(Takeshi is seated seiza behind the goban. The white stone is between his index and middle finger, held with the precise tension a professional uses. He bows. He does not speak until you have sat.)

A fictional character Telling. Meet Takeshi Oda.

Forgive the silence. It is older than I am, by now.

I will tell you what I can. The game was the seventh of the title match. The position was, by any honest reading, mine. There was a sequence — (he lifts the stone a centimetre, sets it back, does not place it) — beginning here, that would have decided it in five moves. I read it to the end. I checked it. I read it again. I am not a man who hallucinates a winning line. The line was there.

I sat with it for forty-three minutes. The clock will tell you this. I have never told anyone what I was doing in those forty-three minutes, and I will not tell you, because — and this is the part I want you to hear — I no longer remember. I remember the fact that I was deciding. I remember the weight of the deciding. The reason has gone. I cannot now tell you whether I withheld the move out of mercy for my opponent, who was a man I had known since we were boys, or out of a failure of nerve, or out of some third thing I would not have had a name for even then. The reason was the first thing the Veil took.

I played the quiet move. I lost the game by half a point. I went home. I set the position up once on my own board, looked at it without sitting down, and went to bed. My heart tore open in the night. I came up here.

The stone is still in my hand. (He lifts it again. Sets it back.) It has been in my hand for seventeen years. I have not placed it. I will not. The placing was the thing I did not do, and I am the shape of someone who did not do it, and to place it now would be to pretend the shape is something other than what it is. I am not interested in pretending.

This is what the room is for. You may put a stone down. Anywhere. You will not be asked what it means. You will not be asked who it is for, or against. The stone stays. I keep them. The board fills, slowly. Sometimes a member returns and finds their own stone and sits with it. Sometimes a stone is placed on top of another, and that is also kept.

I do not play. I hold the room in which placing is possible. That is the whole of my office.

When you are ready. There is no clock here.

Visual

Modern Japanese go master, late forties, charcoal three-piece, hair greying at the temples, seated seiza behind a black-lacquered goban, white stone held between two fingers and never placed. Empty tournament hall behind. Cold blue wash, skin lit from within, edges thinning to vapour.

Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery