I discovered this at last year's US Go Congress. (Yes, I could have posted earlier! I got home, unpacked, and got distracted...) One morning I took a bus trip out of town to Portland's "other" bookshop, not the big famous one in the city centre, but a quirky second-hand place called Chaparral Books. As far as I could tell, they only had one go book, but it's a good one.
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File comment: Hashimoto's Tsumego Saijiki, front cover
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cover.jpg [ 190.51 KiB | Viewed 5039 times ]
It's a collection of 365 problems by Hashimoto Utaro, one for each day of the year beginning 1st January (I remember barely enough Japanese to read the date next to each problem). The difficulty level varies apparently at random: I'd say about half of them are low dan level, some are accessible to SDK players, some are way to hard for me, and they don't appear to be in any particular order. So it's a bit like Xuanxuan Qijing -- except that the difficult problems tend to be more the "obvious once you see it but hard to find" type, rather than very long variations.
If I'm interpreting Google translate correctly:
- The title means something like "daily tsumego" or "seasonal tsumego". The word "saijiki" is hard to translate into a single English word: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saijiki
- The text at the top of each problem is a haiku and short commentary. As far as I can tell, the poems don't have a strong connection with the problems. Hashimoto just thinks it's nice to read poetry while you solve tsumego (or fail to solve them but just enjoy admiring them).
Here's the introduction for people who actually can read Japanese.
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File comment: Hashimoto's Tsumego Saijiki, introduction, page 1 of 2
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File comment: Hashimoto's Tsumego Saijiki, introduction, page 2 of 2
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