Kaiji is An American Masterpiece

    Kaiji is a Manga written by Nobuyuki Fujimoto. While on the surface it is a "Gambling" manga, Kaiji is actually about a vast array of interesting subjects. [LIST GOES HERE]. The story if the character Kaiji is such a profound one in so many ways, least of which being the universal story of a struggle against powers so much bigger that you as to render you a helpless non actor in your own story. So, yeah, you are in for a fucking RIDE!

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    To tell the story beat by beat would be to ruin the finer points of an experience that requires genuine interaction to harvest the full bounty of the crop that is Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji:

   The text and subtext are so beyond what manga has meant to me personally that it took me from the start of the pandemic until now to digest it. The characters and how their struggle is illustrated is so incredibly rich in its attention to detail that you feel like you are reading a book about Jojo characters with money problems. The world in which the action takes place is so effectively and sincerely trying to portray something unique and stylish while describing the most mundane of actions, it simultaneously feels like a fantasy and a grounded story about being a debtor in Japan. 

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    Let's get personal, we all deal with systems of oppression. If you are here (first, how?) you might be an anime enjoyer. Those two fractured sentences are to prove that it is not HARD to imagine some of us see the unfairness in our world like a Freeza or a Vampire Hitler. Why not, it harms no one. So, when I tell you that the people in Kaiji are all real people who exist in real life and this story is the closest we can get to a Shonen protagonist WE might be one day, I present to you, title dropping it for the last time: Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji

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    Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji is an American masterpiece because of how absolute it depicts the predatory and insidious nature of money. From chapter one the very act of doing something human has rendered our boy, Kaiji (in case you haven't figured out he is the main character) in a mountain of debt he CANNOT escape. This series of events ends what little he could call a life and embroils him in a world so dark that I have to turn up my brightness to not get depressed while watching. 

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    If you are hate reading this far, yes, Kaiji is Japanese and VERY based in their culture, the thesis of this ""REVIEW""" is to convince you of the importance of Kaiji because it is not getting the love it deserves in the USA. We spend so much money paying people to write movies that make us feel better and the way The States works, most of those people just give it to the people who are oppressing us. We are paying to be robbed and demanding we be told a bedtime story here in Burgerworld. So when I say Kaiji is an American Masterpiece I mean it the same way that Scarface is an American Masterpiece and it's about a guy from Cuba. 

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    The "American Masterpiece" comes from its relation to a shared sense of Americana. While Fujimoto didn't intend to give such an insightful look into the way money oppresses Americans, he did it. The fact it translates regardless of how money laundering differs between the US and Japan is par of the whole Masterpiece with a capitol M thing. Much like the Yakuza series of games it partakes in a lot of cultural exchange not only by being unabashedly Japanese but having such a distinct flavor that it can't help but pique taste buds of foreigners and help them relate in a way that only food or food metaphors could. I don't need to be incredibly smart to get that a guy in Japan with debt is just dealing with a different flavor of Loan Shark.

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    As the Manga progresses and the fun stuff I don't want to spoil happens (heretofore to be referred to as "THE GAMBLES" defined as a 'game' in which 'participants' gamble and the 'risk' is usually higher than any person would be comfortable with) we find the conversations are so expository and informative as to make every character almost inhumanly eloquent; as THE GAMBLES go on people often are so incredibly willing to explain not only the rules and risks of each game but the very structures that have locked the two participants into the game in the first place.

 

    A lot of that paragraph was meant to sound like a criticism but FOOL ON YOU, that's a feature of this beautiful story. Those not of the weeb variety always bemoan the "verbal diarrhea" of some Manga/Anime as a problem because they can't remember more than ten words. Seriously, if you complain about the word count in a comic, you are damn near illiterate or at least lazy enough to qualify. So if people say that about a one page info dump about how a character 

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