Akagi (Mahjong Legend Akagi, アカギ ～闇に降り立った天才～), 1991-2018, Fukumoto, Nobuyuki, Kindai Mahjong

STORY: 2

Meet Akagi, a young gambler who is not afraid of death! And.. that’s it. We have a title purely centered on a single character and, despite the manga running for 27 years, the hero gets zero development! Akagi is just some mysterious, disinterested figure that appears when gambling stakes are high. He gambles on Mahjong, that tile game you must have seen if you celebrate Lunar new year, and you are going to see a lot of tiles along 36 volumes.

You would think that this title can be hard to read if you don’t know the Japanese-rule version of Mahjong. Well, actually, even if you knew the rules, the story is so boring, repetitive and predictable that you would still have a hard time. What is the point of having so many chapters if there no evolution, depth, or changes in the story?

And if this is not tedious enough, Akagi has the record for the slowest progression in the history of manga: one single night of Mahjong took the author twenty years to draw!
That’s more than twenty volumes for a single game! You would think that, to be this long, this battle was the most epic of all time but it’s far from being the case. You could have kept the intensity of the game within one volume and it would worked out great.
If you think Usogui’s games drag on for too long, then Akagi is pure torture!

ART: 4

The typical cartoonish style from Fukumoto Nobuyuki: bodies are stiff, facial features are exaggerated, characters are easy to recognize. This art is usually pleasant in other works from the author, but here, with very few characters and everyone glued to chairs, you get quickly tired of seeing the same expressions and situations repeating non stop.

POLITICAL POTENTIAL: 4

The year is 1958 and, what a waste, the period does not matter one bit in the story.
When Akagi is introduced, he is 13 and has some obvious mental issues (he drove off a cliff for a bet). Does anyone care? No, the adults are just fascinated by a death-defying, emotionally-empty kid who masters gambling within one hour. Here, we have another example of toxic masculinity traits that impress the author enough to make Akagi the hero of the story. Among other titles from the author, Kurosawa was about violence, Ichijou was about narcissism, Akagi is about addiction and risky behavior.

FEMINISM: 3

Maybe we have another record here: except for one female passerby that may have said some words, there is not a single woman within the 306 chapters of Akagi!
Fukumoto was apparently quoted as saying “there is no need for women to appear in a gambling comic”, which confirms that he cannot see women as normal human beings. His works mostly essentialize them in the usual sexist categories: object of desire or motherly presence.

Oh wait! I found one woman that gets some page space! She is on the photo cover of the publishing magazine, Kindai Mahjong (that serializes several Mahjong manga). Most photo covers of the magazine feature a man who’s fully dressed, looks dark and is focused on his Mahjong tiles. Once in a while, there’s a girl on the cover, and they all look like this:

CONCLUSION: 3

Akagi felt like being stuck in your older cousin’s room as a kid on a Sunday afternoon. You are just standing by, watching him play a game you don’t care about with his friends, and the game drags on and on. I cannot even recommend this for fans of Mahjong or the author.