It took me a long while to write this review because I felt like I'd never going to be able to put into words how incredible important this manga is for me, and how it changed not only me, but the very competitive karuta scene in Japan and around the world.
Chihayafuru is a story about three childhood friends that end up playing the same thing together: Karuta. It is a real game that's been around for almost a thousand years, and was previously played using shells instead of cards. The one played in the manga is called Competitive Karuta, which is a form of karuta that combines agility, memory and poetry. I want to start by saying that it wasn't that much popular before Chihayafuru, and that a manga, THIS manga, was able to make it popular again.
These three childhood friends end up growing up and going different ways, only to find each other again, for different reasons, in high school. Our main character, Chihaya Ayase, who is completely addicted to karuta, really wants to make a club out of it in her new school, but (as you probably felt reading all my previous paragraph) there weren't a lot of people interested in karuta/that really understood it at first glance. In Japan, kids are made to remember all the 100 poems that are needed for playing competitive karuta, so it kind of becomes a traumatic memory for most. Still, Chihaya decides to find people to play with her, and, during that, ends up trying to re-connect with the two people who played with her when she was a teenager. One of the boys, Taichi, hasn't played it since his childhood because of other interests, and her other friend, Arata, the one who showed her what karuta was about, was faced with incredible loss and stopped playing it for good.
Chihaya never stopped, though. With her unwavering love and having find a dream that is finally hers: to become the Queen, the strongest female player of karuta in all of Japan. As she moves foward, her old friends and new friends she make along the way end up getting dazzled by karuta as well, meeting her in her journey as friends, teammates, rivals, senpais and kouhais. This is a story about a young girl figuring out what she wants to be, following her dream, falling in love and meeting incredible people as she plays one of the most delicate and yet intense games ever made (so intense that is considered a sport in Japan, actually). The 100 poems speak to her, and speak to the reader. The author, Suetsugu Yuki, is incredible in every aspect: The metaphors, the art, the story, the way she writes her characters. She is able to show how competitive karuta matches work through the eyes of the players. The romance has its many setbacks, but is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever seen (Shipping them for literal 8 years and seeing them end up together was one of the best moments of my life). The characters stayed and will stay with me forever as well.
This is an amazing story, an amazing shoujo, an amazing romance. I hope you give it a chance even though my review might've been too emotional and not say much about the actual story. And if you do give it a chance, I hope it makes you want to keep moving on as it did for me.
"Like a boatsman adrift at the mouth of Yura, I do not know where this love will take me." - Sone no Yoshitada (poem 46)
