Of Swords and Parasols

Chihayafuru is a 50 episode (plus an OVA) anime based on a Josei manga about Karuta. Specifically, about a high school girl named Chihaya who is absolutely obsessed with Karuta and intends to become the best Karuta player in the world.

Karuta is a sport with 100 cards with Heian era poems written on them. Each player gets 25 cards, and a reader sings the cards. The first person to touch the card that's read claims the card, regardless of which side it's on. The goal is to have no cards left on your side, and you can send the card of your choice to your opponent's side after claiming one of their cards. The sport relies heavily on memorization and speed, and the placement of cards and choice of cards to send sometimes borders on being a form of psychological warfare. The sport is played in both one on one matches and team matches, and team members sometimes find themselves opposing each other in individual matches. Because it's only the first few syllables of the poem that are needed to win a karuta match, most players don't bother learning more than the first few lines of each poem. While I love pretty much everything about this anime, I give it extra points for being the first sports series I've encountered where the actual sports aspect kept me riveted. The matches tend to be very tense and emotional and the series gets pretty deep into the mindset of both the protagonists and their rivals during the matches. What really makes it excel, though, is the sound. I don't mean the soundtrack (though that's excellent) but the sounds of the matches themselves, with the players hitting the bamboo mats as they claim the cards, and running across them to pick up cards they've knocked away. (Since they're trying to touch the card before the opponent they often hit the cards with enough fore to send them flying across the room.) They's also the readers and how the players respond to the rhythm and timing, which creates much of the tension of the matches. Because of this, I'm actually somewhat leery of of reading the manga, on the one hand, I really want to. On the other, while I'm sure the characters and plot will hold up to the anime, I can see the actual matches having the same level of tension and intensity.

But, back to the plot.

As I said, the plot revolves around Chihaya, a girl obsessed with becoming THE BEST KARUTA PLAYER EVER. Specifically, she wants to become The Queen Of Karuta, a title given to Japan's top female Karuta player. (She has her King Of Karuta picked out, but we'll get to him soon.) When the series opens, Chihaya is a Class B player (the second highest ranking) and wants to form a Karuta club at school, but has no takers. She soon learns that Taichi, one of two boys she played Karuta with in 6th grade, is also attending her school. Taichi, however, no longer plays Karuta. Though he enjoys Karuta, Taichi grew up in a competitive household and quit Karuta because he wasn't naturally gifted at it, and focused on achievements he was naturally gifted at. So Chihaya makes a bargain with him that if she can become a Class A player in her next competition, he'll join her club. She wins, naturally, and we flashback to a handful episodes when the two were in 6th grade and met Arata, the other boy Chihaya used to play Karuta with.

Arata, a new boy in their class, is quiet and poor, and so bullied by Taichi, who wasn't a very nice kid to start with, and it wasn't helped by Chihaya being nice to Arata. Visiting Arata's house one day, Chihaya discovers his Karuta cards, which Arata takes as a sign that they must play. THEY MUST PLAY NOW. And then gets Chihaya obsessed by telling her that there's a card with her name for the first line, thus creating in Chihaya and obsessive need to CLIM THAT CARD. Naturally, they become BFF and decided that they will grow up and become the King and Queen Of Karuta and rule the karuta world forever. Or some such. Eventually, Taichi gets over being a bully and and they become a BFF team, but then Arata has to move away so his parents can take care of his grandfather, and Taichi and Chihaya go to different middle schools.

When Chihaya and Taichi find Arata again after they reconnect, they learn that he quit playing Karuta after his grandfather died, and wats nothing to do with it anymore. Chihaya, of course, considers this to be COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. Unfortunately, they live a couple hundred miles apart, so she has to use emails, text messages and voicemails to convince him that Karuta is still THE BEST THING EVER. Most of her time, though, is consumed with getting enough people to form and official club, and preparing for competitions. She forms her club by effectively abducting, bribing, or gambling with them. Her first recruit is Kana, a girl whose family runs a kimono shop. Kana loves the Karuta poems and thinks competitive Karuta is people sitting around in traditional clothing, calmly discussing poetry and complementing each other for instantly recognizing a poem. She deals with the extreme culture shock of competitive karuta by demanding that they attend matches wearing kimonos from her family's store. Kana is my favorite after Chihaya herself. After that, Chihaya almost literally abducts Komano (nicknamed "Desktomu"), the second highest ranking student in their grade (Taichi is the first) who never does anything but study. Because, you know, he's smart, so obviously he's really good at memorization and quick thinking and such. (Our Chihaya is not always overly bright.) The fifth required member to form an official club is Nishida (nicknamed "Porky" for his love of steamed pork buns) who was one of the threesome's rivals when they were kids, but was devastated and abandoned Karuta forever after being thoroughly trounced by Arata. Falling out of love with Karuta is still Totally Not OK, and so Chihaya recruits him through a combination of blackmail and betting. in season 2, the original 5 team members are joined by two new underclassmen. The first is Sumire, a girl who joins because she has a crush of Taichi (she sees herself as the heroine of a shoujo manga who will win the gorgeous but cold school prince from her beautiful rival), and the second Tsukuba, a transfer student who played Karuta in Hokkaido, where they go by the second verse instead of the first, and play by completely different rules.

