Saki Miyanaga is a first-year at Kiyosumi High School in Nagano Prefecture and the protagonist of the Saki series. She's best known for her unusual mahjong ability: the power to end games with a score of exactly ±0. This developed out of necessity during childhood when playing with family members—she'd lose her New Year's money if she lost and get scolded if she won, so she learned to break even. Over time, this became such an ingrained habit that she stopped genuinely trying to win at all.
Her backstory includes a family split when her parents separated. Saki stayed in Nagano with her father while her older sister Teru moved to Tokyo with their mother. The two eventually lost touch, though Saki knows Teru's made a name for herself as a top mahjong player at her school.
When Saki enters Kiyosumi, her childhood friend Kyoutarou Suga drags her to the mahjong club. She plays a few matches against fellow first-years Nodoka Haramura and Yuuki Kataoka, and club president Hisa Takei immediately spots what Saki's doing—deliberately neutralizing her score. Both Nodoka and Hisa push back, asking her to play again, and this time Hisa helps her develop a strategy to actually win instead of break even.
That experience—winning against people outside her family—genuinely excites Saki for the first time. She joins the club, grows close to Nodoka, and the two make a pact to reach the national team tournament. It's there that Saki hopes to see Teru again and finally reconcile with her.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
