This is part of the March Comes in Like A Lion Book Club. If you stumbled onto this thread, start at the Main Page, where you can find more info, schedules, and links to the discussions and vocabulary lists.
On your little pieces spreadsheet. I am pretty sure I remember reading that the と in Tokin is also in itself a version of 金 in as cursive as possible. And maybe I’m misreading, but for the 龍王 and 竜馬 pieces, they both also have 王 and 馬 written on their piece as well.
Welcome to the book club! At least, I hope you will join.
Yes, I need that little spreadsheet because the pieces are super confusing.
Several of them have the same kanji in them. Also, the single kanji abbreviations are sometimes the first Kanji, and sometimes the second. For example, the abbreviation of a promoted bishop 竜馬) is 馬, which I used to confuse for 桂馬, because 桂馬 is like a knight, which in chess is shaped like a horse. But nooooo. Also, the promoted bishop and rook pieces both have have the old kanji for dragon 龍 drawn on them, but when typed out in text, the new Kanji 竜 is used. It’s a mess. Use the sheet.
Oh, and:
と is a promoted pawn, which is functionally equivalent to a 金.
Perhaps I worded that poorly. I was referring to the notes on the right side of your sheet and not asking a question. The origin of the と for と金 is because the と on the back is 金 written in a super 草書 style. The same is true of the Lance, it is just another variant of 金 on the back. As you can see, they are written in progressively more cursive styles.
For the other part, I was referring to the fact that in the guide, both the 龍王 and 龍馬 just say “kanji for dragon”, but both 王 and 馬 are also written on the pieces themselves.
We might be talking past each other here. I’m just saying they both have two Kanji on them. This has nothing to do with the 龍 but below 龍 there are 王 and 馬 respectively, you can see it on your sheet as well, but this picture here is an obvious example:(You can see this on Rei’s too).
I’m clearly tired. I noticed at one point that that little squiggle at the bottom of the piece is a cursive Kanji, and then promptly forgot, obviously. I have seen pictures of sets where it is legible, though.
I think we on the same page now: you are finding the cursive Kanji interesting and commenting on it?
I’m not reading this book but I enjoyed watching the anime (with subtitles). I was just wondering how you are finding all the Shougi terminology. It must be really tough!
The Manga is pretty similar to the show, so far, and I loved the Anime. My main impetus for reading the Manga is that the show only goes through book 9, and there are 15 books out, with another one due to be published any day.
So, if you get to the end of the show and find yourself wondering what happens next, please keep an eye on the book club!
Kind of having a bit of a hard time with the manga in general at the moment. The more creative fonts - especially on black backgrounds - render OTR useless and make it quite hard to look up the kanji. Also feels like the language is quite flowery(?) at times which is making it harder to understand the longer train of thoughts. But it’s all right. I’ve seen the anime and get enough out of it to follow along.
