Hikaru no Go Manga
Hikaru no Go is a popular Japanese manga and anime coming-of-age story based on the board game Go written by Yumi Hotta and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. The production of the series’ Go games was supervised by Go professional Yukari Umezawa (5-dan). The manga is largely responsible for popularizing Go among the youth of Japan since its debut, and in other areas such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. More recently it has gained much popularity in the United States. The title is sometimes abbreviated ‘HGO’, ‘HikaGo’ or ‘HnG’.
Hikaru Shindo is just a normal 12 year old Japanese boy. One day, he’s rumaging through his Grandfather’s things to see if he can find something to sell and pulls out an old Go board. A ghostly apparation appears out of the board and tells Hikaru his sad story. His name is Sai Fujiwara, a man who was a Go instructor to the emperor of Japan a thousand years ago. However, because of bad sportsmanship during a game, Sai was accused of cheating and banashied from the city. With no livelihood or any other reason to live, Sai commited suicide by drowning himself. Now, he haunts a Go board, and wants to accomplish the perfect Go game, called the “Hand of God” which he hopes to do through Hikaru. If Hikaru will be able to do it or not (or even wants to) will have to be seen.
