Saki: A Mahjong Anime

Based on the ongoing manga series (2006–) by Kobayashi Ritz, Saki (2009) is a sports anime in which the sport is mahjong.

Sports anime have their rails and they run on them. The heroes are high-school students who must rescue their sports club, which is either in danger of being dissolved or has just been restarted after dying for lack of players. One of the players was a star in middle-school but for tragic reasons has sworn never to play again, and despite this must be recruited so the club can scrape together just enough players to enter the prefectural qualifiers. As they progress towards competing in the nationals they must learn that teamwork is magic, and for some reason have a training camp in a hot springs hotel.

The anime dives right in to the game so you need to know a little about mahjong.

The little I know about mahjong

When my siblings and I were children our father owned a mahjong set, a small heavy box containing 144 tiles. The tiles are traditionally made from bone backed with bamboo, with characters or symbols carved in to them and painted; modern sets are generally resin or plastic. The tiles are chunky enough to stand up on their edge. The bamboo backs are slightly curved, but you can stack one on the back of another face-down on the table. While playing the game they are laid out in four walls made of stacks of two. Tiles are dealt out from the wall like dealing cards from a pack.

I won’t attempt to summarize the complete rules, but we played the game roughly like this: First, shuffle the tiles and build the walls, making a fuss about getting them straight. Then throw dice to choose where to break the wall. Each player takes 13 tiles as their hand. Normal turns consist of drawing the next tile from the wall, and discarding it or one of the tiles in your hand. If your hand plus the tile you draw falls in to four sets of three plus a pair, you say wu! and you’ve won that round.

Turn order gets disrupted when someone discards a tile another player needs to make a set, in which case they can claim it, lay the set face up, and then discard—with play continuing with the next player. This means if the player before you discards and the player after you claims it, you miss your go.

The other special feature that gets used early on in the anime is that one of types of sets is a kong, which is four of a kind. To make up the hand size after declaring a kong, the player draws from the ‘dead’ wall—the fourteen tiles set aside that are normally out of the game.

We played it mainly for the fun of building the wall and did not pay much attention to the scoring, whereas in the game as properly played the scoring system makes all the difference. The initial score for the four sets gets you some points, but then you double your score for things like having a pung (three of a kind) of dragons, or of the prevailing wind, or of your own wind, and so on. The doubles accumulate, so a very lucky hand can have an astronomical score. This means a canny player won’t aim to complete their hand as fast as possible, but to carry on improving it as much as they can before someone else completes theirs. As well as tallying up potential scores and probabilities of the right tile turning up in your head, you need to read the other players and their discards to estimate how close they are to winning.

Mahjong in the anime

Mahjong is like poker in that you play a large number of hands (traditionally at least 16, taking turns to be dealer), and the way to win overall is statistically: to cut your losses on hands you don’t win, and win big on the ones where you can. Naturally, like poker, apophenia means players start to spot patterns in the randomness of the game: maybe you’re luckiest when facing the door, or when playing South, or when you discard bamboo, or if your hand has your favourite tile in it. You think you can sense when the flow is going your way, or how to divert it away from your opponents.

In the world of Saki these irrational feelings and superstitions are reality.

Players in the anime range from fairly ordinary girls like Yūki, who is lucky when playing as East and eating her favourite food, to players with various degrees of uncanny insight in to other player’s situations, or ways of manipulating the flow of tiles so they get a lucky draw, or their opponents don’t.

These mahjong-specific superpowers are often very conditional on playing in certain ways or having certain goals or thinking about the game in certain metaphors. For example, Saki’s astonishing abilities are contingent on her aim being to neither win nor lose (net score ±0).

When powerful players meet, the outcome of their contradictory abilities can be the result of a dramatic psychic tussle or battle of wits. The televised audience watches them calmly drawing and discarding tiles, while in their minds players see the game as a battle between sword-wielding angels and cosmic anglers, ten-pin bowlers and mountaineers. In their green rooms the team tacticians try to deduce the conditions for their opponents’ powers and how to counter them.

Apart from that, the variation of mahjong played in Japan is different in details from the game I learned as a child, with extra rules and conditions on play, a more elaborate scoring system and extensive vocabulary for describing it. The anime assumes the viewer is steeped in the minutiae of the game, often flashing up a character’s hand as if we can work out its potential score in our heads, but at the same time finds ways to explain enough of why people are impressed by Saki’s play for the likes of me to follow the story.

Is Saki the protagonist?

Saki is the first character on screen, which is indeed the literal definition of protagonist. The first short arc is her being recruited to Kiyosumi High School’s mahjong club, despite having grown up hating playing mahjong with her family. The club president Hisa needs five girls in order to enter a team in the inter-high mahjong tournament (which is segmented by sex), and this year is the last chance before she graduates. And she quickly recognizes that Saki has uncanny powers, if she just knew how to use them. The anime runs through the training camp arc at a reasonable clip and soon they are in the prefectural qualifiers.

Most of the series is the tournaments. Mahjong always has four players, so we spend a lot of time in the company of three players from other schools. There are dozens of teams involved overall, and they all have their school’s take on school uniforms, team culture, training style, and individual friendships. They all have their special reasons why they have to win, or relationships with other players they have to support, and learning their powers we learn about the backstories that motivate those powers. There is enough going on in many of these other teams that they could just as easily be the main characters of their own mahjong anime, and in fact many scenes would appear to be from those hypothetical other series.

