Mukoubuchi Chapter 7

Chapter 7 is now up! With this, we've caught up to where we'd be if we hadn't missed a week, so we'll be going back to biweekly from now on. In this chapter, Wakamu from last chapter comes back for revenge on Kai, and we see the pro mahjong player Yasunaga for the first time since chapter 3!

Chapter Link

"Why don't I steal a bite or two off them, myself."

So we got 2 returning characters apart from Kai this chapter, we got to see Kai beat a 2-on-1 situation, and we heard a bit about what Yasunaga thinks of Kai, as well! That's a good chapter in my book. Clearly Yasunaga thinks very highly of Kai, so much so that Kai not winning as much as usual is enough to make him wonder if he's in a slump. And it was fun to see him rooting for Kai so openly; he really felt like a spectator this match, even though he got some hits on the two as well.

So the colluding that was done in this chapter felt more to alter the flow than anything; instead of playing normally, they thought that by making calls you'd never make they'd be able to disrupt the flow that's always going in Kai's favor. The other thing they did was to bluff in hopes that Kai would try to play it safe and let good hands get away from him. But by trapping them in a bluff of his own and then a double bluff, Kai brilliantly turned the flow back in his favor allowing him to run away with the game.

You get the impression from the last scene of the chapter that Kai doesn't need the money so much as he relishes in taking it from others. We saw last chapter that he just kind of stores it all away, so it feels like him insisting his opponent pay him back in a day or else suffer the consequences was mostly to satisfy his own sadistic pleasure. It's stuff like this that lead me to translate his title as "Demon in human form" instead of "Ogre in human form" or some such. I'm sure if you were playing him while he was telling you how terribly sorry he was to be winning so much, you'd start thinking he was a demon, yourself.

Finally, we learned about Binta this chapter. It's important to know it for this manga, which is why I went into such detail on it. There's a term that gets used a lot, "Kubi", or "neck" that means you're over 25000, and I was originally going to include it, but after seeing how it looked I kind of felt it was a bit unneeded and obtrusive so I left it out and replaced it with "above 25000". As I'm aware, you don't see binta used very often nowadays, but it was very popular in the 80's when this is set.