The series focuses heavily on the matches (over half the second season takes place over the course of one tornament, though I didn't realize it'd been that many episodes until I'd finished) and the friendships between the players and their love for Karuta. They also have a lot of rivals of various import (the most significant probably being Shinobu, the current Queen of Karuta, and Retro, another childhood rival) though the big tournament in season 2 introduces several new rivals who I really hope to see more of in season 3. If there is one, which I really hope there will be. There's a romantic triangle between Arata, Chihaya and Taichi, but there isn't a lot of focus on it. I'm also not sure how much of a triangle it is when one love interest is isolated from the rest of the cast most of the time, and when the person in the middle has a pertty clear preference, but is completely oblivious to the feelings of all parties (including her own) and the "third wheel" is well aware that he's nowhere on that radar, and isn't likely to be. I'd actually go the OT3 route, but Taichi has moments where he almost goes into Nice Guy mode, and tends to try to control Chihaya's interactions with and knowledge of Arata's actions at times, though he almost always catches himslef in these moments, and knows they aren't ok, so it never gets to the point where I dislike him for it.

Even though there's fifty episodes plus an OVA, there's almost no filler to it. Each of the 2 seasons has the required recap episode that all 24-26 episode series have, but that's it. I suppose you could say the OVA is filler, as it's about what the rest of the team is up to in the last episode of season two when Chihaya is separated from them for plot related reasons, but it's literally a "bonus" episode, and separated from the rest of the series. While the various matches can sometimes stretch out for a while, they never felt, to me at least, like they were dragging or being forced to last longer than they should for dramatic effect or to reach the episode count.

I have a suspicion that this might be my favorite new-to-me anime for 2013, even though January wasn't quite over yet when I finished it. We shall see.

To the delight of my twitter feed (or at least, the ones who don't follow 7 Seeds) I have caught up with the scanslated volumes of Tamura Yumi's 7 Seeds. I believe some of volume 24 is scanslated, but I don't think I could handle the tension of trying to read the series in small amounts. I've posted a fair bit on it in my weekly reading posts, but I'll try for something a bit more comprehensive now.

7 Seeds is an ongoing post-apocalyptic shoujo manga (though I believe it was eventually moved to a josei magazine) by the creator of Basara. Both series are set in post-apocalyptic Japan with a drastically altered landscape, lots of women, lots of travel, complicated characters (and make you keep liking characters who do things that would normally make you hate them) emotionally wrenching and often devastating character arcs that regularly put the characters through hell, and all kinds of relationships among a wide variety of characters.

Despite that, the two series are actually almost nothing alike. (Though it should be mentioned that a lot of the character designs in early volumes of 7 Seeds look enough like Basara's character designs to be jarring. Eventually, though, they're tweaked enough to stand apart from their visual counterparts.) While Basara is about war and revolution and defying a corrupt society and forbidden DOOMED romance and gender identity and roles, 7 Seeds is about survival and the discovery of a new and horrifying world and the early steps of creating a society. It's also about psychology and how different environments and rules (and the lack thereof) affect people and their choices. It's also very much about the idea that everyone, no matter who or what they are, is important, and that everyone has something valuable to contribute, not just the people who know how to hunt for food and determine if plants are poisonous and the ones who can build houses, but also the ones who can make you laugh or quote something they read 5 years ago. And people learning the above is also a very important aspect of the series. Also, the ability to find toilet paper and alternatives to toilet paper is very valuable.

The concept of 7 Seeds is that the world's governments know that a meteor is is going to hit earth with enough force to wipe out most, if not all, life. A variety of plans to ensure humanities survival are put forth, and the last ditch plan is to cryogenically freeze small groups of people who will be stored beneath the surface until the systems preserving them determine that the planet can once again support human life, at which point they'll be released. Japan creates four teams of seven people (each team is named after a season-Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, and each team member has a name that is associated with their team's season) plus a guide, and also seven storehouses spread throughout Japan that hold preserved supplies to help them create a new society in their new world. The members of the teams are considered the "elite," artists, musicians, architects, scholars, doctors, athletes, people especially trained in survival, etc., but it's eventually decided to send a fifth team-Summer B-made up of people who have trouble fitting into society (and gangster, a runaway, a girl who's almost pathologically shy and timid, etc.) as a "backup" team in case the "elite" aren't able to adjust to the new world.

