Edo Igo Quest #2

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It is the second day of the Kyowa era, and it is also Mutsuki, the Month of Affection, the heart of winter, when snow falls onto the mountains and street stalls sell hot sake, and the orchard trees stand leafless, but also when the nights start getting shorter and the world begins to warm again. Your name is Komachi Hiroko, ou're sitting in a bookshop in Kyoto, the capital of Nippon, under the quilt of a hori-gotatsu warming your legs, any you're considering several guides to the ancient game of igo.

You flip through the first of the books, the Fundamental Guide to Igo to Chapter 5, which claims to help you "achieve competence in the endgame". There are no tangential illustrations as there were on the cover; instead, there are diagrams of endgame positions, showing a section of the board. These diagrams are followed by commentary discussing optimal strategies to gain the most points from each position, itself only a sub-position of the total board. There are about twenty-five page-sides of material in this chapter.

You put down the book and look at the other two which have been brought to you, and decide to examine Records of the Castle Games of the Tenmei Period, a leather book, its cover bearing a simplified drawing of a Nipponese castle. Skipping its pages, it seems to consist of whole-board diagrams and unfanciful game analysis interspersed with partial-board diagrams showing hypothetical variations on a game's position following a different possible move discussed by the author.

The third and last book on the hori-gotatsu's table platform is Four-Stone Games - Japanese Translation, another leather book, its covering sweat-stained as if it had been much read. An introduction on the first page gives credit for the content to 過百齡, a Chinese master, and explains the book's focus as being games in which one player recieves four extra stones at the start of the game to compensate for weakness, real or nominal. His name's pronunciation in Chinese is _probably_ ' Guo Bailing '. Inside the book are many diagrams with analysis, each point on the board being referred to by a single unique Chinese character from a poem. On the inside cover of the book is a comment from the author, reading: 「It is the author's intention to elucidate the countless variations and let people realize that they all follow the basic principles.」

All this reading in the warmth of the hori-gotatsu is making you feel sleepy, but you expect it would be rude to nap in the middle of someone's shop.

>Buy a book
>Leave without buying a book
>Chat to the shopkeeper, a girl who plays the flute