Enter the dragon. Or should I say, dragons. Without any question, this has been the Karuta season on Chihayafuru – as a percentage of screen time, competitive matches are about 4-5X more prominent this season than they were in the first. So it’s hardly surprising that the season should close […] Read more
Let the tears flow – they’ve been building for a long time. “Frustration won’t last forever. Nobody can keep on going without some measure of reward.” Harada-sensei (I remain puzzled by his absence at this event) thought those words in episode 20 of the first season – possibly the most […] Read more
Confession time: I may not have been glad Chihaya lost her match, but I was definitely relieved. The passage of a week’s time hasn’t changed by view that last week’s developments in Chihayafuru were a bit of a stumble, both narratively and in the larger context of its realism as […] Read more
After probably the most satisfying Chihayafuru episode of the season last week, it’s right back into the torture chamber. This ep was pretty much everything about season two of Chihayfuru in a nutshell. It was all Karuta, exciting, frustrating as hell, and left me irritated with a cliffhanger I care […] Read more
For a while there, I thought the purpose of this episode was to induce as many heart attacks as humanly possible among the audience. This was so close to being one of the classic Chihayafuru episodes ever. It had almost everything – drama, humor, long-awaited interaction with Arata, classic lines […] Read more
Well, that was a surprising turn of events… Or rather, it would have been if a commenter hadn’t spoiled this week’s ending after last week’s episode. Be that as it may, always lead with the headline – and the banner is definitely, “Mizuswa wins the title”. In many ways it […] Read more
An interesting side-effect of the change in focus is that it’s made Chihayafuru a much more difficult show to blog this season. If you’ve been watching, you know pretty much what to expect out of Chihayafuru this week – another intense, riveting episode spent entirely following events on the tatami. […] Read more
I’ll give this to Chihayfuru – more than any series, it’s managed to turn poetry into a blood sport. After a cruel hiatus due to a poorly-timed recap episode, Chihayafuru is back, and things haven’t changed in the slightest. Basically, in the first season Chihayafuru was a character drama about […] Read more
Last week, I described Chihayafuru as “exquisite torture”. If I were to say that again today, I’d be half right. I’d almost allowed myself to believe that this day wouldn’t come for S2, but sadly we have a recap episode. As brutal as this season has been to follow with […] Read more
Watching this season of Chihayafuru has become a sort of exquisite torture. What would happen if an anime did an entire Karuta tournament in real-time? That’s what this team competition is starting to feel like. No one is a bigger fan of the buildup episode in sports anime than I […] Read more