"She seems happy in her work, at least - she has since her hiatus, anyway. I'd vastly prefer the attention to be on shogi itself rather than the person playing it."

Hifumi nods. "An excellent question, and one I've never been able to answer for myself. He rather abruptly stopped doing any TV appearances just before I arrived here - granted, the media was also rather busy with the snap election, but even so."

She doesn't know what happened with Akechi, and she doesn't have any reason to think Ren would know, so she hasn't asked.