Chihayafuru Season 2 – The Triumphant return of Chihaya!

Chihayafuru was one of those special series that managed to fit high school romance together with a traditional Japanese card game called karuta. Part of the fun of the first series was watching how oblivious Chihaya was to the increasing affection from both Taichi and Arata, even though the later spent half the series as an invisible force without any physical presence. It was a series with complicated character that were all struggling with their own view of the world, and karuta acted as a way to bring them all together under a common cause. The brilliance of the original series was how much tension an apparently simple game could produce and the increasingly complicated nature of Chihaya’s relationship with it and her schools karuta club. Karuta is a fascinating game, one that relies upon an intimate knowledge and understanding of 100 cards that represent 100 classical Japanese poems. It is a popular, and also rather complex game at first, and because it is a classical Japanese card game doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone of the same age as Chihayafuru’s characters.