Chihayafuru 2 - 17

"Gust of Wind"

Passion is hardly a new theme in anime, but rarely is it so elegantly and powerfully impacted on the viewer from a sport as niche as this one is.

With every match this season, I can't help but feel a powerful longing to play this game. Perhaps it's my innate love of competition and my history of sports (I'm moving on to ballroom dancing next semester), but every episode seems to be a lovingly crafted letter to the sport of karuta, and that emotion is rather infectious. In fact, having just recently rewatched the first season, I've noticed that the depiction of the game seems to have evolved into the dominant force of the series, whereas before, this was not necessarily the case. Regardless, whether the sport is depicted as plot driver or central figure of attention, the fact that Chihayafuru remains as intense as day 1 is undeniable, even with this glacially slow pacing we've adapted for the dramatic purposes of this tournament.

The beauty of the Hundred Poets has really been one of the central points of Chihaya's maturity as a karuta player. If she's taken accuracy from Shinobu-chan and self-reflection from Komano, then a passion for the "color" of each individual poem is the contribution that Kana has to offer her teammate. The game, after all, is more than a bloody war for the sake of winning; in the essence of Japanese culture and aesthetics, karuta is just as much about art as it is about competition. Coming to "know" each poem intimately is a powerful weapon, and one that Chihaya started cultivating as soon as she began to picture the chihayaburu card as flaming red. Even when injured, the will to win and incorporate this hard-earned gift from the benched Kana-chan drives Chihaya to play her hardest against Rion (a genius who is only able to play well when the reader is good), and in turn her determination to ignore her pain motivates the rest of the team.

Which is exactly the push Misuzawa needs. I'm not overly fond of the whole "we're men so how could we live it down if a girl does her best while injured and we don't" line of thinking, but at least it's effective in sparking the boys' pride into gear. Taichi and the others have been losing all match, but really the dramatic tension falls squarely on Nishida's shoulder's; Taichi has been undefeated, Komano won the semi-final, Kana sacrificed her ability to play in the final to secure that win, and while Akihiro hasn't contributed much, he's hardly an ace the team's been depending on in the first place. The truth of the matter is that Nishida's had a terrible time this whole season, and for the only other Class A player on the team, his constant losses truly are a let down. Though team matches may not mean anything to Shinobu, they mean the world to people like Nishida, and maybe, just maybe, Chihaya's injury will be enough to spur him to his first win in a long time.