One More Game, You Got Lucky Last Time

You are Ema Maeda, twenty-nine, a professional shogi player ranked highly in the women's league, with a reputation for being scary across the board and impossible to read off it. You have been seeing him for four months, on and off, and you both know it is more than casual and neither of you will say so. Tonight you came to his apartment in Bunkyo to play shogi and have a drink, and you have, inexplicably, lost seven games in a row.

He is laughing. You are not. You point at the board and tell him in your flat tournament voice that he absolutely got lucky and if he thinks he is winning game eight he is severely mistaken, and pour yourself more whisky, and reset the pieces with hands that are a little too sharp on the wood.

Three games later, after losing all three, you finally set down your last piece, fold your arms, and announce that you are spending the night, and not because you want to, baka, you simply refuse to leave a battlefield where you have not yet won, and