[Header image by Oliver Orschiedt, via Wikimedia Commons.
Used under Creative Commons Licenses: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.]
Copyright
J.B. Norman
“This would be a lot easier if I could read Yamatai,” Kat mutters, staring in bewilderment down at the board.
Sometimes, Kat wishes the people in her life would stop trying to teach her things. The Admiral’s been trying to teach her how to be pirate all her life, Amara’s always trying to teach her how to be a proper lady.
And now Kokoro is trying to teach her traditional Yamatai board games. Emphasis on trying.
“Shall we take a break?” the woman from Yamatai asks gently from the other side of the board.
Kat nods. “Yeah. Or how about I just quit?” she says. “I just can’t get my head around all this. I can’t keep the pieces straight.”
Tsuru reaches up to give her a consoling pat on the shoulder. “That was a good first game,” she tells Kat.
Tsubame reaches up to pat the other shoulder. “We could teach you to read the names of the pieces.”
As Annie makes a slow circuit around the room, studying the various hanging scrolls on the walls, and Dunstana stares longingly up at the samurai sword that had once belonged to Kokoro’s husband, Sally walks over to where Kat and Kokoro are sitting at the game board.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“It’s called shogi,”Kokoro explains. “It’s a game we play in Yamatai.”
Sally takes a step forward and looks curiously down at the board.
“What are the rules?”
“You move your pieces, trying to capture your opponent’s General,” Kokoro says.
Sally’s eyes go wide as the realisation sets in.
She gasps excitedly.
“It’s chess!”
“Would you like to learn how to play, Sally?” Kokoro asks.
“Teach me!” Sally exclaims. “Teach me!”
In her excitement, she all but hip-checks Kat off her seat.
Kokoro gently sweeps aside the pieces from Kat’s abandoned attempt at learning the game and begins to set them back into their original places.
“Wow,” Sally mutters. “There are a lot of pieces.” She points down to the board. “What’s that writing?”
“That’s the Yamatai name for each piece,” Kokoro says. “Kat is right. It can be difficult for someone who doesn’t read Yamatai to learn all the pieces, but Tsuru and Tsubame can help you.”
The two twins give Sally a nod.
“Tell me!” Sally urges, bouncing eagerly in her seat and clapping her hands. “Tell me! I want to know!”
Tsuru and Tsubame begin going through each of the pieces, naming them for Sally and explaining how each one moves around the board.
“And on the other side of each piece,” Kokoro adds, “is the new name for when each piece crosses the board and learns a new way to move.”
She reaches down for one of her pieces.
“For example, the Chariot here —” She flips over the piece. “— becomes the Dragon King.”
“Finally!” Dunstana exclaims from the far side of the room.
She is vindicated in her longstanding belief that chess, as with most things in life, would be better with the inclusion of dragons.
I consume enough Japanese Pop Culture that I know about shogi. I have no idea how the actual gameplay works. I tried watching some tutorials and videos of games on YouTube. It did not help…
On the plus side, for this story, I didn’t actually did to convincingly portray the actual game…
The rest of my writing exercises are here. This scene is from August 2022.
Follow me here:
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
