Old Gomoku manual

[kaiou]

I like old books, I play Go, so I received the natural gift for me!
An old go book, Japanese, very fancy, exactly the kind of book that I like!

I toke a quick look at it, and it was quite strange, it turned out to be a gomoku manual, quite easy for a non Go player to get confused.

I can't read Japanese and I am not nearly knowledgeable to date or do any worthy consideration to date the manual by myself.

Does anyone have any good source, or can help me to find some useful information about it?

Here is a gallery of the cover, first pages and some of the internal ones:
http://imgur.com/a/cNio0

Thank you!

[macelee]

This is very interesting, because it's the first time I see handicap stones in Gomoku games. There is a Google Books page about this book:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mObQ ... CDEQ6AEwAA

While the page contains very little information, the year of publication, 1859, must be correct. On your second photo, the last 6 characters (reading from right to left and top to bottom) are: 戊午春土井恪. The first two characters are the traditional Chinese way to record years, and 1859 happens to be a year of 戊午 (this happens every 60 years). The third character means 'spring'. The remaining are the name of the author.

And you can use Google translation to read this Japanese page:

http://homepage1.nifty.com/crow-renju/kosyo.htm

[kaiou]

It seems to present handicap strategies up to 4 stones placed on a small square in the center, as in the scan, and up to 6 stones of handicap placed in the common go-way, on the hoshi points.

Thank you for the help!

I will do a complete scan tomorrow, it may be a interesting reading for someone else too!

(And I'm sorry that I mistook the chinese text for japanese, I was tricked by the appearance of the book, that looked somehow familiar)

[Nyanjilla]

No, it's Japanese. Chinese characters are used in writing Japanese, including dates.

Fascinating book. Thanks for posting about it.

But there seem to be two versions of the author's name---is it 土井恪 or 土井有恪 ?

[John Fairbairn]

While the page contains very little information, the year of publication, 1859, must be correct. On your second photo, the last 6 characters (reading from right to left and top to bottom) are: 戊午春土井恪. The first two characters are the traditional Chinese way to record years, and 1859 happens to be a year of 戊午 (this happens every 60 years). The third character means 'spring'. The remaining are the name of the author.

1858 I think you'll find (Ansei 5). This is the second oldest gomoku book known (the oldest is Ansei 3).

The author was Doi Yukaku, a Confucian scholar, which is no doubt why he uses the old Chinese name for the game. He himself is more usually known as Doi Goga 土井聱牙, who lived 1818-1880, so he didn't live long enough to see the game transformed into renju.