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Kaiji Itou is something you don't often see in anime heroes - a bum. Aged 23 and what the Japanese contemptuously term a NEET (not in education, employment or training), he passes his days engaged in fruitless gambling, hanging about his crappy apartment and amusing himself by vandalizing expensive imported cars. That all changes when a loan shark shows up at his door demanding payment for a loan on which he co-signed for a vague acquaintance a year earlier - a debt currently weighing in at nearly four million yen. Kaiji has no choice but to accept the offer of a night aboard the gambling ship Espoir, where he and dozens of others have a slim chance of wiping out their debts to the syndicate, if they can win through the bizarre card games that've been devised for them to play.
That's the unpromising setup for a series that I started watching a few months ago, only to find myself crying out for the next fansubbed installment in short order. Kaiji's the Oz of modern Japanese TV, a show full of desperation, misery, claustrophobia, suffocating homosociality, tenuous alliances and bitter mistrust - the card game the bottom-feeding gamblers must play, Restricted Rock Paper Scissors, is childishly simple, yet tears open the psychological makeup of the players as they compete to win before the time limit expires. Kaiji himself is an amazing protagonist; starting out lazy, gullible and irresponsible, one of life's back-seat drivers, he evolves under pressure into a ruthless, brilliant strategist, inspirational leader and courageous opponent - which isn't to say that he's boringly infallible or in any way heroic, but that his errors, defeats and simple fuckups are all the more involving for the heights he's capable of.
Stylistically the show's in a class of its own too. Devoid of the cutesy style seen in every other contemporary anime, the characters are ugly and distinctive caricatures, convincing inhabitants of the lightless, desperate world of inescapable debt. The background music, with the recurrent Zawa Zawa! motif at moments of high tension, gets under the skin and the metaphors that embody the characters' circumstances - quicksand, abysses, demons - are brought to the screen in a manner that's at once crude and obvious, and lethally effective. Fumihiko Tachiki (the sepulchral voice of Gendo Ikari and Kenpachi Zaraki) narrates with gusto. And the Oi! punk stomp of the opening theme is a quick and dirty bit of joy.
Watch episode one in three parts. It's damn addictive, I warn you. |
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