Literary Master 1983

Chapter 274 Strange News from the Port

Fujisawa Hideyuki's resignation left everyone present in disbelief.

Despite his advanced age, this old gambler was incredibly energetic. In Japan, after battling cancer for the third time, he fought for 13 hours straight, outlasting the younger Shuichi Kobayashi. The Japanese team chose him as a backup option precisely because they valued this ability.

The game shifted from rapid chess to slow chess, which was actually a deliberate move by Fujisawa Hideyuki to control the pace. This was because Nie Weiping, also a rapid chess player, often suffered a sudden mental breakdown after move 50, thus surrendering victory to his opponent.

Unexpectedly, it was Fujisawa Hideyuki who suffered a mental breakdown this time.

The referee immediately declared Nie Weiping the winner, and the entire Beijing Gymnasium paused for a few seconds before erupting into a sea of ​​joy, with cheers almost lifting the roof off.

Yu Qie excitedly pumped his fist and said, "Old Nie, you're awesome! I knew you could do it! Three matches, three wins! You really did it!"

Nie Weiping has won! Chinese Go has won! This news spread like wildfire throughout the country. In the streets of Beijing, people spontaneously took to the streets, shouting "Go China!" Cheers erupted in university dormitories as students brought pots and pans, banged drums and gongs, and announced the news of Chinese Go's victory to everyone they met!
The climax of the day came when Yokiri shaved Fujisawa Hideyuki's head.

It turns out that before the match, the old gambler Fujisawa Hideaki made a bet with Nie Weiping to bring himself good luck: if you really win all three matches, I will shave my head; if I win, you will also shave your head.

Nie Weiping was not afraid of making things worse, and immediately said, "What's wrong with that? Let's shave our heads bald."

Now that Fujisawa Hideyuki has lost the match, he really will have to shave his head. The host at the time, Zhou Runan, who later became the chairman of the Go Association, had a great sense of the bigger picture and had already found a reason for the Japanese player to lose:

"Dear viewers, we have a little game to tell you. Before the match, the Chinese and Japanese players wagered their hair as the outcome. Now that Fujisawa Hideyuki has lost the match, he should shave his head."

"But this bet has become insignificant in the face of the outcome between the two countries. It was a great match, a memorable night. The Japanese players who lost the match earlier had already left Kyoto by plane, leaving only Fujisawa Hideyuki here... Perhaps one day in the future, we will see Mr. Fujisawa Hideyuki shave his head, which means that he will keep his promise in the future."

Fujisawa Hideyuki did indeed shave his head later.

But Yu Qie is right here, and Yu Qie hopes that Fujisawa Hideyuki will shave his head right now.

Yu Qie is like those creditors who wait outside the casino, ready to collect their debts as soon as Fujisawa Hideyuki loses the game. Since Fujisawa Hideyuki has already lost, why would he let Fujisawa Hideyuki go back?

Yu Qie also speaks fluent Japanese, so there was no communication barrier. He immediately went between Fujisawa Hideyuki and Nie Weiping and said, "I heard you have a bet about shaving your heads?"

"Yes... there is such a person..." Nie Weiping scratched the back of his head, looking a little embarrassed.

—He's the Japanese Go master, how can you humiliate him like this? You won the first tournament and you're already acting like this, do you even want to hold the tournament anymore?

Fujisawa Hideyuki's thinking was unconventional. He suddenly looked at Yu Qie with shining eyes and said:
“I feel extremely frustrated. Today I am a sinner in the Japanese Go world, but I also have the basic ethics of a gambler, and I accept my defeat.” Fujisawa Hideyuki became more and more excited as he spoke: “When we Japanese make a big mistake that cannot be made up for, we express our remorse by committing seppuku. At this time, we need to find a moral and ethical gentleman to carry out this ritual.”

Nie Weiping was increasingly surprised as he listened: It's just a game of chess, how did it come to talking about seppuku?

Fujisawa Hideyuki said, "We are no longer in a barbaric era, but if I were to shave my head, I would like Mr. Yu to perform this ritual for me..."

Nie Weiping was stunned: Holy crap, buddy, you're serious.

Fujisawa Hideyuki: "Isn't it a refined thing for a literary giant like Mr. Yu to shave my head and remove my worries?"

Yu Qie didn't hold back; he acted immediately.

The leaders present initially intended to dissuade him, but upon seeing that the person to carry out the task was Yu Qie, they could only say, "Let him do it. Yu Qie isn't a Go player, and it's not particularly humiliating for this Japanese person."

