Shusai

The famous myoshu  

Shusai played a famous game with Go Seigen in which there was a lot of controversy surrounding multiple adjournments during the game. Maeda Nobuaki is supposed to have been the one to find in the diagram above. There was, of course, a lot of controversy surrounding this accusation.

In Pieter Mioch's interview with Go Seigen, he says:

The game to one side, Go had the following to say on Shusai in the interview: "Was Honinbo Shusai a villain? He was a scoundrel! How the Ki-in manages to deify this person of all people is unbelievable!"

He goes quiet for a moment, then suddenly he declares in a surprisingly loud voice and with much agitation: "A villain. He was a villain! He is now praised to the skies by the Ki-in and depicted as one of the heroes of this century, yet - mark you well - he sold his title to the newspapers for mere lucre and bought with it a fair-sized piece of land in Tokyo without giving one cent to the Ki-in or the go world." And so he goes on...

Shusai's 1938 retirement game against Kitani Minoru was the subject of Kawabata Yasunari's famous novel The Master of Go.

Prior to becoming the 21st head of the Honinbo house (1908), Honinbo Shusai was known as Tamura Yasuhisa. This was the name that appeared on his kifu when he was still a pupil of Honinbo Shuei.