First off, big thanks to Manic Dogma for his Let’s Read Kengan Asura thread, which gave me this inspiration, and to Omicron for sending me advice on how to post images from a tech perspective.

Now, let’s talk about Kaiji.

Kaiji is an incredibly long running manga series by my favorite manga author (Noboyuki Fukumoto, NF for short), and while I’ve read almost all of the rest of his work, I haven’t read this. I have watched the anime, but that cuts off after two seasons. So my plan is to use this let’s read to finally amend that gap in my reading and I hope you’ll come along.

As far as what you’d be getting into, well, Kaiji is a big departure from most manga/anime. It is better in some ways, worse in others, and mostly just profoundly weird. It is uglier, slower paced, and typically has lower stakes. NF thinks little of spending a chapter where a character lights a cigarette and then spends the whole time thinking about why they are doing what they are doing, before ultimately deciding to go ahead with what they were about to do.

For a more objective pitch, Kaiji is a gambling/survival show/manga of the ‘death game’ variety. Our protag is involved with the bad guys, and the only way out is winning various contests. Squid Games is a pretty direct descendant, but if you like manga like Liar Game or Kakegurui you’ll see the influence there.

Probably my best attempt at selling it is this. This is a manga that understands that gambling addiction is a serious, bad thing, which it calls out in the harshest of terms, and it is simultaneously a manga written by someone with real insight into the mind of a gambling addict, to the degree that you hope he has someone keeping an eye on his finances.

Kaiji is also, from what I recall, really really good at making loathsome bad guys. Other shows be like "this guy takes time out from his torture job to do rapes and arson", and Kaiji is like "this manga serves overpriced soda and to get you to buy it he gives out salty food", and I just see red.

On the other side of things, a bullet I got to bite, NF’s art is very much it’s own thing. And by ‘it’s own thing’ I mean a bad thing. He no draw good. I dunno, like, a lot of fans like to talk about how expressive it is and how he is adept at getting meaning out of-...and it is all cope. Our guy put his points in other places. If you come around to it, as I have, you’ll ultimately appreciate the sort of totemic weirdness of the style, but if you take a single look and walk away I cannot blame you at all.

With that said, let’s get started. Kaiji, chapter one. All right, NF, circa, 1996, what’s the image that will hook us in for thai wild journey?

Perfection.

So, this mulletted charmer is our hero, Itou Kaiji. The first page begins on a shot of playing cards, with low stakes change sitting around them, and the cheery caption "the future is in our hands".

We broaden to an establishing shot that I think I’ll also show, because it lets NF show to a little better extent how his art style works.

I love that little panel there. "A guy who keeps losing money", and just a nonchalant arrow pointing to our boi. Put it on his fucking gravestone, man.

Someone, somewhere, once said that the episode "If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich" DEFINED the Riddler, in an absolute an inescapable way. I really appreciate that kind of thing, and I think starting the whole series off by calling out your main guy like this is just kind of perfection. Who is Kaiji? Well, he’s a guy who keeps losing money.

Anyway, Kaiji loses another night of low stakes cards and. Oh god damn it, I have to show another panel. Like:

What can I even do? He’s such a muppet. I love this little bastard. Kaiji weeps in the aftermath of his defeat, even as bitter laughter escapes him. He rides back to his house on his bike, musing idly that he has to get a job, but taking no steps towards actually getting one.

The captions chime in here to let us know that Feb 1996 is the most miserable that Kaiji has ever been since he moved to Tokyo 3 years ago. He got laid off at the start of the year, and so he spends his days drinking and gambling. His hobby was.

Ok, look, obviously Kaiji is a perfect angel, see above picture, but I’d forgotten this next bit. Yeah. Deep breath. Ok. here we go.

Kiaji’s hobby was finding luxury cars and vandalizing them by stealing their emblems or scratching up the sides of them. Not a great look to be honest. Petty criminal who targets random strangers. Yikes.

I do want to share this panel here, because it kind of establishes a second character who we ‘see’ a lot of in the anime, which is the narrator.

Now, for me, Arrested Development is what I think of in terms of the Narrator being a character in the story, but Kaiji definitely is right up there. The narrator in Kaiji is a raging psycho, and I’m wondering if this is going to be reflected in the captions that we’ll see in the manga.

Like, this isn’t just a calm and evenhanded discussion of what is happening, this narrator is feisty, he drops that ‘completely unproductive’ diss cold to the dome, and then goes fully in on the ’mess up other people’s lives bit. It’s like Vampire Hunter D’s hand levels of ‘a voice follows you around and it doesn’t like you much’.

In any case, Kaiji is looking for a car to vandalize, and is just about to give up, with his favorite prey called out as ‘the Benz’, which is nowhere to be found, before suddenly spying the another target. He quickly pops a tire, slashes the side and then…

I really admire how hard NF goes here to make Kaiji deserve what’s coming. Like, petty crime aside, the wicked chuckling to himself, the rationalizing, it’s all just pitch perfect to make you want to beat Kaiji’s teeth in.

