Sangatsu no Lion
Sangatsu no Lion is a manga by the author Umino Chika (Hachimitsu to Clover AKA Honey and Clover is her other famous work).
It’s in part a “mind sports” manga that follows the main character Rei as a young professional Shogi player (Japanese chess). However the approach here is less about competition and more about introspection, as Rei slowly finds out that having his life in order is the main factor for success and satisfaction. So the other main part of the manga are the human connections he makes, in particular with a parentless three sister family running a confectionery family business.
It’s a truly great work, but in my opinion suffers from a glacial release pace and weird fetishism with food, hah.
I love the magical atmosphere the author creates about being alive. It makes me think the less you have the happier you are. “Less” meaning less unnecessary stuff. Many of the shogi players in sangatsu are like that, especially Souya-meijin whose very existence radiates the thought. He seems to have no care about nothing but shougi. But it’s not the kind of determination to delete all obstacles on his way, but instead genuine dedication to the life chosen. Souya literally seems to float through time and space, silent with his mind in a world no one else knows. Lack of human interaction and interest in the surrounding world has left him seemingly nonhuman, yet in a sense he is more complete than anyone else.
Souya-meijin is definitely my favorite character. The way he “communicates primarily through shogi” connects him in a special way to his best friend, and also to Rei when after they play just one match. Almost all the players in this manga are zen-like, but in particular I think Souya shows a future Rei might have had if he kept drawing inside himself instead of working to connect with the sisters and other people. Later we find that Souya too has a family of sorts, but to me it’s still a great example of how “there is no wrong way to live if you stay true to yourself”, a theme I like very much.
Personally I think sangatsu might have been better with more stories about the shogi people and less of the sisters, but I do think the two (almost opposites) sides are pretty nicely balanced and serve important function as foils to each other. I imagine real work-family balance to be a lot like that, two very separate worlds. It might be interesting to compare that in H&C the school is the equivalent of work, but the characters are never shown taking classes, and most the projects they are shown working on appear to be extra-curricular. Also Hanamoto is never shown teaching. Maybe such lack of focus in one topic of the two is the reason why some feel sangatsu progresses too slowly.
I am starting to think that sangatsu might suddenly end because I don’t have a clear understanding what story it is ultimately trying to tell. If it’s about Rei becoming an adult, then we might already be almost finished. If it’s a slice-of-life, we might take several volumes more to provide closure for all the major characters. If it’s about Rei’s life (as a shogi player and person), we might follow him until he is able to fight a title match (against Souya-meijin maybe). Obviously often the authors themselves don’t know how long their series will be, and might plan in a flexible way. At this point I suspect Umino will deliver the second option (ensemble cast slice-of-life) because that’s what H&C was, and because the series is already longer than H&C and not proceeding very fast.
Looks like the sangatsu anime finished recently. I probably won’t watch it for some time though because the manga is still in good memory.
I liked the Hachimitsu to Clover crossover in the 14th volume of sangatsu. In the afterword she says she planned it 12 years ago, while still writing Hachimitsu to Clover. I really like this manga, but man it’s a real test of patience with its release schedule. Every time I read another chapter about nothing but food and happiness, I feel the sting of month of her time having been spent on drawing that chapter — a month more waiting for the chapters I can’t get enough of. For example I reread quickly the previous 13th volume, and its last chapter was one about Gotou and Kyouko. I think it was years since they last had a chapter?
Watching more Sangatsu. It took me until the fourth episode to think “this looks like Shaft” and recall it indeed is by the studio. There was even a head tilt in a previous episode and I just thought “huh, it’s not that unusual I guess”. It’s not like I’m an expert on Shaft, but I do know their style is not just one thing, but that they can blend it to fit with the source material style.
Now I see Shaft in every scene.
The series goes very much into the real life consequences of being a professional player and training others for the same profession. The father of Rei’s adoptive family is a professional shogi player who trains his children and Rei to become professionals as well (reminds me of how László Polgár famously taught his daughters to be chess players).
Rei turns out to be a better player than the other two kids in the family, which understandably causes serious friction because they too had made huge sacrifices to get good at the game, and now their own father is showing signs of favoring Rei. The boy becomes withdrawn, while the girl Kyouko redirects her furious concentration into the outside world. In real-life too, only a very small minority of players aspiring to become professional go or chess players manage to do so.