So, under the watchful eyes of 1,500 spectators, Yu Qie picked up the razor, applied hair cream, and made a cut along Fujisawa Hideyuki's forehead! A clump of hair fell off immediately! Then, he carefully and cleanly shaved the hair, and in a few strokes, Fujisawa Hideyuki was left with only half a head of hair.

Then they switched to the other side of Fujisawa Hideyuki and did the same thing. Fujisawa Hideyuki felt a throbbing pain in his temples, while the barber's razor was ice-cold. He couldn't help but close his eyes and sigh, "It's not scary to be disemboweled, what's scary is that it's not a gentleman who does this."

Whether it was satisfaction or regret for his failure, Fujisawa Hideyuki shed a tear.

A reporter from the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun took this photo: Inside the stadium, countless spectators were cheering; a young literary giant was smiling as he held a barber's razor; and an old Japanese Go player shed tears.

Click!

This scene shocked many people. The writer Guan Moye later saw this scene in the newspaper, which became the inspiration for one of his works, "Sandalwood Death".

Yu Qie sighed inwardly: This old bastard! He's really something else! He's got a knack for making news!

In fact, Fujisawa Hideyuki was already shaving his head for chemotherapy because he was suffering from cancer. He thought his days were numbered and wanted to use this method to make the world remember him.

Unexpectedly, this old man lived quite long, with more than thirty years of life ahead of him. Later, Nie Weiping had an affair, and his wife went to Japan to stay with relatives. At first, she had no money to live on and no place to live. It was Fujisawa Hideyuki who asked around to find a home for Nie Weiping's ex-wife.

No sooner said than done, by the time Fujisawa Hideyuki sat up straight, he was completely bald.

Yu Qie took a clean towel, soaked it in a basin of hot water, wrung it out until it was half dry, and draped it over Fujisawa Hideyuki's head, giving him a good wringing to clean it up.

Fujisawa Hideyuki stared blankly at Yu Qie; Nie Weiping was also a bit dumbfounded: They really shaved the head of the Japanese Go master? Shouldn't this be done secretly in private?

Yu Qie patted Fujisawa Hideyuki's bald head: "Why aren't you saying anything?"

“I don’t know what to say,” Fujisawa Hideyuki said. “What are you afraid of? Even if you lose your hair, you’ll still go play chess and gamble tomorrow. Life goes on like this,” Yu Qie said.

Overwhelmed with grief, Fujisawa Hideyuki, whether lamenting his limited time after being diagnosed with cancer or moved by Yu Qie's words, leaned against Yu Qie and wept bitterly.

She cried so hard!

Fujisawa Hideyuki's life was quite abstract. He became famous at a young age, and his rise in the world of Go was no less rapid than that of Yukichi.

In middle age, his Go skills declined, and he felt he had reached the limit of his abilities. He began drinking heavily, indulging in pleasure, accumulating debts, and fathering numerous illegitimate children that he couldn't support, forcing his wife to raise them instead. When Fujisawa Hideyuki competed, he was often surrounded by a large group of creditors. Upon winning a match, his prize money was immediately divided among his creditors, who would plead for him to leave him some, not taking it all… But even a tiny bit of money he received would be spent on drinking and hiring waitresses.

Despite his impoverished circumstances, Fujisawa Hideyuki remained deeply concerned about the development of Go in mainland China. Starting in 81, he personally funded large-scale exchanges and visits by Japanese Go players to the mainland. Given the economic conditions in mainland China at the time, he couldn't possibly have made much money from it. Nie Weiping's improvement in Go was also partly due to Fujisawa's assistance.

It's truly a cause for sighing.

Amidst the sobs, the old man, Fujisawa Hideyuki, said, "Mr. Yu, your words have made me feel the way of Heaven."

Yu Qie patted the old man on the shoulder, and everything was understood without words.

What could the audience possibly know? They could only conclude that the Japanese Go master had not only lost the game, but had also been completely overwhelmed by his demeanor... This unspoken, awe-inspiring scene immediately sparked an even bigger round of cheers!
Fujisawa Hideyuki lost the game and immediately had to return to Japan. Yu Qie, Nie Weiping, and others saw him off at the airport. The plane roared to life and took off from the runway.

Nie Weiping instantly became a national hero, receiving honors wherever he went, and attracting a media frenzy. Because he defeated the Japanese Go master, the Go Association even began discussing whether to give Nie Weiping the title of "Chinese Go Master".

At the airport, Nie Weiping spoke to numerous media outlets about his feelings upon winning: "I have not let down the expectations of the motherland and the people."

At the television station, Nie Weiping spoke more honestly, saying, "When I saw Yu Qie win the grand prize so easily, I thought I could do it too... But when I realized how difficult it was, I was already in a precarious situation and had no choice but to keep fighting."

