Do you play a game for the fun of it? Or do you play to win? The fifth and (assumed) final member of the karuta club turns out to be the kid that they went up against during the flashback segment. His name is Nishida--or as Chihaya likes to call him, "Nikuman" ("Pork bun"), which is a pretty apt nickname if you ask me. Anyway, like the other members, Nishida also has a slight problem to overcome before he decides to join the club. Apparently he got his butt handed to him when he went up against Arata in the national tournament and decided that the game was about who had the most talent and quit instead of focusing on honing his skills. He joins tennis as a replacement, but as Chihaya points out, that's not fair to tennis when it's not the sport that he truly enjoys. Although we don't get a lot of internal monologue from Chihaya this episode, it's clear from her actions that her driving factor isn't just getting Nishida to join the club but make it official, but also because she likes to play against people who love the game as much as she does. And if we've been shown anything throughout these last seven episodes, it's that Chihaya's enthusiasm, while over-the-top at times, is infectious. It's her passion for the game that reminds Nishida of how he used to feel about playing. I've talked a lot about Tachi's problem with needing to win for the past couple posts, and it was interesting to see a slightly different take on the issue through Nishida. When he started out, he was simply playing for the love of the game, but the better he got at it, the more his ego grew ("People would praise me when I did well"). He admits in his flashback that eventually he was just playing to win, but as we see in his loss to Arata in the flashback and how it still bothers him even all these years later ("It doesn't matter how much we practice, we'll never beat Wataya Arata") it wasn't about wanting to win so much as he just didn't want to lose. There is a thin line here; of course everyone wants to win, and no one wants to lose, but depending on which side of the coin is your driving factor, it completely changes the way that you play and how much it does affect you when you do lose. Nishida in the flashback in episode three was pretty full of himself, and while his high school self still carries a bit of that ego, it's clear that he's been humbled a bit by his failure. We see in the game that he does have a lot of skill, and once he started playing the game for fun, not just to win, he was able to match Chihaya. It'll be really interesting to see how his character grows in the future, which goes for all the new club members. Now that we're at the end of another arc, like at the end of the flashback episodes I can't help wondering what's next. I feel like there might be a potential rival in the teacher, since she doesn't really like Chihaya in the first place and now she's stolen a tennis club member from under her nose. Also, when are we going to see Arata in something that's not a flashback? Hurry up and come visit! Additional Screencaps                                 Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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