It was not really my motto, but when I was young I often wrote 'discernment' on autograph paper. There was a comment in my favourite book, The Little Prince, that 'important things are not visible to the eye.' I believed that this had something in common with go; I often wrote it because it overlapped with my feelings at the time.

These days I write the phrase 'clear heart' on autograph paper. It's a phrase I value. My older daughter's name is written with the characters for 'heart' and 'clear', which we read Kosumi. This is a name that my husband and I made up from scratch; we finally hit on it after a lot of agonizing.

I was worried that my father might scold me for being imprudent in using [a homophone for] a go term as a name, but he visited the hospital on the day that Kosumi was born and he told me that in the old days my mother had used the term 'clear heart'. In various ways, I feel the workings of fate.