Legendary Gambler Tetsuya – 01

Since there are only two episodes of this show (subbed or otherwise), I will blog through this in its entirety. Stay tuned for the second episode's summary.

Click on the  'read the rest of the entry' for the full summary.

It was right after World War II, where Japan was left in shreds by the Allies. At Shinjuku, life slowly came back to a start, and a market was focused where simple food was sold at a relatively cheap price. Discontentment was not allowed: these were hard times, and a man complaining of something of his food was driven away.

Someone sold some first-grade sushi. People around the stall contemptuously told off the vendor because no one would buy the sushi anyway. Yet, in fact, a person did. He has clean hair, clean clothes, and he ate sushi. People all around were looking at him: this was a man with money.

After eating he seeks a mahjong parlor; he then decides to let the coin in his hand decide where he is to go. The coin rolls and stops near a mahjong parlor, and this is the parlor that he enters. An older man follows him and picks up the coin after he entered.

The man, confident of himself, finds a place to play, and for quite some time a fox-eyed opponent got all the wins in their game. A flashback then occurs: back in a prisoner camp, a bald old man was teaching him about how luck flows, that one can only make one's luck go bad, and no one else's. After saying all this, he wins the game with a ron. The supervisor enters their room afterwards, shouts some pro-Japanese propaganda (it was WWII, after all), and knocks down the table. He then angrily shouts for the old man to die after the old man asked quiescence from this supervisor, but the supervisor haughtily tells the old man to die. An aura comes out of the old man: he then retorts that people die when they die, and the supervisor then discovers that the old man is yakuza. At that time, touching a Yakuza (or the Japanese mafia) would mean eventual death, so he laid his hands off this old man. We also discover that in this setting, the man being taught about luck and the man who was a newbie in the mahjong parlor was Tetsuya himself (if this wasn't obvious in the intro).

An alarm interrupts this face-off between the old man and the supervisor: this was a warning for a bombing to occur soon. Tetsuya and his crew run off to safety, but the old man walks up to the roof of where they were playing and stays there. Before this, Tetsuya asks the old man why he is going up when a bombing is nearby, and the old man simply replies that 'people with bad luck will die.'

True enough, as Tetsuya rises up from their bomb shelter, the factory, where the old man was, was left untouched by the bombing. The old man then tells Tetsuya that it's all luck.

The scene returns to the present. Tetsuya, inspired, uses an apostrophe to tell the old man to watch him. The fox-eyed has currently dominated the game; Tetsuya notes that he has taken the luck of the wig-man. The hand of the fox-eyed man is almost in Dai San Gen, from what I know among the hands with the largest points in Mahjong (the man also says so himself, more or less). Tetsuya stops this with a Tsuyao no mi, a cheap hand, but one that stifles the fox-eyed man.

Irate, the fox-eyed man throws his tiles on the board, and another game begins. Tetsuya wins again. The old man who picked up his coin, not that one in the past, enters and observes Tetsuya's game. Tetsuya wins again. In the end, he won their money, but the fox-eyed man didn't have any. Angered, Tetsuya almost punches the man in the face, but the old man set in the present time intervened. He punches the fox-eyed man first. The man set in the present is Boushu-san, by the way.

Boushu-san tells Tetsuya to stop, although Tetsuya challenges him. He then continues that if Tetsuya sees that parlor as easy, he'll die, and that Tetsuya plays a weak style of Mahjong. He then ups the ante to 500 yen, a large amount of money that time. Tetsuya feels that he can't back down, and so he plays with Boushu.

He keeps on winning until the last round, where his final wait on a Green Dragon will make him win. Yet Boushu irradiates a powerful aura, which makes Tetsuya hesitate. He picks up the tile that would make him win supposedly, but discovers it to be a different tile that the old man needed to win. He drops it, and the old man wins. Boushu then teaches him a lesson: he did what Tetsuya has done to that fox-eyed man.

After losing, he tries to find where the Green Dragon was hidden. He then finds it underneath the mahjong table. He wonders how the old man could have done it, because he didn't see the table move at all. Determined, he then uses his little money left (50 yen) returned by the old man to him to try to win it all again.