March comes in like a lion

Episode 9

This week's March comes in like a lion was consumed by Rei's encounter with the sixty-five year old Mr. Matsunaga. After preparing to blame himself for disposing of the old man by Kyouko, Rei was in deep melancholy as this episode began. Beautiful shots of his face reflected in the train's windows offered a graceful illustration of his mindset: the city might be rushing past, but Rei's own thoughts were stuck firmly in place.

Fortunately, Mr. Matsunaga himself was quick to dispel Rei's dignified gloom. Stopping by a shrine before the match, Rei found Matsunaga making a quick offering and mumbling about how he'd frankly rather be at home than out in the cold. It was the first moment to contradict Rei's image of Matsunaga as a dignified embodiment of forty years playing professionally, but it would be far from the last.

The actual match was one of the highlights of this episode, as Rei struggled against his mental image of Matsunaga even more than his actual opponent. From Matsunaga's first appearance onward, Rei sought to find significance or wisdom in each of his wizened opponent's actions. Matsunaga arriving late and staring at Rei was “psychological warfare,” while his deviation from an established strategy had to be some kind of trick. None of these things were actually true, but as a young teen suffering from deep uncertainty about his career choices, Rei was pretty much bound to seek meaning in these choices. The wisdom of age isn't a tome of secrets - it's more the knowledge that there is no tome, and that in the end we're all just muddling through.

As expected, the close focus on shogi mechanics from the last couple episodes bled over into a much tighter focus on the match itself this time. I really appreciated the show's articulation of Rei struggling with Matsunaga's presumed mind games, trying to play his best even as his opponent was falling apart in front of him. Matsunaga's actions were desperate and unfocused, but Rei couldn't just assume his opponent was an idiot - instead, he just had to play the best shogi he could under adverse conditions.

There's a commonly employed cliche narrative where a rookie with no training in some pursuit triumphs by not falling into the assumptions of more practiced players. This cliche is feel-good bunk, and this episode demonstrated why. We use established theory to parse games with far more complexity than we can hold in our heads at one time, so even as Rei's active brain was fretting over Matsunaga's erratic play, his understanding of shogi theory brought him safely home. By contrasting Rei's steady strategic decisions against his mental hesitance, this episode effectively demonstrated how Rei's greatest professional weakness is almost certainly his mental instability.

Having crushed his opponent in the match, Rei found himself treating Matsunaga to a fancy dinner, where his opponent rambled on about Rei's career and Shouko and the historical greatness of his hometown. This segment was easily the episode's weakest, leaning into the simplistic and repetitive comedy that made the first few episodes so uneven. While characters like Harunobu and the sisters have earned the affection of the audience, Matsunaga is still a relatively stranger - hinging a whole segment on how endearing we find his drunken ramblings was a bet that definitely didn't pay off.

Fortunately, the episode's final act returned to March's strengths and tied a convincing bow on Rei's current emotional arc. In a beautiful sequence that saw Rei and Matsunaga sharing a riverside walk at night, Matsunaga confessed the magnitude of his career anxieties; even when he was trying to finish his career with dignity, he couldn't help not wanting to lose. Inspired by this show of relatable honesty, Rei asked if Matsunaga liked shogi - to which Matsunaga responded “how the hell should I know” before describing a combination of depression and elation that perfectly matched Rei's own feelings.

Rei has been struggling for several episodes now to find a reason to play. Rei initially played for the sake of others, but he's lost that drive, and with his career plateauing, his shogi play has recently been nothing but anxiety and disappointment. Having played professionally for forty years, Rei assumed Matsunaga had discovered some key to handling the pressure - but in the end, it turned out that Matsunaga has struggled with Rei's own worries for all his life. Though this didn't offer a true “answer” to Rei's concerns, he ultimately got something better: an acknowledgment that his anxieties were perfectly natural and that struggling with these fears didn't make him broken, wrong, or a poor choice for the shogi life.

Overall, this was a somewhat messy episode that nevertheless brought a satisfying end to Rei's current emotional arc. Rei's overall emotional problems are far too vast and complicated to be solved by one uplifting conversation, but life under depression isn't You versus The Black Hole - it's many smaller anxieties at once, all of which demand some form of address. Defeating Matsunaga ended up being a positive thing for Rei, and if he can carry that attitude forward into his future matches, he may keep it together yet.

Overall: B-

March comes in like a lion is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.