Mahjong Diva Obaka Miiko Chapter 5

It's time for another chapter of the educational mahjong series, Obaka Miiko! In this chapter, Miiko is now a student of Gataka-pro, and he has instructed her not to call for an entire year! There's no way that can be good advice... can it?

Thanks to PenguinKnight again for letting me use his initial draft of the translation, and to Frenetic for stepping up to typeset this series again and again!

Obaka 5

"Closed-hand mahjong sometimes has explosive powers."

So actually, not calling at all is a good way to learn how powerful closed hands can get. For instance, personally I've gotten into the bad habit of calling way too much, even from hands that have lots of potential closed, so I could probably get something out of not calling for a while as well. I loved transliterating Miiko's shouts and stuff at Gataka's voice, coming up with ways to represent sounds is actually one of my favorite parts of translating. I love how Miiko has a little cross necklace, I'm sure she's not actually a Christian but it was still nice for me to see. Reika was also wearing one last chapter; the prevalence of crosses in this series was actually one of the reasons I decided to pick it up when I did. It just made me feel good about the series in general having just become a Christian myself a good 6 months ago. I know it's a really minor detail but it at least shows that Katayama might have a positive view of Christianity, or at the very least approves of crosses as a fashion choice.

The "Push with 1 safe tile, dodge with 2+" is a really good lesson, after all if you only have 1 safe tile you're just going to run out the next turn anyway if you don't draw more so you may as well push... as long as your hand is in fighting condition that is. I freaking love shashasha guy, so silly. Miiko definitely still wants to be Namidame's student, but it looks like we're going to have to go through some more drama before they can actually reunite again and she can get away from that scumbag Gataka. See you soon!