"This just happens to be the day it comes back you, buddy", I think, after I hurt a stranger. Gah, full body cringe. What a prick.

Kaiji bikes away, heart somewhat lighter now that he’s ruined someone’s day (at random, because he is a bad person), and the audience gets its first glimpse of the driver of the Not Benz, a trenchcoated, sunglass wearing figure. More on him later.

We follow our protag, in any case, back to his lair, where a row of Benz hood ornaments hang on the wall. Kaiji lies on the floor weeping about the fact that he doesn’t have enough money.

I didn’t promise a relatable protag, but, delightfully, here we find one! Who among us has not had the odd floor cry over having less money than we’d like to have. Alas, Kaiji, alas Humanity. Man is as one insofar as we’d like some fucking bread, yo.

There’s a knock at the door, and Kaiji opens it with a snarling, ‘What the fuck do you want?’.

I don’t think any of you will be surprised to discover that the man at the door is the driver of the Benz, the only other human we have spent a panel on thus far. Call him Suitman, as he doesn’t introduce himself in this chapter, and I don’t know if his manga name is the same as the one I’m thinking of from the anime.

The man begins to interrogate Kaiji, asking his name and whether he knows a man called Furuhata Takeshi. Kaiji, obviously confrontation shy, does the anime ‘smile so his eyes are closed’ thing, and temporizes.

Yeah, he’s familiar with Takeshi, but they haven’t had any contact, practically cut off from one another. And you are…?

Suitman is like "I don’t want to talk on the porch, can I come inside?"

Kaiji panics at the thought of dude seeing his insane benz vandalism shrine, and tells the guy that they should just go out somewhere to talk, maybe he could grab a bite to eat, too?

Fine by me, says the suited figure, he’ll go get his car.

He walks off, and Kaiji spins about to get to hiding his stolen emblems.

We see some wordless panels, where the man sees his car all slashed up, and the tire punctured. He makes a call on his cell, which is a flip phone, and then comes back to Kaiji.

I wanted to share this panel, both so that you’d know what Suitman looks like, and also for the little ‘damnnnnn’ panel that I just love. Something so cheeky about the vertical writing and the angle of it, perfectly getting across Kaiji’s roguish ‘oh shit oh shit oh shit’ vibes.

This is also the second time Suitman has demanded privacy. The two go inside of Kaiji’s room, the benz emblems carefully cleaned up, and Kaiji gushes over sympathy with the fellow. Another mandatory page, I think.

First off, we get another prime quality Kaiji muppet face, but also I really like the pacing on this page. Kaiji’s guilty conscience leading him to ramble on about ‘punks’ who get ‘sick pleasure’, and suit guy taking the long drink before confronting Kaiji. It’s a great beat that gets across that Kaiji is frantic, and puts some hype on Suitman’s smarts.

Suitman never said he got punked, you see, just that his tire was flat. A normal person would assume a normal flat. Kaiji, frantic, bumps over his emblem trophy bag, and as the man stands up menacingly, Kaiji frantically confesses… to messing with Benzes, but uses that to say he’d never mess with Suitman’s car.

Suitman demands to know how Kaiji knew his car wasn’t a Benz, at which point Kaiji goes full muppet face and the manga pans out to his house, nervous laughter rising into the the sky.

We smash cut to Kaiji in Suitman’s car, both are sitting in the back seat, so this guy, in addition to being important enough to have a flat tire taken care of with a phone call, presumably not to AAA, is important enough to have a driver. Put that together with his desire for privacy before, and things are growing a bit ominous for our hero.

Kaiji, desperate, pulls out an ultimate weapon. He apologizes. He’s sorry, he says, before asking how much he has to pay.

Strangely, that gets Suitman laughing. He agrees that ordinarily he’d try to get the repair costs from Kaiji, but says in this case it wouldn’t be worth it. Kaiji has much bigger problems.

Furuhata, your buddy from work a year ago, that guy? Yeah, he disappeared. And before doing so he took out ten odd loans from loan sharks, wouldn’t you know. And, hey, Kaiji, wild thing about that, do you maybe remember cosigning one of those? Think hard.

We smash cut again to this guy’s office, where he hands Kaiji a signed contract. Kaiji has a brief flashback to Furuhat, who is full on casting ‘sempai save me’ on Kaiji, taking advantage of our boy’s hatred for confrontation to get him to cosign as a guarantor, since he is underage and a loan shark wouldn’t lend him money without one.

Suitman does a, ‘sadly, for you’ speech, where he lays out that, you know, Kaiji is on the hook. A prime quote is "The guarantor, which means you…" followed by "It’s unfortunate, but there are ups and downs in life".

