So after watching the anime recently I decided to pick up the Chihayafuru manga where the anime left off. And I have to say the story arcs that followed were strong enough to cement my opinion of this being overall very good sports series. The third Omi Jingu tournament in particular really blew the other two out of the water by well not having Chihaya passed out or injured in one of the tournaments. And by actually giving Arata a compelling challenge with him having to lead his own team in the tournament and finding new strength individually through his team after Chihaya handily defeats him. This is one top of Chihaya really showing her stuff as someone who wants to be a Karuta adviser and finally giving us a true follow up match with Shinobu after the let down of having to see her play Shinobu injured the previous match. We even get to see Hyoro finally get his due in leading his new team to victory after so much suffering. I was also pretty impressed with how Taichi’s whole arc was handled. I know the conclusion of his third match against Arata at the Meijin qualifier has been seen as divisive, but seeing him finally being set free and realize that his youth spent of kurata wasn’t wasted due to all the people he became close to was satisfying. And Taichi’s arc allowed Suo to become really likable and bring him down to earth.
Now I also want to talk about a big problem I had with the manga and that is character juggling. It wasn’t until Tamaru joined and seeing her mesh with the remainder of the kurata club third years that I realized that Tsukuba and Sumire didn’t really bring much to the table. Tsukuba more or less existed to be a warm body on the team while another third year couldn’t play and I’m hard pressed to remember a match he won that wasn’t an off screen individual tournament. Sumire’s potential being another data gatherer for the team didn’t pan out past the second tournament and her playing skill didn’t really improve at all. The other three newbies are pretty nothing but at least Tamaru was good enough to really fill a team roll despite losing a good bit and had some ambition. It was a bit weird to have her in the final East queen qualifier match against Chihaya because it definitely didn’t have the intensity of Rion v Chihaya before, but it at least gave her something.
That and I kind of want to complain about Yumi and Megumu basically being shoved off into irrelevancy despite beating Chihaya there first time around and being hyped as queen challengers. I can see why Yumi was replaced because Inokuma was the more interesting at hand Ex Queen and even gets to stick around and practice with Chihaya. I probably would have preferred a revenge match against Megumu for the Queen challenger match however since Momo despite having an interesting connection to Shinobu didn’t offer much to Chihaya as an opponent. Chihaya struggled more against the reader than Momo herself, so it jsut kind of made for a weirdly unexciting match.
A.J., April 2019
Manga OT 