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!

[C]: Control: The Money and Soul of Possibility 9

[C] finally makes its apearance as a menacing force of nature that devolves whatever civilization it comes into contact with. We saw a glimpse of this when the Tokyo skyline shrunk, but this week it happened all over East Asia; Singapore was totally wiped out and Shanghai became a shadow of its former self. Mikuni, backed by his guild, makes a deal with the devil (Masakaki) to secure funds to stage a last-minute buy that saves Japan from utter ruin, but at a humongous price. The GDP, economy, and infrastructure devolve more than a decade (this is obviously a reference to the real-life “lost decade”, birth rates plummet, and Tokyo is steeped in poverty and squalor.

This was another “jumper” like episode three in its first half, going back and forth through the timeline, unfolding how Mikuni managed to do what he did. But it was only a band-aid, and Yoga doesn’t believe it was worth it. Satou agrees, and they both agree to work to restore the future they had lost. Enter Mashyu: Yoga learns from Mr. Goldteeth that his father had an asset called Mua that looked just like Mashyu. He changed his tune about his father, who clearly had far nobler designs than he initially thought. Similarly, Yoga gets the idea that Mashyu was meant to be his own daughter, but joining Midas meant selling her for collateral. Assets are lost dreams personified.

As much as Mashyu has grown, she is still only an asset. Yoga wants her to be a real girl, and he wants everyone still in his life to have their futures repaired. This includes a Hanabi and a store manager who have totally given up. Indeed, the whole country has, which is why no one is being born. He can’t accept this Japan, and he won’t let it stay that way. They tried it Mikuni’s way, now it’s time for him to spring into action. No more sitting on the sidelines, no more soul-searching. Only…what are they going to do? Rating: 4

[C]: Control: The Money and Soul of Possibility 4

Yoga’s opponent turns out not to be his father, but one of his professors, Ebara-sensei. Thanks to quick thinking from Mishu, Yoga is able to defeat him, and he learns exactly what defeat means. The fight was continually dotted with a scene in the real world where Ebara’s wife is in the class, pregnant with their third child. But when Yoga meets with Ebara after class, his wife isn’t pregnant anymore, and they have no other children. For Ebara, those children were the future he put on collateral when he became an Entre.

Yoga feels terrible, but Ebara doesn’t blame him; he lost fair and square, but he will have to live with the consequences. Interestingly, the only other person with memories he ever had children is Yoga, his opponent. So he doesn’t want Yoga to lose. Moreover, Mikuni has created an organization – the Starling Guild – that seeks to maximize profit by minimizing the effect of deal outcomes on the real world. Now it’s more clear why Yoga’s dad committed suicide – he had gained so much, that when he went bankrupt, so much of his world changed, he couldn’t deal. Mikuni seeks to avoid that, and puts on quite a show doing just that.

For him, deals is more about winning and losing. It’s about preventing Midas Bank from overly influencing real world events. When Starling Guild has 50% share – and the promise of never going bankrupt is a good recruiting tool – they believe they can start influencing events in the financial world, turning the tables so to speak. What is interesting is that Masakaki allows this behavior; you’d think he’d want to amass as much “future” as possible.

Yoga is weary of his potential, much to the chagrin of his asset – but a lot of that is due to the guilt of defeating people and what it means. He isn’t heartless. So his goal in future deals will not be to “win” outright, but strive to simply “not lose” and thus not totally ruin his opponents. Rating: 4