This becomes real in the second (2012) anime series, which adapts the manga Saki Achiga-hen episode of Side-A, in which a different mahjong club (Achiga High School in the mountains of Nara prefecture) has been closed and must be revived. The energetic protagonist Takakamo Shizuno wants to compete in the national tournament in hopes of meeting her old friend Haramura Nodoka (Saki’s friend in the first season) across the table there. I assume she dismissed simply phoning her as insufficiently dramatic. The other characters have their own reasons for wanting to excel in the nationals. It is very much its own series, with characters from the Saki series (who are in side B of the tournament) making cameos. In some ways it is better than the first season—the animation is better drawn, the characters are more evenly balanced, and it fast-forwards through some of the territory the first series covered already (like training camp and much of the prefectural qualifiers) to focus on the nationals.

The third season Saki: The Nationals (2014) is another series of long, drawn-out games, but they are now up against other prefectures’ strongest teams. As you would expect from prefectural champions, they are all a little bit more invested in the game of mahjong than is entirely healthy. At least, some people might think a teenaged priestess letting herself be possessed by old gods from the mountain is a disproportionate response to falling behind in a mahjong game, and some of the other teams’ approaches also present safeguarding issues. The supposed main characters appear very ordinary by comparison; we don’t learn much more about Saki or any of her teammates. All we get is backstory teasers, in which Saki feels sad about her backstory without actually elucidating it.

Fan service ick

The term fan service means anime creators inserting opportunities for ogling the female characters into the story and credit sequences. Now obviously beaches, swimming pools, and, in Japan at least, social bathing are things that exist, and the last of these is a cultural tradition you might feel is worth promoting. So they can be an organic part of the storyline—and anime aimed at a female audience are perfectly capable of depicting them tastefully. But some anime are so obviously pandering to the presumed lecherous male viewer as to make them unwatchable. The Saki manga was serialized in magazines with boys and young men as their target audience, so some intrusion of fan service is an expectation.

You could interpret Haramura Nodoka’s arc in the first series as a kind of interrogation of fan service culture. Her special mahjong power is she is oblivious to other players’ special powers. This is because she is a ‘digital’ player, relying for her understanding of other players’ positions on their discards only, ignoring their presence (or lack of it). This is because she normally plays mahjong online. Why doesn’t she go out with friends from school instead? Well, Nodoka is one of those anime girls with a wildly exaggerated bust, and the show does not scruple to show that boys fall over themselves chasing her, girls (including one of her teammates) make catty remarks, adult men (who should know better) leer at her, and adult women (who should know better) sneer at her. So she stays home, wears her princess dresses, and pays online into the night. Am I over-interpreting to read her blank aspect as her attempting to rise above the continual sexual harassment she is subject to? Or to feel the animators choosing to include lingering shots of her breast squashed up against the mahjong table, make us, the audience, complicit?

After writing this section I did a little searching online for the manga and Kobayashi Ritz’s web page (relying on machine translation from the Japanese) and I now feel any suggestion that Nodoka’s experience is some metafictional comment on fan-service culture and the relentless sexualization of teenage girls is just me trying to paper over these intrusions in to the super-powered mahjong action I actually came to watch. But I still don’t think Nodoka enjoys the attention she is subject to.

The second and third series were made by a different production company who are ‘good at fan service’, according to some review I read. For the most part this is not as bad as it sounds; the majority of the girls have respectable-looking school uniforms and dress in a manner that you can feel the girls would choose. Any group of five school pupils inevitably has one violator of the uniform code, and a couple of those show a lot of skin. Including in one case the regrettable innovation of cropped kosode and mini-hakama. Unlike Nodoka’s situation these girls don’t attract comment from other characters.

Let’s be friends / Lesbifriends

One of the nice things about the story is that the former opponents are friends after the contest is over. They enjoy playing mahjong, after all, so win or lose they look forward to playing again. A couple of rival teams from the first series even end up joining a combined training camp with the Kiyusomi girls, and a fine time is had by all.

There are also plenty of intense personal connections between various girls. Maybe some can be interpreted as sapphic, though given their feelings can only be expressed through the manner in which they play mahjong it’s difficult to say whether any particular pair are lovers or just good friends. The relationship showing (slow) progress is Nodoka and Saki, who have reached the stage of Nodoka holding Saki’s hand and saying ‘The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?’, while Saki is still stuck at ‘Gosh! Playing mahjong with friends is fun!’

Watching the anime

I watched the series on Crunchyroll, where they have grouped Saki (2009) and Saki: The Nationals (2014) as seasons 1 and 3 of one series and Saki Episode of Side A as a separate one. So to watch the series in publication order you need to switch series after season one and back again after Side A.

As a curious aside, the English-language subtitles change between seasons. The first season subtitles the Japanese words for the sets of tiles chī, pon, kan as chow, pung, and kong (the words I was taught, so I assume from the Chinese) and Saki’s rinshan kaihō is prosaically subtitled Tsumo after Kong. The rest of the mahjong jargon (yaku, mangan, ippatsu etc.) is subtitled with the Japanese words. The later seasons 3 switches to using chī, pon, kan.

One more thing, and this is a spoiler, but I know some people will want to know this before sitting down to watch an anime series: the end of the 2014 series is not the end of their story, and after a more-than-ten-year gap, I am not expecting a concluding season to be produced. So far as I can tell from the fan wiki, the manga is still on the last day of the competition, which is surely a record-setting level of time dilation for a serialized story.

Not sure I can recommend this anime unconditionally. But if you have to have an interest in super-powered mahjong and the design challenge of inventing 52 differnt schools’ uniforms, you could give it a try!