I’ll get the bad news out of the way right from the start: the second Chihayafuru film is not that great of an actual film. If I were giving it a formal review, I’d probably spend a fair amount of time talking about how its first act hangs on insubstantial drama, as well as its inability to maintain the manga’s tactical sports intrigue, which generally acts as a needed counterbalance to the story’s melodrama. I’d praise Mayu Matsuoka for absolutely killing it as Shinobu, but reflect that ultimately, in spite of doing its best to reconstitute the manga into a coherent three-film structure, it loses too much of the original’s appeal in the process. I’d conclude by summarizing it as not a great film in its own right, but a very fun lark for fans of the franchise, and a fascinating exercise in the difficulty of translating ongoing manga to discrete films.

Fortunately, this isn’t a formal review, and I don’t particularly care about convincing you to watch or not watch this film. Instead, because this is my site, we get to focus on the fun part – that absurd, maddening difficulty of turning long volumes of karuta matches into a coherent movie!

The funny thing about this film is, in spite of it not being the most dramatically effective thing ever, nearly all of its adaptation choices struck me as very smart. To take the first example at hand, after the first film ends on Chihaya’s victory over Hokuo at regionals, we jump directly to Chihaya and Taichi traveling to visit Arata. The first film moved the death of Arata’s grandfather forward along the timeline, allowing him and his friends to establish their “dramatic neutral” early on, while also giving present-day Arata a reason to be actively involved in Chihaya’s story. Here in this film, starting with the reveal of his grandfather’s death allows Arata to once again feel more central to the narrative than he did in the manga, while simultaneously tethering his path back to karuta to both Chihaya and Shinobu’s meditations on whether karuta is best understood as a solo or communal activity.

That, too, counts as a major and very intelligent change from the source material. In the manga, Shinobu’s first appearance comes when she randomly crosses with Chihaya, and their first actual match has no real thematic undertone beyond “time to prove myself against the Queen!” Because Chihayafuru the manga generally builds to matches which are their own tactical reward, its battles don’t always need a clear emotional or thematic intent. In contrast, in a film that lacks the running time or cinematographic acuity to make matches exciting in pure tactical terms, each fight must be a Battle of Ideas in order to be a meaningful battle at all. And so, instead of holding off the reveal of Shinobu’s philosophy for a whole extra year, her very first battle is framed in terms of “I’ll prove to you that solo karuta is superior to team karuta.”

Granted, it probably helps that these films have the luxury of knowing from the start what Chihayafuru is actually about. In the manga, it was quite possible that Yuki Suetsugu only realized Shinobu and Arata being childhood friends would be a key dramatic device after introducing her – her first relevance is “the greatest challenge for Chihaya to face,” and other aspects of her dramatic profile are fleshed out as they become needed. For the films, knowing from the start that Arata and Shinobu’s debates would become one of this story’s key philosophical arguments, and that Shinobu’s feelings of isolation would be key to the overall story’s thematic thrust, allows smart revisions like having Shinobu first introduced at Arata’s grandfather’s grave. Her rivalry with Arata is thus correctly framed as even more important than her rivalry with Chihaya, and the preeminence of this “solo versus team” argument can furthermore be seeded all throughout this film’s conflicts.

All these smart revisions ultimately point backwards to another truth – how impossibly difficult it is to write cohesive long-form drama in weekly manga form. If Chihayafuru were written as a novel, Suetsugu could simply look back after the first draft was complete, and realize “oh hey, Arata’s narrative is dramatically out of sync with that of his friends. If I move the whole grandfather arc here, I can use his story as a thematic counterpoint to this other narrative. That will require rewriting a bunch of these conversations, but it will ultimately result in a more cohesive story.”

If you’ve ever written long-form fiction, you know that negotiations and major revisions like this are an essential part of the process. In light of this, the fact that manga artists must make sure their work is immediately entertaining enough to maintain a readership each week, while also being unable to revise earlier material in order to account for an increasing understanding of their story’s trajectory, means they’re working under impossibly strict creative conditions. The fact that so many manga artists still use this medium to tell ambitious, thematically searing, long-form drama is incredible, and a testament to how much of storytelling is preparation. If you’re simply starting out as a writer, the correct guideline is generally “just write, and see what happens.” If you’re one of these lunatic geniuses, you have the sculpture in your mind’s eye before you ever pick up the chisel.

