Akiba Maid War – 02 – Oink-cean’s Eleven

Being a café maid was a dream for Nagomi, but after one day it’s become more of a nightmare. She gets scant sleep after her traumatic experience the night before, and wakes to the grunting of Ranko sewing up a graze wound.

The breakfast table is accompanied by TV news reports of the dust-up, while Manager is punished for letting Ranko go too far by having to serve as a golf tee. Life’s hard out here for a maid.

Nagomi can’t reconcile last night’s violence with the calm of business as usual at the Oinky Doink, and the squirt of ketchup causes her to retch. Shiipon suggests she take a “stroll”, which for a maid means handing out pamphlets.

Initially, she’s bullied by rival maids into handing them out somewhere less favorable, but she gets an encouraging pep talk from a kind maid. Unfortunately, just when she’s feeling better about trying her hardest, the manager makes an announcement: the café is going out of business.

She got a loan from an obvious loan shark, using the Oinky Doink as collateral, then pissed away even the meager amount she got at said shark’s underground casino. But Yumechi isn’t about to give up.

The only way to save the café (and the maids’ home) is to win the money back at the casino, which caters specifically to maids. Using the day’s take (a handful of ¥10K bills), the maids hit the slots, table, and wheel, and…lose it all.

But there’s one last slight hope, which is clearly a mechanism by which the loan shark collects maids for human trafficking purpose: high-stakes maid poker using their potential futures as currency.

Shiipon, Manager, and Nagomi all lose their chips pretty quickly (Nagomi doesn’t even know how to play), but Ranko entrusts her chips to Yumechi, who uses them for one final all-or-nothing gamble.

Yumechi almosts pulls it off, with her 8-Jack Full House being beaten by a 9-Jack. But her dealer and opponents were cheating, so she and the others shouldn’t really be the shark’s property. Ranko asserts that position most emphatically…by pulling out her gun and shooting the shark between the eyes.

A gunfight ensues, with even Shiipon and Yumechi brandishing pistols, begging the question of why they weren’t frisked and disarmed on entry? Was it arrogance on the part of their casino maid hosts…or sportsmanship?

No matter: the Oinky Doink maids and the sloppy manager who got them in this mess end up getting out of it, and even when the head casino maid tosses a fuck-you grenade out the front door, Ranko catches it, throws it back, then turns and walks away slowly for that classic cinematic explosion stroll.

A speechless Nagomi watches the burning money fall and be astounded once more by the death and destruction wrought by her roommate. At the breakfast table the next day, the news reports and exploded underground casino, and all she can do is celebrate the fact that at least she’s alive…and not crabbing on a ship in the freezing Bering Sea. That’s something!

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Author: sesameacrylic

Zane Kalish is a staff writer for RABUJOI.

One thought on “Akiba Maid War – 02 – Oink-cean’s Eleven”

  1. This episode was even more nuts than the first one. I love the innate humor underlying all of the darkness Nagomi is caught up in. The loan-shark’s glib explanation that the Maid casino was all wholesome had me chuckling out aloud as did the maid chorus commenting on the card game. And The beautifully depicted, glittering yet cold, and alienated Akihabara streetscape sets the scene for it all.

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