Introduction: Games as Rational Systems In 1938, the great Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata witnessed a turning point in the history of the game of Go. Kawabata was then a young reporter covering the championship Go match sponsored by his newspaper. Honnimbo Shusai, the Invincible Master, who had reigned over the world of Go for a generation, was pitted against a young challenger. So popular was Go that Kawabata's newspaper could offer the players substantial sums for participating and pay all the expenses of the match. These were considerable as the match lasted many months. Kawabata felt he had witnessed the end of an era at that Go match in 1938. Many years later he brought out his old newspaper articles, added new fictional material, and published a novel called The Master of Go (Meijin). This novel is an elegy for the world the Japanese lost as they modernized. Kawabata's rather sentimental traditionalism is not so simple as it appears at first; nostalgia is a moment in the structure of modern consciousness, and afortiori, novelistic form. This is why his story has much to tell us about the nature and possibilities of modern society. It may seem strange that Kawabata's most sustained investigation of modernity should be the story of a board game, but in fact games exemplify formally rational systems. Like markets, law, scientific and technical research, games break loose from the continuum of social life to impose a rational order on a sector of experience. Modern institutions too are characterized by explicit rules, unambiguous measures, defined times and places of action, equalization of participants' positions. Their game-like structure, with its predictable procedures, absence of predetermined content, and simple principles of equity are all contrasted favorably in modernizing ideology to irrational, dogmatic and biased traditions. We will see how Kawabata, through his narrative of the great Go match, turns the argument around and develops an implicit critique of the particularity and bias of formal rationality. He accomplishes this by the peculiar literary technique of unfolding layer after layer of meaning in the moves of the game. The apparently neutral forms of play turn out to be loaded with social, cultural and historical content. The Go match can stand for the whole range of modern institutions invading Japan, each of which delivers far more in the way of social change than appears on the surface. In the concluding portion of this essay, I attempt to enlarge the scope of these reflections in two directions. I will first compare Kawabata's literary technique with Lukacs' early theory of the novel. Using different means derived from his own culture, Kawabata achieved a form based on the same sort of layering and double meaning Lukacs' analyzes in terms of the category of irony. It is this form which enables Kawabata to carry through his critique of Western modernity. Secondly, I will discuss the larger implications of Kawabata's novel for the question of modernity. Japan's cultural specificity is often mentioned as a factor in its rise to industrial power. Kawabata's novel suggests a new way of thinking about why this might be so.