Incidentally, the necessity of preparation, and the importance of letting your story’s key goals define its trajectory, is why I tend to chuckle when stories include fictional writers who “just can’t figure out the ending” to their story. It makes in-story sense that these writers can’t find their endings, because discovering an ending is an exciting concept that makes sense of everything, and can be used to obvious dramatic purpose. However, for a professional writer, the ending is the story. Where and how you choose to end a story defines its ultimate takeaway, and tends to be the point, emotion, or whatever else that led that writer to craft that story in the first place. Writers absolutely need to be open to adjusting their narrative trajectories and embracing new ideas, but it feels to me that writing a story without knowing the ending is a lot like welding random car parts together, and hoping that once you’ve run out of parts you’ll arrive at a working SUV.

Anyway, we were talking about Chihayafuru. Though I’ve spent a lot of words praising this film’s methods of rewriting Chihayafuru in order to create a more tightly written and thematically cohesive story, that desire also inspires some of this film’s least effective choices. The fatal, damning flaw of this film franchise is its utter inability to recreate the match sequences that are the actual highlight of the manga/anime. Those matches rely on a specificity of tactical interplay that the source material spends dozens of chapters ensuring we understand, and moreover demands a precision of visual language that’s frankly impossible for a film of this production tier to manage. And so, in order to make up for the lack of lesser matches and preparatory conceits and tactical interplay that makes up over half of Chihayafuru’s material, the film leans that much harder on the story’s character drama, and does its level best to turn a hundred chapters of “but how does she really feel” asides between matches into a coherent dramatic arc.

In the manga, Chihaya’s feelings towards karuta are almost elemental in nature, an energy so strong it carries everyone else in her wake. That works fine when your story’s appeal is how fun karuta matches are, but a film like this demands more concrete character arcs. Because of this, the film decides to directly tie Chihaya’s passion for karuta into her fear of being left alone – after losing Taichi and Arata as a child, she was forced to cling that much tighter to the passion that hadn’t abandoned her. In the present tense, this fear expresses itself as a complex forcing her to choose between working for the team and working on solo Queen practice, thus creating a rift within the group. It’s a smart choice in theory, and leads to great individual lines like “if you win against the Queen, it won’t make Arata come back,” while also echoing the isolation-versus-community arcs of Shinobu and Arata. The only problem is… it’s an entirely invented complex that never existed in the original material, thus making the first fifty minutes of this film feel like a quick jog away from and then back to the actual narrative, while also feeling totally out of character for Chihaya herself.

That arc being both unconvincing emotionally and inconsequential dramatically is definitely this film’s biggest failing, but even that arc is full of smart individual choices. Reducing endless volumes of manga to ninety minutes of film demands ruthless cuts, and what this film chooses to save stands as a smartly chosen greatest hits of thematically relevant Chihayafuru moments. Arata’s advice to “find an image of the place where you were happiest playing karuta” acts as a natural line linking him, his grandfather, and his friends, and cleverly informs Taichi’s ascension into Class A. Having Chihaya dash off to practice with Hokuo might not seem exactly in character, but it allows Sudo handing off the team’s opposition research to both stand as a welcome dramatic payoff in its own right, and also neatly conclude Chihaya’s solo play arc. It’s abundantly clear that this film’s writers took that “solo versus team play” theme as their guiding principle, and slotted in familiar scenes however they could to illustrate and contrast that theme across Arata, Shinobu, Chihaya, and Taichi all at once. While I might dearly miss Chihayafuru’s match scenes, I can’t deny this is fine, intelligent design work.

In the end, the film’s pieces come together in a genuinely thrilling finale, as Chihaya’s team-based philosophy gives her the strength to fight the Queen. After a film that explored this contrast in philosophies from every possible angle, Harada’s claim that “solo karuta is team karuta” is proven true, with one trusted ally after another pushing her upwards to glory. In the dazzling, joyous dance of these two characters fighting with all they’ve got, I can forgive a little dramatic wonkiness. This is Chihayafuru. You’re gonna have a good time.

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