It’s episode 11 of Shion no Ō. Hisatani has his next match and things start getting steamy between him and Saori. Meanwhile, we find out the fate of Hisatani’s phone. And why are Shion’s mother and Satoru meeting up secretly at night?
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Go Straight to the Screenshots | Go Straight to the Review
The highlights of this episode:
- The call to Shion from her parent’s murderer continues, with the murderer saying that he’s glad that Shion has continued playing shogi. Shion is barely able to spit out a “who are you?,” but the murderer merely regretfully notes that Shion just broke her promise to “forget her words.”
- Shion’s foster parents discuss the phone call to Shion when they get a phone call. Shion’s mother picks it up, says a few things, then tells Shinji that she’s running out to the store to get something. Hisatani, who is at the train station fretting over his lost cell phone then sees Shion’s mother meet up with Satoru outside the station, and sees Satoru giving her an envelope with some papers in it.
- Hisatani meets up with Saori at the association, and then run into Satoru, who sort of nastily teases Hisatani about the fact that he’s nearing the upper age limit for the 3-dan training league that he’s in.
- Hisatani then faces off against a 7-dan opponent in the 3rd round. Hisatani’s opponent remarks how the 3-dan league must be tough, but that life doesn’t really get any easier as a pro. Meanwhile, Saori is moping about Hisatani’s attitude going into the game when Furuta tells her that she’s the one who convinced Hisatani to participate in the tournament, in order to “test himself.” Saori marches down to Hisatani’s match to see how he’s doing, but finds that he seems to be acting fine now.
- Hisatani arrives from his game a winner, but then has to be questioned by the detectives, as they found that his lost cell phone, which Satoru found at the association’s entrance that morning, was the one used to call Shion the night before.
- That night, Shion’s mother tells Shinji and Hisatani that she met Satoru at the train station the night before. Apparently Satoru hired a private detective to investigate Shion’s case, and had given her the findings, but she was too afraid to look at them yet. However, Satoru did tell her that a name found written in Shion’s mother’s diary, which was thought to be just a friend of hers, may end up being Shion’s foster-mother’s brother.
- Afterwards, everyone looks at the upcoming tournament schedule and see that Shion plays Satoru, Ayumi plays Shinji, and Saori plays Hani-meijin all at the same time. Kobayashi also plans to broadcast the 3 matches online for people to watch.
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We have some movement on the “who dun it” front in this episode, as the murderer seems to be making it more and more clear that he’s not only in the shogi community but possibly quite active in it. I also think that the show is trying to point the attention towards Satoru, both because he has a rather nasty personality, and because there just happens to be several small coincidences, such has him finding Hisatani’s cell phone. Despite that, I’m find highly doubting that he’s the culprit.
Otherwise, not a lot in this episode other than the new sidestory of Hisatani reaching the age limit in his training league.
Episode 12 definitely isn’t the last episode, and I’m not sure if we’ll wrap this up in 2 or 3 episodes either. Assuming we finish with all the 3rd round matches in episode 12, we still have the main tournament and something like 9 players in that. That’ll probably take several episodes. Will Shion end up being a full season? It may be.
