Chuukan Kanriroku Tonegawa Episode 24

I first learned about the chairman's obsessions with unusual forms of entertainment when he assigned Tonegawa the task of coming up with Restricted Rock-Paper-Scissors. This time, the chairman makes things more simple by outright telling Tonegawa to get on with implementing "Human Derby", a new gamble involving debtors, prepared only for the moneyed leader's amusement. The actual gamble isn't shown so as not to rob the show of its light-hearted feel, but anyone acquainted with Kaiji already knows what it is. One of the gambles of Kaiji season 1, it takes place at night in front of a huge bourgeois crowd, but Yamazaki is off enjoying an evening reserved all for himself. When he first received updates of this mysterious event, he immediately thought, "I have got to see this." I mean, how can you go wrong with a gamble specifically thought up by the chairman? Well, in some respects, his ideas sometimes fall short of sensible expectations. Yamazaki eventually does come close to finding out what it is, but his cell phone runs out of battery millisecond before his coworkers can tell him and the suspense continues.

A group of black suits has gathered for one of their peer's wedding. Tonegawa is present as well, but it's soon revealed that predictabe wedding parties are the bane of his wits. The guests do as they please, including showing a short movie about the groom's past, revealing unknown information about his origins, much to Tonegawa's surprise. He sets out to stick around longer, until the wedding photo shoot starts. In a fateful turn of events, two unpredicatble things happen. One is that the black suits elicit some coordenated action with their arms and legs, suggesting that they had planned in advance to form a flash mob. The other is Tonegawa's misjudging the effect of their efforts after noticing that the remainder of the crowd is warming up to it. Tonegawa acts defeated at first, but soon resigns to the overall cheerful mood and surprises everyone by walking away as if to retreat from the scene, only to moonwalk back to join the fun.

The very act of trying to relate an otherwise somber series like Kaiji with the upbeat tone of Chuukan Kanriroku Tonegawa would normally be taken as an exercise in futility. When Nobuyuki Fukumotto decided to do it anyway, i knew that i was in for some treat. All that was left was to check to see what he would come up with. At first I couldn't imagine how this could ever be reconciled with the bitter and tragic tone permeating all over Kaiji season 1. And it still can't, that's what season 2 was for, to smoothen out the edges and make the series more relatable by giving it a more human side. Chuukan Kanriroku Tonegawa is just the perfect touch to connect some loose ends about Tonegawa's background with the main story featured in the series. The end result is an artful production, which will have me coming back to rewatch it time and again. Just like the first two seasons of Kaiji.