Writer: Shuichi ShigenoStars: Shin'ichirô Miki, Jason Spisak, Robbie RistCountries: JapanLanguages: JapaneseSummary:
Takumi Fujiwara is an average 18-year old high school student with an average job as a gas station attendant, and a not-so-average hand in the family business. To help his father's tofu shop, Takumi has been delivering tofu in his father's 'Eight-Six' Trueno (known as the Toyota Corolla GT-S in the US) to a hotel at the peak of Mt. Akina (the local mountain), every night at 4 a.m. In doing so, Takumi has been unknowingly training to be the greatest mountain-pass drift-racer in all of Japan. After a freak late-night encounter with Keisuke Takahashi, the number two driver of the infamous RedSuns team, Takumi is quickly, and unwillingly plunged into a high-speed world of white-knuckle contests on the most dangerous mountain passes in the Gunma prefecture. Assisted by the local Akina Speedstars team, his slightly obnoxious friend Itsuki, his somewhat shady girlfriend Natsuke and the sage-like words of his chain-smoking, ex-racer father Bunta, he'll need all the help he can get to outwit and outmaneuver Japan's most talented underground drift-racers. —Nathan J Rossberg