We're introduced to the series through Summer B, specifically through Natsu, the shy and timid girl mentioned above, and the first plotline introduces us to the idea of the 7 Seeds project as Summer B starts to see the changes to the world. Normally, you'd expect Natsu to be the main character of the series, and to meet the rest of the world through Summer B's travels, but instead we soon move to another team entirely. Unlike most shoujo series (or manga in general) there isn't a clear lead protagonist or main character. While I'd say Natsu and the main POV character for Team Spring are the POVs we probably spend the most time with, the focus frequently shifts between various teams and subgroups formed from teams as they travel and attempt to find the best places to make their homes. For a while (I think about the first ten volumes?) events aren't completely chronological, and where they chronologically fall in relation to other events isn't always made clear right away. This, however, doesn't interrupt the flow of the story at all, and I think it actually adds to it at times.

As I mentioned before, it's a very psychological series, and as a result, not only is it very tense and nervewracking (there are many times I went "surely she won't go there..." and then Tamura did) and there are parts that are rather traumatic to read and lots of what I can only call soul crushing angst. But the good kind? She appears to get most of the soulcrushing angst out of her system by around volume 13 or so (but not the overall tension) but has revisited it a couple times since. There are also various horror elements (note: if you have an insect phobia, it might be best to very selectively read the second volume, or ask someone to give you a summary) and a couple rape attempts, though I somewhat expected that given the premise, and the subject is actually handled MUCH better than elsewhere.

The series isn't light reading at all, but it is excellent reading.

I think most of what I'd want to say about the series has been covered by oyceter   and skygiants   in their respective tags and the comments to their posts, but some more spoilery commentary from me:

( spoilers )

What are you currently reading?


The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer: Every author has to have a first book? Sometimes when they're teenagers.

7 Seeds vol 20 by Yumi Tamura. Almost caught up with scans! And have possibly already read the best (or at least, most entertaining) part of this manga.

( spoilers )

What did you recently finish reading?

Volumes 20-27 of Skip-Beat, which I posted on separately.

The Piper by Lynn Hightower: Gothic thriller based on the "Pied Piper" fairy tale about a woman, Olivia, who receives a call from her dead brother, Chris, telling her the he "paid the piper" and that everything would be all ok now. This, of course, happens right before Olivia and her young daughter, Teddy, are about to move back into the old family home where not only did Chris die in his sleep, but from which their sister, Emily, disappeared 25 years older while watching Olivia. Chris's widow, Charlotte, believes that there's something wrong with the house, which Olivia dismisses, but soon Teddy starts claiming to be scared of the house, and that a man visits her at night and makes threats and promises. "Fun" isn't exactly the right word for this type of book, but I thought it was pretty good gothic suspense, and enjoyed it a good bit.

Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks: GN about a zombie epidemic at a Canadian college, through the eyes of a zombie movie fan named Joss. The best parts are probably Joss going by The Rules of zombie movies. It's not as good as the other two books by Hicks that I read recently, but pretty fun, that it makes an awkward switch from madcap self aware romp to Serious Consequences totowards the end that was a bit jarring.

The Owl Service by Alan Garner. 60s YA novel in the vein of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, based on the Welsh legend of Blodeuwedd, in which a teenager named Alison finds a service (plates) decorated with flowers that form an owl, which sets off an unusual chain of events involving her, her stepbrother Roger, and their cook's son, Gwyn. Some of the locals appear to know what's going on, but don't clue the teenagers in, and tempers and grudges are only exacerbated by classism and prejudice on all sides.
up until the end, I really really liked it, much in the same way as I still like The Dark Is Rising, but the ending was a bit too abrupt for me, and I didn't really feel that I got the needed emotional resolution for the characters, or for their conflicts with each other. Still, I'm curious about Garner's other works, if anyone wants to rec any.

Foiled by Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro. GN (apparently the first in a series) about a female teenaged fencer who starts having Interesting (And Sometimes Unexplainable) Things Happen after her mother buys her an unusual practice foil at a garage sale, ands she discovers her destiny as a swashbuckling defender of the (good) supernatural. When it was on, I really liked it, but a lot of time was spent on high school teen drama that didn't interest me a lot. It wasn't bad teen drama, just not overly interesting for me. There's at least one sequel, but my library doesn't have it, and I can't ILL it until I send the ones I already have back.


What do you think you'll read next?

