I'm avid Go player with a strong interest in the history of the game so there are many elements to the text that would likely be opaque to other readers. I've tried to get other friends into this one, with little success. But I think the insularity is intentional, I think Kawabata wanted to make something intensely Japanese - yet the reason I return this short book every few years is for its universality (I've read it three times). In the end, the book is about death, at the level of an individual but also at the level of society itself. I do think an adventurous reader can get something out of the text, but doing some research will definitely pay many rewards. For one, the book fictionalizes a real event that would have been well known to many Japanese readers - these deviations from reality are intentional and give the whole affair a profundity akin to the game itself.