ReviewKorean in Japan’s bestselling tale of prejudice and star-crossed lovers

Go
by Kazuki Kaneshiro
AmazonCrossing

3.5/5 stars

Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Go was first published in Japanese in 2000. Shortly after, it won Japan’s prestigious Naoki Prize and was adapted into a successful movie. It is not that hard to see why Kaneshiro’s debut, recently released in an English translation, wowed both serious critics and seriously large audiences. His loftier ambitions are signalled by the book’s epigraph, taken from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? / That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

The quote echoes throughout the story, most obviously in Kaneshiro’s own pair of star-crossed lovers, Sugihara and Sakurai. Names mark their climactic scene, in which Sugihara confesses a long-held secret to Sakurai. During the fallout, they reveal their full names for the first time, along with an accompanying allusion. “My given name is Tsubaki. Like Tsubaki from La Traviata,” Sakurai says. “My real name is Lee. Like Bruce Lee,” Sugihara responds. The irony, not lost on either, is such honesty has come too late, as Sugihara realises. “My name sounds so foreign that I didn’t want you to know because I was afraid of losing you – like I just did.”

Sugihara is Kaneshiro’s Romeo: a wild, pugnacious and clever teenage boy, good with his fists and his facts. Regular boxing lessons with his father have married his weight of punch to his speed of thought. As a result, Sugihara is the undefeated heavy­weight champion of his school classroom. “I had a 23-0 record and was known throughout the school as the reigning badass.”