The English version of VTuber Kurono Senba's riichi mahjong hint book feeds a growing, but starved, niche

As evidenced by the tears of so many Like a Dragon series players, it’s kind of tough to learn riichi mahjong. In video game terms, riichi is a tutorial-required game. A few strict, inflexible, and complex rules shape the game’s strategy at its core; everything grows out from there. These core rules need to be explained to you, and then you need to process them by actually playing the game until they become a matter of course. You’ll know this has happened when you see others making the same mistake that you’ve already forgotten that you used to make, and have the audacity to feel annoyed by it.

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But thankfully, beginner-level explanations are now rather common in English. Any number of online video guides or game tutorials, even a few books, can help you out with details like furiten or yaku (or not having any yaku). If you don't know what those are, they are the reasons you can’t win that hand. You can get over the riichi beginner bump, as so many already have.

The thing that’s truly lacking in the English-speaking riichi world is teaching material beyond the beginner, post-tutorial level. Newbies don’t have too many places to go after learning the extreme basics, and playing a lot of games just isn’t enough to get better. If you want to actually improve your play, you have to study at some point.

Daina Chiba’s essential Riichi Book I, being a digital-only text, isn't as well-known as it should be outside the IRL tournament scene. Beyond RB1, there are few legal options in English to learn to better your mahjong game; mostly scattered blog posts and Youtube videos by those who have climbed the ladder before. Fan translations of Japanese texts, usually by professional-level players, exist with wildly varying quality in dark corners of the internet.

There’s long been a wealth of riichi strategy writing from beginner to professional level available in Japan, but there are significant barriers to getting that work translated. Riichi writing is packed with game jargon adapted from Chinese to Japanese: it's already its own language of loanwords. A translator needs to understand the game at a competent level along with all this terminology, and then be able to re-package it in English in a way that’s clean and readable. That’s very specialized work for an extreme niche audience.

Enter new publisher Mahjong Pros. A vendor of mahjong tile sets up until this point, Mahjong Pros recently appeared with plans to translate books and manga from the prolific publisher Takeshobo (Ten and Akagi, in addition to most other mahjong manga, run in their Kindai (Modern) Mahjong magazine). Their first product in this endeavor is a tip book by accomplished VTuber Kurono Senba, and after reading it, I feel this is exactly the sort of book that the English-speaking scene was missing.

It would be a grave mistake to dismiss Senba based on the anime crow girl avatar: they’re a world-class player with a 9th dan rank on Tenhou and one of the first Celestial rank players to be crowned on Mahjong Soul’s Japanese servers. (Their Ultimate Master rank on Street Fighter 6 is nothing to scoff at, either.) They’ve also got a clear and to-the-point authorial voice, with a talent for saying just enough to render complex concepts instantly accessible. It’s a potent combination; they’re one of the best mahjong teachers you could ask for, and their books have been extremely successful in Japan.

The full title of this book is 136 Ready-to-Use Mahjong Strategy and Tactics: Essential Tips and Techniques To Win More Mahjong Games. As that mouthful implies, it’s less a structured text and more a grab bag of useful, practical tips. It’s not a book about learning how to play the game from the ground up; though Kurono does have one of those, it’s not yet out in English. Rather, it’s a book of “hey, ever notice this?” observations for intermediate and above players who want to get better, written by a player with an incredible depth of observational skill. Someone who notices everything. If you think you're past the beginner level at riichi, this is a must-read book.

I wouldn’t give this book to a total beginner: there is stuff towards the front of the book that beginners can put to use right away, but overall Kurono writes this book with the expectation of a reader who’s already well-acquainted with the game. If you need to learn the ground-up fundamentals, you should really read Riichi Book 1 first.

What strikes me about this book, anyway, is the extreme clarity, focus, and conciseness with which Kurono conducts their miniature lessons. You gotta understand: riichi is pretty complex to write about. Every Japanese mahjong text I’ve ever read in translation has been dense at minimum. As such, the author’s simple and approachable style is a real achievement unto itself. Every page or two has Kurono zooming in on a single topic, often using practical examples of a plausible hand you might pull in a real match. The longest they're ever on a subject is two pages, with most of these lessons taking only a single page.

Kurono’s straightforward approach is matched by the book’s English translation. English-language riichi strategy frequently expects the reader to have already memorized a thesaurus’ worth of mahjong jargon for even the simplest concepts, like a double-sided wait (ryanmen) or the player sitting across from you (toimen). Use enough riichi terminology in one sentence, and it ceases to be recognizable spoken language at all: after all, kamicha dealt into my jigokumachi kanchan riichi because he was pushing a bakahon too hard. Some of this is force of habit, some of it is otaku gatekeeping.^[1]

This, as stated in the translator’s foreword, is not Mahjong Pros’ approach. Kurono’s straightforward prose is matched with a straightforward English localization that uses self-explanatory translations for the jargon and Mahjong Soul’s English yaku names for the hands, with the Japanese equivalent jargon in parentheses for the players who already know those words. It looks like “All Simples (tanyao)” or “a triple-sided wait (sanmenchan),” which is quite reasonable.

When I started out with riichi, the biggest problem with the material I read online was that it was hard to follow. The rule sheets were overwhelming, trying to teach the whole game in a single breath. Some blogs tried to re-imagine the plethora of Japanese terminology from in English and only made it more confusing; others used the untranslated terminology aggressively, to gatekeep anyone they judged not Japanophile or anime-nerd enough to play riichi.

Now, not only do we have ubiquitous beginner lessons in English, we even have breezy, readable strategy for intermediates and above. I hope this is only the beginning for translated riichi strategy in English, and I very eagerly await the translation of the rest of Kurono's work; I'll even buy a second copy of this book when the physical release is published (only the ebook is out right now.)

It's still a small scene; support projects like this. 136 is available as an ebook from Amazon right now, with plans to publish a physical version.

1- This is a communication issue I'm already beginning to see in my growing IRL community, as the jargon from advanced players talking shop actively, unintentionally, intimidates new players. Basically every single thing that can happen in riichi has equivalent JP terminology (and not necessarily EN terminology), so players can wind up sounding like Kawaiikochans. "I got oya-kaburi'd on a baiman, but luckily there was no agari-yame and then shimocha gave me a gyakuten in South 4."