"The Girl who Played Go" (by Shan Sa)

Shan Sa has an extraordinary CV. Born in Beijing, she started writing at seven and enjoyed success as a teenage poet. At 18 she moved to Paris to study, worked for the artist Balthus and won a Goncourt with her first novel (she writes in French), a Prix Cazes for her second and another Goncourt for this, her third, which is also being filmed. At a time when Chinese women's fiction in translation tends to be auto-biographical, it is a relief to discover The Girl Who Played Go . Shan Sa's first book to be translated into English shows her to be more interested in narrative form and history than in self-exploration.

A carefully wrought novel, set within the framework of the board game, go, it takes place in a small city in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1936. An unnamed Japanese soldier has been sent with his battalion to seek out the Chinese resistance movement within the region, a gateway, he believes, for the glorious death that has long been his ambition. Meanwhile, a bored Chinese schoolgirl finds solace from the frustrations of adolescence, obsessively playing go in the local square.

In an attempt to infiltrate the enemy, the soldier joins the city's go players, and falls into a game with (and then fatally in love with) the eponymous girl. As their match stretches out, both find their certainties wrecked. When the Japanese army moves towards Beijing, the game breaks up. Neither player is a victor.

Essentially a territorial contest (its Chinese name, Wei Qi, means "surrounding game") with roots in both Chinese and Japanese history, go is an apt metaphor for the period. "The black and white stones now form a series of intertangled traps where those that lay siege are themselves besieged," remarks the soldier, late in the match. "We are battling for narrow corridors and cramped corners."

Shan Sa has another use for the game, however. She inches her way through the narrative, telling the stories of the soldier and the girl in alternating, fragmentary chapters, some just 400 words long, mimicking the stately progress of the competition as she does so. Dramatic events in the lives of the protagonists are repeatedly brought together, so that his chapter recalling the earthquake of his childhood is matched by her observations of the local uprising against the Japanese.

This approach recalls the European group of literary gamesters, OuLiPo, of whom Georges Perec and Italo Calvino were the best known. It certainly marks Shan Sa out as one of several diaspora writers currently experimenting with a fusion of western and eastern traditions. But it does not always make for an easy read. Although for the most part the voices of the protagonists are well differentiated, the girl's agonies dominate those of the equally troubled soldier. Similarly, the brevity of the accounts of each impedes much of a sense of involvement in the story, and the cautious strategic opening of a game of go drags the narrative pace of the first third of the book.

Shan Sa has spoken of the novel as a homage to her grandparents' generation, who rebelled against the Japanese and defended China, and to Manchuria itself (she spent childhood summers in the region, and lived there for a while). She does not hold back in describing the cruelty of the Japanese, nor the courage of the resistance. But this is an extremely even-handed book, which gives a picture too, in the details of the soldier's letters home, of the Japanese mindset. It is a story that is worth telling, and intriguingly told.

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The Girl Who Played Go is also being made into a film. You can see why it might appeal to a producer: it is the story of a young girl in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the late Thirties and of a Japanese soldier making his way towards her and her country. It is brutal and domestic and has a big dramatic arc; like a much shorter, more constrained Dr Zhivago, it has the sweep of war and the intimacy of a love story.

The structure is formal and rather restricted. The girl and the soldier take turns to narrate, telling their stories in short chapters, some no longer than this review. The double narrative mimics their antagonistic positions as players, as combatants in war, as potential sexual partners.

The soldier and the girl are male and female principals, Japan and China, death and new life. But the real interest lies in the psychological tussle between them as individuals as they meet to play Go in the town square: this is, in the end, meant to be a contemporary novel. At this psychological level, the brevity of the interlocking narratives is a drawback: you are no sooner absorbed in one story than you have to switch to the other. There are moments when the forward movement seems to slump. You can tell Shan Sa wants us to believe that they are inexorably on a collision course, but sometimes it feels a bit effortful.

I had the sense that Shan Sa was closer to her female character, loved her more, expected her to stand for more, and perhaps because of that has left her fuzzier. The girl, who is only 16, gets caught up accidentally in the Chinese resistance, and finds her young life turned upside down by the convulsions of a country rocked between feudalism and modernity . The Girl Who Played Go may perhaps be a little formal, a little too freighted by symbolism to be the same sort of success in the UK that it has been in France. But there is a lovely reversal at the end of the novel. Several times in the course of the book, the soldier has recalled his mother's parting words to him: 'If you have to choose between death and cowardice, don't hesitate: choose death.' Each time he repeats the injunction, it is chilling, until the last page, when suddenly blind principle and an obsession with honour become humane. It would make a great end to a movie.It is never clear who wins the protracted game of Go, and presumably neither of them does. They both have their minds on other kinds of survival. And of course, they discover they are more alike than they imagined.The soldier, who is the less complex but more dramatically interesting character, begins with gleeful dreams of violence, of saving the Chinese by killing them (that old liberation fantasy again). He believes himself to be armoured against beauty and all manner of soft feelings, thinking, for example, that sexual congress between prostitutes and soldiers has an almost holy purity, because both have given up on happiness. Yet he finds himself unmanned by his long drawn-out game.