Rei Kiriyama

The protagonist of this work, a young professional shogi player who entered the professional realm as a middle school student, making him the fifth person in history to do so. At the start of the story, he is in Class C-1 of the ranking games and holds the rank of 5-dan. From volume 9 of the manga, he moves up to Class B-2 and 6-dan. He is 17 years old at the beginning of the story and has a height of 170 centimeters as of the first season of the TV anime.

He lost his parents and sister in a traffic accident when he was young and was taken in as an apprentice by a shogi player friend of his father, Masachika Koda. Due to friction with Koda's biological children, he felt out of place at home and immersed himself in shogi, becoming a professional player at 15. When Koda's daughter, Kyoko, tried to leave home, he decided to move out himself to stop her, and after graduating from middle school, he started living alone in the fictional town of Rokugatsu-cho in Tokyo.

Initially, he led a rough and careless life, but gradually his mindset began to change through interactions with the Kawamoto family and the After School Shogi Science Club (Shogi Science Club). Driven by his admiration for Shimada in the shogi world, he joined study groups and attempted to start a shogi club, gradually opening up his closed world. He eventually came to see Hinata Kawamoto as someone special, and when she was bullied, he earnestly thought of solutions and even rushed to Kyoto during a school trip to look after her. After the Shogi Science Club was disbanded, a shogi club was established with the addition of the principal (voiced by Naoki Kusumi) and the vice-principal (voiced by Atsushi Imaruoka), and he became the club president.

He transferred to Komabashi Private High School a year late and commutes there, being older than his classmates, which initially led to him being isolated at school. His grades are decent except for physical education and music, with particularly good performance in physics and mathematics. When he tutored Hinata, he helped her raise her math scores by nearly 30 points. Due to shogi matches, he often leaves school early or is absent, putting his attendance at risk.

Playing Style:

He is an all-rounder who plays both static rook and swinging rook strategies. There are descriptions of him intuitively expressing a bad move on the board as "feeling uncomfortable," and Shimada has remarked that he has an aura similar to Soya. Nobi-dome has commented that he tends to follow the opponent's tactics without having a preferred pattern.

During the Soya vs. Shimada match, where everyone recognized Shimada's disadvantage, he noticed Shimada's winning move that even Shimada and Fujimoto Raido (played by Yanagihara in the movie), who were providing large board commentary, had missed (Soya himself had noticed it). Later, in a match against Fujimoto, despite some Fujimoto Illusions (blunders), he quickly defeated him.