Shigeru Akagi Husbando

Akagi Shigeru is a supporting character in Nobuyuki Fukumoto's manga work Ten and the protagonist of its spin-off/prequel, Akagi: The Genius Who Descended Into the Darkness. A white-haired gambler, he is portrayed as an aloof genius who has reached a superhuman level of wit, intelligence, intuition, luck, force of will and all the other elements necessary to win at gambling, especially in the game of mahjong. Throughout the story, Akagi utilizes techniques other gamblers don't dare to in order to sway his opponents: brazen cheating, extremely risky maneuvers, far fetched bluffs, and blatant disregard for his own life. Akagi is a Japanese young man with a rather lean build and very sharp facial features (particularly his nose, a recognizable trait between him and Itō Kaiji). He has pure white hair, which he already had by the time he turned 13, and eyes of bottomless darkness that compel people to imagine the short life he has lived up to that point. During his early teens, meeting Nangō and having a match against Ichikawa, Akagi wears a white short-sleeved button-up over a darker tee-shirt, a belt and dark pants, the button-up shirt being typical of the time period. Because he first appears coming out of a storm, his shirt is messy and a little dirty upon his first appearance but it is cleaned by the time of his match against Ichikawa. After the first timeskip, Akagi appears again in a polo shirt with breast pockets. In the anime, the color of his polo shirt is consistently blue while the pants and sneakers are white/pale, but the original manga also features volume covers where his colors are less consistent, showing him wearing orange and occasionally pink. After the second timeskip, Akagi's appearance has not changed much if at all. In his middle years, as shown in Ten, he is wearing a tiger print dress shirt and white suit. He briefly appears again with that outfit in the final scene of the series. Akagi's lack of concern for life and death, profit and loss, and common sense, and his stance on the games themselves and his desire to maintain his beliefs, is unique among Fukumoto's works, which tend to depict extreme battles for big money and survival. His brilliance, mentality, luck, and prowess are all so out of the ordinary that he is often compared to the devil. He is a genius at mahjong and other forms of gambling, but he does not have a greed for money or materialistic desires, and even if he wins a lot of money, he readily squanders it. He does not like to get along with others, and at a young age, he is a lone wolf who has built a legend of his own by going through many scenes of carnage. He has his own unique view of life and death, and he understands that he is a heretic who has no desire for life and no fear of death, to the extent that he describes himself as a "half-dead man". Despite this, he has shown consideration and concern for Osamu after the latter begins to tag along within the three year timeskip following Akagi's match with Washizu Iwao. A few times over the course of volume 36, he has repeatedly tried to convince Osamu to turn away and get a normal life as not to get involved, though it can be argued that he did this for the sake of preferring to be alone and trying to make it so. In the main series/sequel Ten, he is portrayed as a legendary gambler who lived his life with no support, relying only on his own abilities. Although he is said to be invincible when it comes to gambling games, there are times when his luck is slightly worse than it used to be in his heyday. It is also said that his elegant mahjong tactics are very popular with the ordinary gambling enthusiasts (not the yakuza). He reigned at the pinnacle of the underworld for about three years, but retired early because of his principle that position and fame constrained him. He has been called "Man of the Divine Realm," "Fierce God," "Once-In-A-Century Genius," and "The Infallible Akagi," and has countless legends to his credit. Just as he did in his youth, his sincere approach to the games and his conviction that he prefers earnest battles above all else has not changed. However, the sharp, pointed personality that seemed to be pregnant with madness that he had in his youth has been softened somewhat, and he is now comically portrayed as forcing a chef to cook fugu sashimi late at night and only eating one bite of it, and traveling to Hawaii with Washio and Kanamitsu and indulging in a round of golf there. He also became more eloquent compared to his younger days, when he was less talkative, by giving Hiroyuki lots of advice as his guide and gently persuading Ginji, who was on the verge of death himself but was terrified of dying.