Man, I have fallen far from my prime, and have far yet to fall, but if I ever under any circumstances are describing how much life is gonna suck for someone else and I say ’It’s unfortunate, but there are ups and downs in life", kick me right in the dick. What an incredible bit of mealy mouthed bullshit. I’m fully back on Kaiji’s side in the face of this embodiment of smarm.

Kaiji, reasonably, protests that he is unemployed, barely making ends meet. How can he possibly pay back 300k?

Suitman laughs again, and in my mind this is a full on sinister darth vader laugh. This is how vice laughs at virtue, a dog barking in a deep well at the smell of meet approaching the well’s edge. Kaiji must be joking again, of course, "There’s this thing called interest, you know?"

I swear, in the opening, when I was praising NF for making villains, I wasn’t referring to this guy. It had completely slipped my mind how odious he is in the first episode. Go fuck the devil in hell, Suitman!

Kaiji’s attention is directed to the contract. This contract has a compound interest of 20%, monthly, and has been out for 14 months…so… Furuhata, or rather Kaiji now owes 3.85 million.

Kaiji seg faults, and the guy takes out a nice little chart to explain the math. Kaiji demands to know why they let matters get so far out of hand. Suitman says that the original loan shark and Furuhata are clearly in cahoots, its a classic move. They get people to cosign for small amounts, which they do because they are small amounts, but they put an insane interest rate on there and then come back for a massive amount.

It’s interesting to me that he paints the bad guys as Furuhata and the original loan sharks. Like, if you are Kaiji, surely you’d think that if anyone is in on this it would be the collection guys, Suitman and his crew, yeah? But i do like the technique of deception via revelation, which is totally a thing in the real world. Whenever someone wants to sell you on shit it is always a ‘classic trick’ that you’ve somehow never heard of.

In any case, Kaiji has the reaction anyone would, as Suitman breaks down that, you know, he can just pay back 60k per month for 11 years and there you go. Suitman has the gall to say "I’m a nice guy!", as he does the math, and calmly observes that Kaiji will be free and clear (that is, he’ll be back where he thought he was this morning), when he’s 32 or 33 years old.

I am a fossil, dying where I stand. 32 or 33 being ‘old’, shudder. Never change, manga authors.

Kaiji says he’ll never pay, pointing out that this interest rate is illegal, whereupon Suitman starts describing Kaiji’s family members, and how their lives would be disrupted if he has to start reaching out to them. He uses the delightful line "Illegal is a part of the law too", as he explains that his office collects much more illegal contracts every day. Kaiji’s sister makes a lot, and his mother, although they’d probably hate him, with their help he could get it done in maybe just five years.

Kaiji explodes into threats, as the (fairly obviously yakuza) guy waves him to silence.

This doesn’t have to happen, you see, he goes on to describe. All this unpleasantness can be avoided.

Incidentally, if you watch the anime, the way the narrator pronounces ‘Espoir’ has about eleven syllables. It’s great.

So, anyway, that’s our death game hook. We all know enough about stories to know that never in all of manga history has someone brought up something like this for the protag to be like ‘nah, I’ll get started on that monthly repayment, better start tightening my belt’. We are going to the Espoir, folks!

Anyway, the pitch is simple. Kaiji, on the Espoir, will be facing other young debtors in gambling games. If he lose, his debt will increase, and, critically, Kaiji will be on a boat owned by the collection agency. Losers will be taken elsewhere to work off their debt.

The real pitch is the converse. Winning doesn’t just give you enough to pay back your debt, you might end up winning a million or two! "Quite a few guys like that step off the boat every time!" says Suitman (whose car you just vandalized earlier today, Kaiji!!)

This is honestly a pretty good technique. You promise that life will be unpleasant, then hold out the hope of not just a return to the status quo, but riches, and all the victim has to do is, you know, get on the boat and sign some stuff. No downside, yeah? Like, you already owe money you can’t pay, how much worse could it be to owe twice that? Never mind that the original debt is super shaky, and the new one will be ironclad and enforced by you being on our death boat.

Kaiji considers matters, even as we get our first glimpse into the diabolical mind of Suitman.

I continue to appreciate the commitment to making sure you know how bad this guy is. "A fitting place for losers like you, the last match of trash who are on the verge of death", etc. Like, Kaiji is just some fucking guy. A petty vandal, sure, but basically homo sapiens in its most generic form.

His body is as healthy as Suitman’s, probably more so, since dude is twice his age and smokes like a chimney. This whole superiority complex is solely because of the fact that Kaiji is poor and dude is less so, and it is, like, bedrock to the man’s mental architecture. He’s reduced the whole many faceted gem of human relationship to a greater than or less than comparison of two bank accounts.

That’s chapter one, I hope you’ll read on with me to chapter two, on board the Espooooooiiiiirr-....