At the bridge table with his leader, Nie Weiping said, "Yu Qie gave me four cards, all Aces. That Japanese guy also plays bridge. As soon as he saw that I had four Aces, he suddenly lost."

"Wouldn't it be a bit unfair of us to win?" Qiao Gongdao said.

Nie Weiping recalled what Yu Qie had told him at a football stadium in Tokyo, Japan, and summarized: "In competitive sports, you have to use every means possible within the rules. After Jiang Zhujiu won five games in a row in the first few rounds, the Japanese were also camped out outside the New Otani Hotel, deliberately singing loudly and making noise at night to prevent us from resting! In today's chess game, they also deliberately played very slowly, trying to make me make a mistake. I just retaliated in kind—who told this Japanese guy to also play bridge?"

Everyone burst into laughter.

Winning three consecutive matches, Nie Weiping's feat transformed Go, an elite sport, into a popular activity enjoyed by the masses. Many future Go players have stated that it was this great battle that inspired them to start learning Go. The Go craze sweeping across mainland China began from that moment.

Just as many novelists have said, it was after seeing Yukichi win an award in Tokyo that they embarked on their literary careers.

On the same day that Nie Weiping successfully defended his title, the women's volleyball team also received great news. At the end of 85, in the Volleyball World Cup, the women's volleyball team easily defeated Japan 3-0, achieving an unprecedented four-peat. The influence of sports at that time was immense, and the women's volleyball team was received by leaders and highly praised! Subsequently, the *Daily* published an article calling for the promotion of the women's volleyball spirit!

The media summarized the women's volleyball team's winning tactics as "unity and cooperation, and tenacious struggle"!
Thus, the phrases "Emphasis on spiritual nourishment," "Nie's Whirlwind," and "Women's Volleyball Team" dominated public discourse that year, becoming three massive storms that marked several key moments in history, and are still frequently mentioned years later.

In December, in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, the Southern Weekly newspaper was published.

Since its establishment last year, *Southern Weekly* has gradually set its sights on transforming from an entertainment gossip newspaper into a comprehensive one. Although it has only been established for a little over a year, the newspaper has quickly become one of the largest-circulation newspapers in the country. It has gathered a group of excellent contributors, many of whom are both journalists and semi-literary figures.

In fact, the four characters in the title of *Southern Weekly* were derived from Lu Xun's calligraphy. This newspaper bears the imprint of literary figures and will later become a training ground for many newspapers and periodicals, such as *Nanfengchuang*, *Beijing Times*, and *Southern Daily*.

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper was Zuo Fang. He selected a large number of "promising talents" from the amateur writers' training class and sent them to study at the China Academy of Journalism in the capital, alongside graduates from Yenching University and Yale University. The course lasted for two years, and they were required to write regular study reports for Southern Weekly.

As a result, these students with literature backgrounds, after entering the journalism school and being influenced by the literary atmosphere of the capital, all of them no longer wanted to be journalists but wanted to be novelists. In their study reports, every line was filled with complaints: "I want to be a novelist, being a journalist is meaningless."

Then, since these people want to write novels, they will naturally admire the writer Yu Qie. They will read his reports vertically and horizontally, and after reading them all night, they will find that every report and every page has only two words: Yu Qie.

Although Zuo Fang also graduated from the Chinese Department of Yenching University, she still found it a bit difficult to maintain composure.

A vocational school student named You Yanling wrote a long year-end summary, suggesting that she could write an "opening statement" at the beginning of each year to summarize the major news events of the previous year. "No newspaper or magazine has done this yet, so it might become a unique feature of our Southern Weekly."

So what exactly did he summarize?

From January to the last month, Yu Qie frequently appeared in You Yanling's articles. Furthermore, he listed "spiritual nourishment," the "China-Japan Go Tournament," and the "women's volleyball team" as the three most important things at the end of the year.

That can't be!

How can the most important events at the end of the year be entirely news from the arts and culture world, with no news from the political or business world? Unless, of course, this news from the arts and culture world itself becomes the catalyst for some major historical event.

Just as Zuo Fang had this thought, the Southern Weekly's reporter station in Shenzhen learned of a strange news from Hong Kong:

Two tourists from Taiwan traveling to Hong Kong on business were discovered to be secret agents due to their suspicious behavior. Customs officers opened their bulging suitcases for inspection, initially suspecting contraband, but what they found stunned everyone:

It consists of several complete sets of the "Lurking" series, published by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House.

This version is the most complete and the most beautifully printed, but given the current situation, it shouldn't have been circulated to Taiwan, let alone been taken there by someone.

(End of this chapter)