The Master of Misinterpretation

Freeberg uses the example of the Kawabata novel the Master of Go to support his thesis that many realities can exists at once in a technological world and that's fine. Personally, I think he misinterpreted the novel for his own purposes, which illustrates the failings of New Criticism (that was a random tangent). Sure, I could take five passages from Huck Finn and say, "Mark Twain was a socialist. Everyone should be a socialist," which is exactly what Freeberg does to Kawabata. As many post-war Japanese authors, he was lamenting the change to his society brought about by technology not subconsciously writing in support of technology diluting culture. Diluting his culture is exactly what Kawabata is writing about and I think that's evident in his other writings such as The Boat Women. The Go match between Shusai and Otake was less about the old vs. new master and more about the loss of art and the destruction of it by a calculating (or possibly naive) move on the part of Otake. The master quits the game because he knows that the beauty and art it embodied is lost and so there is no sense in playing anymore. While, the narrator shows some feeling for Otake, as one who writes, it seems as only a device for characterization. Even then, Otake only gets understanding from the author as a person, as one who exists as aperson outside of technology. He doesn't mean to give understanding to the cause of a varying reality.
The other point brought up by Freeberg comes as a result of the game Kawabata plays with an American, who has a whole different style of play. He says that Japan stole the game from the Chinese and has since evolved the game. However, let us not have such a superficial reading of Japanese history as Freeberg does (I am in fact calming down from Freeberg's slight to all of Japan). Japan "stole" not just just games such as go but also cultural elements of China including many sects of Buddhism, their writng system, and even Kyoto's layout modeled on that of Chang An. The Japanese did take elements of China but they also took the context; if you write in China and in Japan the Kanji still mean the same thing (not the Hiragana or the Katakana, which are of Japanese creation), if you are in Kyoto or Chang An you can see that both formed the same purpose as capital, and if you played Go in either Japan or China, the game was still an art that held respect. The master formed rules for the operation of the game not as a scientist but as an artist. Thus, Freeberg has managed to misinterpret a great allegorical novel and manages to make himself symbolic of what he talks about. Freeberg has become representative of one who lives in a contxtless without any regard for meaning or history just as Otake.