More manga? Get back to Legend of the White-Haired Demoness once 7 Seeds stops dominating my kindle. Whatever besides manga I got from the library the other day.

Ooku is set in an alternate Edo era Japan in which a plague has reduced Japan’s male population to ¼ of its female population, resulting in the women taking over all levels of the government and economy, which is kept a secret from the rest of the world.

The first arc focuses on the female shogun’s harem and its dynamics and power structure. It’s a good standalone arc, but doesn’t create much incentive to read more, and actually made me not care about the titular Inner Chambers, being way more interested in the world outside. The last bit of the first volume and the entirety of the second volume address that, shifting the focus (but not POV) to the shoguns, with the second volume largely focusing with how the first female shogun came to be shogun, and the early years of her rein. Technically speaking, volume 2 actually has one of the best overall plotlines I’ve encountered in a manga, but it also has 3 rapes and one case of sexual intercourse that can, at best, be said to be of extremely dubious consent, which keeps me from going as nuts about it as I think some others do.

While I definitely have a “Japan is now mostly made up of mostly women and a patriarchal society is now a matriarchal society, and everything is still all about the men?” reaction (and, while gender roles are reversed on a societal level, on a more personal, one-on-one basis, many don’t seem to be changed much), the world is fascinating enough to get past that. The main problem is that the translator has decided to translated the formal dialogue of the time with such stilted twee faux!medieval dialogue that this has the questionable honor of being the only manga whose translation I actually find difficult to read, which likely makes my irritation with some parts worse than it would be otherwise. I mean, I’ve read some bad translations before, but none that were so bad it was actually hard to read the manga. A couple examples, located by randomly flipping through the first volume and pointing at a word balloon with plenty of words.:

“If need be, we can resort to adoption to secure a man for Shino. Regardless, thou needst be concerned with thine own fate, and thine alone!”

“A new apartment hath been prepared for thy use. Thou shalt move thy belongs there forthwith.’

And this is a very talky manga.

The world is interesting enough to get past it once things get going, but the translation makes the 200 page manga feel like slugging through the King James version of the Bible (which I have done a few times and which is, in fact, easier to do as it’s more consistent-there are bits where it will randomly have half a sentence or a couple balloons of contemporary dialogue, then switch back-and actually flows) until then, and even when the manga gets interesting, the translation wears it down.

This is one of those series that tends to get a lot of “if you don’t like *insert genre/trope/etc. thing is an example of* you might still like this” recs. In this case, yaoi. But then, despite often being billed as yaoi and released by a publisher that primarily licenses yaoi titles, this isn’t actually yaoi, but is a josei title where one of the four leads is gay, and another possibly (probably) bisexual.

Tachibana is the scion of a rich family who decides to leave the family business and open a cake shop in what used to be an antique store. With his family’s money, he’s able to hire Ono, a “legendary cake master” who also attended Tachibana’s high school, and confessed his love for Tachibana, only to be rejected. Ono’s cakes are exquisite, but he comes with complications that make hiring a staff difficult. For one thing, he’s scared of women, and his general reaction to them seems to be either to lose the ability to speak, to run away crying, or some combination. Obviously, a female employee is out of the question. For another, in the years since being rejected, Ono has become “a gay of demonic charm.” Despite his mousy appearance, just exposure to him tends to make men of any sexuality fall in love with him, and fights have broken out at his former jobs.

Eventually, they’re able to find Kanda, a former boxer with a sweet tooth who isn’t Ono’s type at all, and is too busy trying to learn to bake as well as Ono to even notice the demonic charm. Later, they’re joined by Tachibana’s hopelessly helpless butler, Chikage, who was raised by Tachibana’s family. Chikage is very much Ono’s type, but is also so simple and puppylike that just thinking about it tends to make Ono have spasms of guilt.

The food pr0n is amazing, and Tachibana’s descriptions of the various cakes offered by the shop are both detailed and somehow hilarious. Like many manga series revolving around a shop, the series starts off mostly focusing on the stories of the various customers, and then shifts to being more about the people who run the shop. Normally, I’m ready for the anthology section to take a back seat to the main story, but here, I wanted it to last longer.

I’m amused by both Tachibana and Ono, but I’ve long since lost almost any interest in both rich angsty playboys and men who no one can resist, resulting in an endless stream of lovers. I find the childish-but somehow apparently the most grownup and self-aware of the lot-Kanda and the puppyish Chikage much more endearing, but they’re given much less attention.

Overall, it’s very funny and charming, though I suspect that Yoshinaga Fumi’s kinks are a little closer to my squicks, based on the huge-if acknowledged-power imbalance in Ono and Chikage’s relationship, and with what seems to be her approach to Tachibana’s family and past.