March Comes In Like a Lion Review

Rei Kiriyama is seventeen, professional, and living alone in an empty apartment because staying in the house that took him in had become worse than leaving it. Umino gives him shogi as a career and as a hiding place, then spends volume after volume prying him out of it. The board scenes are staged like duels, with clocks and sweat and Souya the deaf Meijin sitting behind a silence nobody in the room can read, but the series is never really about the game. It is about the bridge over the river, the Kawamoto house on the far side, and three sisters who keep handing a starving boy dinner until he can admit that he was starving.

The Hinata arc is the peak and it is brutal. Umino writes school bullying with no villain speech and no rescue, just an adult apparatus that would rather the problem went quiet, and a fourteen year old who will not apologise for standing next to the girl they picked. It sits in the middle of a manga about a board game and it is the best sustained writing in the run.

The art carries two registers at once. Umino washes whole pages into water and wind and falling snow when Rei's depression takes the wheel, then drops the same cast into chibi gags a panel later, and the whiplash is the point: that is what a bad head feels like from the inside. Nikaidou and Shimada keep the professional shogi world from turning into an abstraction, and the Soutetsu study group chapters are quietly the warmest thing in the book. It is long, it wanders, and it earns nearly every digression it takes.