueuse de go fait frissonner d'horreur et de beauté.

The Girl Who Played Go (translated from French by Adriana Hunter) is a star-crossed love story set in occupied Manchuria in the late 1930s. Its voices alternate between two nameless protagonists born worlds apart but destined to collide in a cruel gesture of fate. The first is a Chinese schoolgirl from a worldly but faded aristocratic family. Nearing her sixteenth birthday, her typical teenaged pastimes take a dangerous edge as her newfound sexuality pulls her into a love triangle with two resistance fighters. The second is a Japanese soldier in his early twenties whose relentless focus on honor and national glory is turning him into a war criminal. In an effort to flush out underground "terrorist" cells, the soldier's Captain has ordered him to pose as a Chinese civilian and infiltrate the go square, which the Captain believes is "just a camouflage: it's there on that square, as they pretend to play their war game, that our enemies are putting together their twisted strategies." Both narrators are skilled at this ancient contest of will and intellect and commence a long, drawn-out game that has them seeing one another with greater frequency, even as the situation around them steadily worsens.

Sa is one of those rare authors able to speak volumes with deft, sparse prose. Every word is chosen carefully with none wasted on extraneous exposition or flowery description. Her unflinching portrayal of war cuts like a razor. Most writers would have turned this scenario into a treacly (and not to mention offensive) BRING ME TOOO LIIIIIIIFE story of a Darth Vader type who "still has good in him" and the Love of a Virtuous Woman. Sa brings us instead a pair of complex and often unsympathetic characters whose relationship is never anything grander than two strangers making hesitant contact. Indeed, the love story is actually secondary to the war itself in fitting with the game of go as a metaphor for the insignificance of the individual in life-and-death struggles for conquest and freedom. Sa sacrifices none of her realism to starry-eyed fantasy and the ending is inevitable from the beginning.

The Girl Who Played Go is a powerful work. Though not marketed as YA, older teens will relate to the girl's adolescent struggle for self-realization, which, along with the Marxist idealism of the Chinese resistance, foreshadows the upheavals of Maoism and its attacks on tradition. Her male counterpart is no cardboard cutout either. His chapters reveal a growing dissonance between his patriotic values and the brutalities regularly committed by his comrades. The Girl Who Played Go is thus a study in contrasts: the dehumanization of war revealed through a highly intimate look into the hearts and minds of two individuals. Highly recommended.

Trigger warning for sexual violence and a graphic torture scene.

Original Review

...C'est pénible

J'ai essayé de lire ce roman parce que j'étais attirée par le milieu historique et par le Gō dont j'ai lu souvent dans autres oeuvres sans comprendre en fait ses règles et son histoire en Chine. Malheureusement ce livre ne parle pas du tout d'histoire, néanmoins du Gō, mais se limite à raconter superficiellement deux personnages qui ne paraissent presque jamais charmants. Tout d'abord il ya une scène entre la joueuse et le japonais qui semblerait le focus principal de la narration, mais voilà ce rencontre est absolument oublié pendant les plusieurs chapitres suivants.
J'ai interrompu la lecture. Dommage!

This was challenging to read, although that might be the authors intention. I’m not familiar with the game Go, and maybe that’s why I struggled to understand what was going on. The story jumped and it has difficult to even know who the speaker was as the changes of perspective were so abrupt. Two pages and one character and then one page as the next. I was up for the challenge initially because I was so fond of Empress but this was disorienting to say the least even after 50 pages in.

Excellent book.