Luminous, suspenseful and serene, The Master of Go is a compelling portrait, quietly devastating of two men - and a whole society - facing defeat.

Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, the strategy game Go is an expression of the Japanese spirit. But when a revered Master is challenged by a younger, more modern upcomer, their match, waged over several months and layered in ceremony, pits imperial Japan against the twentieth century.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of Japan's most distinguished novelists. Born in Osaka in 1899, he published his first stories while he was still in high school. Among his major novels published across the world are Snow Country (1956), Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). Kawabata was found dead, by his own hand, in 1972.

Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each other's black or white stones. Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, it is an essential expression of the Japanese sensibility. And in his fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and invincible Master and a younger, more progressive challenger, Yasunari Kawabata captured the moment in which the immutable traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the twentieth century.

The competition between the Master of Go and his opponent, Otaké, is waged over several months and layered in ceremony. But beneath the game's decorum lie tensions that consume not only the players themselves but their families and friends - tensions that turn this particular contest into a duel that can only end in one man's death. Luminous in its detail, both suspenseful and serene, The Master of Go is an elegy for an entire society, written with the poetic economy and psychological acumen that brought Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature.