Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji: Kazuya-hen

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Kazuya-hen is quite possibly the most divisive part of Kaiji. Everyone seems to either love it or hate it. Personally, it is my favorite part because of how it subverts the tropes of the series.

For one, the fact that it is 3 volumes shorter than the typical Kaiji part is greatly to its benefit. I don't think there are many people that would argue that long arcs like 17 steps, the Bog, and One Poker aren't at least a little drawn out and while Kazuya-hen does drag in a few places, like any Kaiji arc, the pacing is not quite as bad as the previously ... mentioned arcs.

At the core of Kazuya-hen is the idealogical clash between Kaiji and Kazuya. This time, Kaiji, instead of staking his money or his life on this gamble, he's putting his ideals on the line. That's what's so brilliant about this arc. It really gets to the crux of what makes this series so great and cuts out a lot of the fluff that we've come to expect from it.

The frustratingly long sequences where characters get stuck in logic loops where they just keep restating the same things over and over for sometimes entire volumes are almost entirely done away with.

The main purpose of this arc within the grand scheme of the series is to develop Kazuya as a character (hence the name). It is so effective at doing this that Kazuya is now easily my favorite villain in the series and that's mostly because of this arc.

Ultimately, while Kazuya-hen is not quite as high-stakes as the previous and following arcs, I feel that it is better at conveying what the series is all about than any of the other arcs. In a way, it was almost destined to be ignored. Being placed between two arcs about Kaiji betting his life on huge one-on-one duels, does not do this arc any favors, but I personally will always enjoy it more than 17 steps or One Poker.

Despite a deliciously devious death-trap being the focus of this entire arc, I can't help but feel that this was the weakest arc in the Kaiji series so far. It is still a good, fairly suspenseful read, but this arc displays some rather uncharacteristic shortcomings which are disappointing to see in a series as excellent as Kaiji.

Kazuya, whom you will remember as a spectator in the Minefield Mahjong game, now invites Kaiji as a spectator for a new, three-player death-trap; the Salvation Game. More on the game later. This entire arc is built around a central theme, which is the nature of friendships. Kazuya believes ... that even the closest human friendships are all superficial at best, and "best friends" will betray each other if the scenario is right for it. Kaiji, despite being the victim of many betrayals, refutes this viewpoint and plays the optimist. So there are really two 'games' being played out in this arc, the Salvation Game itself and a battle between Kazuya and Kaiji's respective philosophies on the nature of humans.

The premise of the Salvation Game is one of the best things about this arc, and thus I will give a vague description as to avoid spoilers. The Salvation Game is the first true "group" game since Human Derby, and we acutely feel the danger posed by the possibility of a betrayal or simple slip-up. The game is a deadly twist on the classic "Prisoners with Hats" puzzle; resulting in a game riddled with confusion and uncertainty, where good communication is absolutely vital. Fukumoto does a fantastic job of making us care about the three unfortunate individuals playing Kazuya's devious game, and he makes it easy for us to relate to their moments of sheer panic and desperation. Despite entering into the game willingly and with consent, the three players really do begin to feel like "prisoners" trapped in Kazuya's deadly snare.

The problem with this arc is that the initial thrill of the Salvation Game wears off quite quickly. Once the initial problem with communication is solved, no particularly "smart" strategy is devised by the three players, and the rest of the challenges of the game are mainly 'solved' through luck. These other "challenges" are artificially created by Kazuya's underhanded methods, and there is no real solution to them other than lucking out or overcoming emotions. I really feel like the game needed more fundamental difficulties beyond the lack of communication between players, and there needed to be more challenges that were raised naturally by the mechanics of the game, not through Kazuya's increasingly contrived meddling. The game itself becomes less and less interesting due to the lack of strategy and repetitive contrived methods of creating suspense and difficulties for the trio to deal with, and as a result the moral battle between Kazuya and Kaiji actually becomes more interesting than the game itself. This is obviously not right, because the star of the show SHOULD be the game itself, and the battle of philosophies should be an underpinning theme.

I may be coming across as if I hate this arc and the game, but I really don't. It is still a suspenseful and intriguing game, especially if marathoned. It simply does not feel as tightly planned as all the other games devised by Fukumoto, and many twists and turns do not feel like they arise naturally at all. These twists are still unpredictable in nature, but they still lose their effect over the duration of this arc. Fukumoto teases certain developments later on to keep readers reading, but these usually turn out disappointing. We can sense that Kaiji will potentially become more than just a mere spectator to this game, but when this does happen, it is extremely minimal and disappointing. Honestly, Kaiji as a character in this arc is reduced to a screaming, panicking crybaby. Well, Kaiji has always been like that, but we are usually given some moments of genius and badassery to serve as the satisfying antithesis of this. In this arc he contributes no such noteworthy moments. Perhaps his presence was diluted so we could drink in the deliciously evil nature of Kazuya, who is really the man of this arc. Kazuya is simultaneously honest and duplicitous, simultaneously generous and unforgiving, simultaneously fair and unfair. Though his meddling with the game was not always to my liking, Kazuya's paradoxical nature makes him a very interesting character to add to Fukumoto's roster of excellent villains. Despite being a spoiled scumbag, Kazuya is a highly entertaining character, even providing us with some very memorable reaction faces in this arc.

So, this is unarguably the worst Kaiji arc by far. Still, this does not mean it is bad; it is just bad by Fukumoto-standards. I recommend marathoning it to get the most out of Fukumoto's suspense building.

Luckily, it seems the One Poker Hen is rectifying many of these faults already.

This part totally surpassed all of my expectations its probably better than the first three parts.
Kaiji has always been a good gambling Anime/Manga the reason its gambling scenes was so dense was the tension; characters and the risks they took, their motivations and philosophies but this time it crushes its genre, the first three part was focusing on gambling I have no issues with that since its beautifully done but it was focusing on the gambling side of the story sure there was character motivations and philosophies but it was just a device to make the gambling even more thrilling this ... time it combines gamble with the philosophical side of the story they literally discuss about the human nature with an experiment how a selfless caring person can turn into a selfish bastard under the right circumstances because their instincts to live tell them so. This time it combines the 2 sides of the story perfectly Gamble and Philosophy.

About art its the classic "Fukumoto Aesthedic" the characters are extremely ugly but its done in a matter it really helps you to understand the feelings of the characters just by looking their faces
Nothing special to say about it i am not an artist I can't review it on a technical level

And thats all I can say about it

The way things are going, when Sakazaki told Kaiji that he peaked during the pachinko arc and that he should stop gambling, that was a metacommentary, since the two arcs that have followed have both been worse than the last. Still, it’s not bad, it’s still packed to the brim with the old Kaiji flavour that’s always been there, but you don’t need to be a very harsh critic to come to the same conclusion as I did, he’s not even doing anything this time around, why would they honestly have thought I’d respond positively to that?

Overall, I’d argue the biggest issue with Kazuya-Hen is ... the way in which the story was orchestrated and paced - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There was nothing wrong with the old cyclical formula of Kaiji needs money, gambles for it, but goes too far and loses it, and so he needs money, and gambles for it, and so on. Instead, this time around, he’s just talking to Kazuya (son of Hyoudo) at what is essentially a bookie. He has gone from Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor to Kaiji: Ultimate Spectator, but the essence of the game is the prisoner’s dilemma: 3 people are sat in a chair and one person is tasked with getting up and pressing a button after 30 seconds, but no more than 60, and they also can’t talk to each other during the process. One thing I will say though is that the characterisation early on, the first five volumes in particular, are of exceptional quality, and Kazuya as a character is definitely the most unique, compelling, and overall human of Kaiji’s main opponents thus far. Not only that, but we’re given flashbacks of the backstories of the newly introduced characters, and by some miracle, these hastily introduced flashbacks of people we’ve just met are actually good, it might be a bit of a change of pace to talk about the post-Showa economic bubble and Filipino garbage collectors and the like, but it works well, and if I’m praising flashback sequences, you know they’re fucking good.
The characterisation in this manga are as good as they get, it’s just a shame that once the game gets going, it largely ceases, and Kazuya in particular starts to take after his father and just starts to engage in pure sadism, but while Hyoudo liked seeing people in pain and not much else, Kazuya’s also got pure contempt for any sort of feelings of friendship, happiness, trust, and just about anything else remotely nice. That contempt is absolute, even Emil Cioran seemed to at least acknowledge the existence of happiness, but not this chap. And, naturally, Kaiji is his binary opposite, which makes enough sense for narrative purposes, but such clear absolutes seem a bit at odds with the nature of things in the series usually, consider for instance that one speech by Tonegawa that mentioned how the rich and poor aren’t really any different upon examination, the word for that is ambiguity, which there is a profound absence of this time around, and it seems a little unusual, to say the least. Certainly, Kaiji is naive, and trusts people when he shouldn’t, but him trusting people so strongly seems a bit odd to me, and for someone who mentioned at one point how he’s an outcast but that’s how he prefers it (paraphrase), such an unwaveringly positive view of people is a bit strange.

And really, I haven’t got much else to say, the game isn’t bad per se, just a whole lot of blokes sitting in a chair and then getting up to press a button as Kazuya tries to subtly sabotage their efforts and produce feelings of mistrust, which never goes very far, until the last 3 (of 16) rounds at which point he just says fuck it and turns it up to 10, but really, what need was there for 16 rounds? The intensity of the games is Kaiji’s schwerpunkt, wouldn’t it have been a better move to instead just make it 10 rounds, or 5, but have the mindgames and moral dilemmas and everything else be at their limit throughout their entirety, or at least the majority? The early rounds aren’t boring, they’re just not up to the usual standard of the rest of them, it’s just a lot of filler and I am starting to sense a pattern here, a rather bland game for more or less the entirety of the manga, and then suddenly near the end it all becomes a mental battlefield, when it’d be more effective to just have that for longer - increase the good parts, decrease the filler, write more good characters, bish, bash, bosh.

Throughout Kaiji, Fukumoto submerges the audience in the subjective experiences of individuals going through extreme suffering. He does this not for the sake of a detached notion of "psychology", but rather to induce an edifying empathic response. These are mythical stories, tapestries of human life, suffering and the inextricability of the two from each other. The famed, repetitive sequences in which we enter into someone's (usually Kaiji's) thoughts and are barraged by wavy lines, screaming, neurotic thinking and visual metaphors involving death, not only dramatize our (contemporary) suffering but link it to eternity. Fukumoto relates all to all: we see Job in the characters and ... we see ourselves in them too.

However, Fukumoto tends to spin such a yarn out of the intellectual battles that Kaiji ends up in that readers are left conflicted. Half sharing in the agony of Kaiji's psychosis, half delighted by Fukumoto's witty plot twists. Part 4 of Kaiji makes the solemnity and universality of the story more apparent and inescapable (even oppressive) than in past arcs. This is apparent in the gruesomeness of its main "game". The meat of the story is nail biting but it is too obviously disturbing to be entertaining. A life or death mahjong game does not force you to consider its lethal consequences at every moment, but the "Salvation Game" of Part 4 is disturbing in its very visual construction. It is not only this factor that makes Kaiji Part 4 so grave, however.

Part 3 is mostly magnificent and jubilant, but undercuts itself more often as it goes on, and Kaiji begins to truly panic. Most potently, the victory that Kaiji eventually achieves becomes slightly underwhelming because Fukumoto highlights the randomness of it all. Kaiji didn't "deserve to win", and he barely escaped being cut into pieces. When the psychopathic villain Muraoka is defeated and Kaiji is not only spared but given millions of dollars, Kaiji expresses ambivalence rather than joy. It isn't just that he doesn't seem that happy about the money. He also begins to feel sympathy for Muraoka, who, while writhing around on the floor out of madness and agony after losing, has wet his underwear.

Part 4, then, picks up right where Part 3 left off both narratively and thematically. Fukumoto shifts Kaiji into the background for the entire Part and dramatizes the inner lives of the chillingly cruel villain Kazuya, and three new characters, Mario, Chang, and Mitsuyama. The former is a revelation: through Kazuya's deranged, vulnerable speeches detailing his sympathetic but evil ideology, Fukumoto makes the Dostoevsky influence present in his depiction of inner monologues extend also to long, emotionally charged discussions of what is essentially theology. While Kazuya talks about his belief that human nature is unchangeably completely evil, like a great Dostoevsky speech, revulsion at his hatefulness and incorrectness take a back seat to compassion and partial understanding. Fukumoto gives him the floor, and Kazuya expresses his thoughts so vulnerably and fully that the reluctant Kaiji feels it; he is unable to completely refute Kazuya, not only because Kazuya is a better rhetorician, but also because Kaiji knows he's onto something. He does not merely see a twisted logic in Kazuya's explanation. Kaiji empathizes with the suffering, and ultimately the cynicism, that Kazuya expresses. To see yourself in someone you despise is true connection, and to depict that as an artist, particularly in a genre that thrives on treating opponents as less than human, is true boldness. That Kaiji continues to disagree with Kazuya despite feeling the sincerity of his longing for understanding and mutual honesty is what makes it work. It's the difference between a work that evokes the universality of human experience and a nihilist polemic.

One may imagine that the time spent with the new characters, three incredibly poor and incredibly close friends, must be less moving than that time spent with Kazuya. After all, Kazuya's perspective as someone born into immense wealth is one we have not seen before in the series, whereas Kaiji himself is, like these three friends, poor, caring and sentimental. But expanding the focus beyond Kaiji and people he knows makes it clear that the mythical aspects of the manga serve its empathic purpose, rather than the other way around. If this had been a manga about immortalizing the struggles of Kaiji alone, then the empathy shown towards Kaiji (or even his "equals" like Kazuya, who he gambles against) would be tools that aide the depiction of some sort of battle of the gods. Fukumoto, thankfully not a tedious writer, does the opposite, and places the audience so totally in the experience of Mario that it is as though he was the main character. As he once related the reader, Kaiji and the history of man's suffering, Fukumoto now links Mario to Kaiji, and Kaiji to Kazuya. The particulars of life and suffering are not limited to rich or poor, Japanese or foreigner nor to major characters or minor. It's immensely rewarding because Mario's life is not only so similar to Kaiji's but also so different from Kaiji's, as revealed through numerous evocative details of backstory and inner monologue. His childhood of working long hours in the heat, scavenging through garbage to make the equivalent of one US dollar a day is too moving to be reducible to a thematic purpose. As is his love/hate relationship with his spirited, generous, happy Christian brother, whom Mario describes as "the weird one" when compared to the countless men in their environment who, under such cruel conditions, simply gave up. In one mind blowing moment, Kaiji even seems less virtuous than Mario! Had the notion of universal experience been (over)emphasized to the point that the specifics of individuals' selves and lives were overlooked, the manga would be no less tedious than those aforementioned stories which seem to assert most people as backgrounds for the all important duel between protagonist and antagonist.

Though it is in many ways a tangibly sickening, cynical work, Kaiji Part 4 is not unsettling. We all know we suffer unbearably. Fukumoto responds by pointing out that everyone else suffers just as much. It's as much a comfort as it is a challenge.

Kaiji part 4 was very disappointing for me. It started out strong with Kaiji again pursuing his grudge against Teiai by setting out to beat the founder's son in a gamble. Kaiji being introduced to his grave stone by said son really cemented him as someone intimidating and to be feared throughout the arc.

Throughout the beginning we also continue to learn more about Kazuya and what makes him tick and his whole motivation to engage in his sadistic gambles.

However, the characterization comes to a stand-still when we are introduced to the actual gamble of this part. It does not even involve Kaiji but three ... people we've never seen before. We're introduced to their backstories but they all come across as real sappy and melodramatic. It was hard for me to care about the new characters.

All Kaiji does throughout this part is just provide commentary on these other people's gamble. I thought this would be a diversion until the main gamble with Kaiji and Kazuya started but it wasn't. This gamble lasts until the end of this part, where it's concluded.

The gamble with the new characters started out compelling but afterwards it really felt drawn out and many chapters felt unnecessary.

I didn't know anything about Mahjong prior to reading part 3, but seeing Kaiji's struggle against people he once cared about and overcoming the president's tricks was much more engaging for me. Part 4 was a major let-down in being worse than the previous arc about a game I don't even know how to play.

Being the arc immediately after Kaiji's previous victory, some will expect to move into an arc about a big dramatic match between Kazuya and Kaiji. If that's what you expect, you will be let down. This arc has an incredible story, but be wary that it's one that breaks free from the formula.

The set-up for this arc is an ideological battle between Kazuya and Kaiji. Kaiji finds out the core of Kazuya's motivations, and we learn some of his background as a result. The core belief that Kazuya holds is that people, media, society, and so on, all promote an image of humanity that is ... fake. Behind the facade, people are ultimately self-serving and looking out for number one; themselves. Kaiji vehemently disagrees with Kazuya. The commentary is not subtle in the least, but really allows the story to get down to the question of "who's right?"

When the early chapters spell out what this arc will be about, it's not joking. Instead of facing Kaiji head-on, we get a story full of twists and turns where Kazuya puts this to the test with his special friendship-testing device. Kaiji is a spectator but this is not a bad thing. The arc concentrates on fleshing-out the new characters and waging this war of ideals, and it's fantastic because of it. Though the gambles in Kaiji are a big draw of the series, philosophical and societal questions are an integral part as well.

The story and signature Fukumoto art is exciting and great, but overall the arc is divisive. The formula had so far been using a gamble to introduce subtext, whereas here it is flipped. We know the subtext from the start and watch the gamble to answer a question, of which Kaiji is not directly involved in. In spite of this the arc is strong and most importantly, allows the overall story to continue in a meaningful way.