The train takes you eight stops west from the centre of Tokyo, away from the suits of the business district to the working-class area of Kamata. From the station, you walk past a shoeshine man waiting for business, then part a way through shoppers drawn by the display of plastic gadgets outside the supermarket. The office-cum-residential block seems an unlikely place to find the Japan Chess Association. But then, in the particular search you are on, the unusual has been the norm. You have come as part of the quest to find Bobby Fischer, the American chess grandmaster, regarded by some as the greatest chess player ever.
By all accounts, Fischer, 60, is living in Japan, giving the association as his mailing address. The young office worker who answers the door is unable to help, politely taking a business card, promising to pass it on to someone in charge. But even if Fischer answered the door, even if he talked, you know the conversation would barely touch on chess, for these days, Fischer is playing another game, one characterised by paranoia, bitterness and anti-Semitism. Wanted by US authorities, Fischer has become a recluse.
The full article is to be found on the SMH web site
After winning the world chess championship in 1972 Bobby Fischer drifted into seclusion. For a period he found refuge in Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, a fundamentalist cult that believes in the Second Coming.
