Well, I never did write up any final thoughts on Umineko. I'm not sure if I've missed the window there... I might still take a shot at it, if I can scrape together my ragged memories. But for today, let's talk about Higurashi. As ever, there will be spoilers. I will discuss the events of the first episode of Higurashi, and my thoughts about what I just read. I haven't read further than that so you're pretty safe from spoilers for later chapters. I don't believe there are any Umineko spoilers in here.
I've just finished reading Episode 1 of Higurashi. (As an aside, the terminology seems to be all over the place, but I'm calling the big chunks episodes and the small chunks chapters.) We met Keiichi, Rena, Mion, Satoko and Rika, as well as Tomitake and Ooishi. We had a nice introduction, everybody became friends, they went to the festival and then Bad Things Started To Happen.
Having a bit more of a feel for this kind of story now, I'm not sure I should try to "figure it out", but I think it's probably good to take note of what stood out to me, if only to give me something to mull over later when my memories fade. I don't think I ever fully made sense of Umineko, but I can see that you don't really get the full experience if you're not at least trying to make sense of things. So you're not going to find a single grand theory here. It's going to be confused and contradictory. I'm going to posit supernatural and mundane explanations and they're likely to smear together.
After everyone splits up and goes home on the night of the festival, nobody hears from Tomitake again. Detective Ooishi turns up at the school and tells Keiichi about his gruesome demise, enlisting Keiichi to gather information. It's unclear if Keiichi tells him anything useful. But something has changed. Maybe it was the events at the festival. Maybe it was Keiichi talking to Ooishi. Maybe it was Keiichi's shameful resolve to abandon the club rules and help Rena instead of striving solely to win. But from this point onward, Keiichi feels like an outsider, and begins to experience increasingly strange and threatening behaviour from Rena and Mion.
At the same time, Keiichi starts to undergo a change of character himself. He talks about ideas occurring to him and feeling a great sense of relief at having a plan to protect himself, but these ideas do not seem to be his own. He is drawn to a metal baseball bat which he practices with aggressively, and we later learn from Rena that the "transferred" kid Satoshi behaved just the same.
The way Ooishi seems distant, neutral and bound by rules feels significant to me, but I'm not sure if it's more a storytelling thing than a story thing, if that makes sense. I feel like there's a mirroring between Ooishi and Oyashiro-sama, although I may be imagining some of that because I feel like I'm trying to construct a concept of Oyashiro-sama from scraps. It's definitely interesting the way that Keiichi labours that Ooishi cannot come to save him unless he provides him solid proof. It feels like a sort of supernatural pact.
At various times Keiichi becomes frozen in place while Rena or Mion take on a glassy-eyed and menacing visage, appearing to have inexplicable knowledge of his actions. It is suggested to us that they may be possessed. It's unclear whether they remember these events afterward. It does not seem a straightforward possession because they sometimes laugh cruelly about Keiichi even when this isn't happening. It's also unclear how reliable this account is. Keiichi seems like he may be an unreliable narrator, and may himself be possessed. It's possible he is inventing or imagining some or all of these interactions.
When they are apparently possessed like this, they are not just trying to deliver a message. They definitely seem to need information from Keiichi. They seem to be trying to figure out what he told Ooishi. They seem to be trying to figure out if they are in danger from what he has disclosed.
I wonder whether we should consider things that happen in Tips to be more canonical. I wonder how we should feel about things that are described to us entirely outside of Keiichi's awareness. It feels as if the lack of an embodied narrator deprives us of the capacity to judge how trustworthy these are. It does feel like we're supposed to be able to trust as genuine the newspaper articles and things observed by the detectives, although the contents of the articles may be unreliable and their interpretations may be dubious. I also think that things like the damage Keiichi does to his house is supposed to be incontrovertible, even though the story of how it came to pass might not be.
It is mentioned that Oyashiro-sama may curse those who leave Hinamizawa. Or some of those who leave. Or maybe those who enter? And that Oyashiro-sama may be understood to be some kind of guardian, trying to keep Hinamizawa partitioned... It's unclear whether this means protecting Hinamizawa from the outside world or the outside world from Hinamizawa. Perhaps both.
Keiichi becomes certain a number of times that some presence is trailing him or even clinging to his back. Towards the end of the episode he has multiple periods of complete amnesia, where we have evidence he was nevertheless conscious and active. (E.g. when Rena helped him back to his house, and immediately before he found himself in a room with dead bodies.) Perhaps he was possessed by this demon, the same demon making him behave like Satoshi before him?
It was suggested that there is something more specific than just leaving Hinamizawa that triggers the curse. Perhaps it's leaving Hinamizawa with some object, or even with a demon? Maybe Keiichi and Rena unwittingly carried/smuggled a demon out of Hinamizawa and that caused their troubles? And Oyashiro-sama acts to clean up their mess? (Keiichi temporarily left Hinamizawa with Ooishi. I'm not sure if this preceeded his Satoshi-like thoughts.)
It occurs to me that Rena expressed her discomfort at Keiichi behaving like Satoshi, but made no mention of any similarity to her own experience. She must have some feelings or thoughts about the correspondence between Satoshi and his bat and her own rampage.
There are five poorly-described adults seen outside Keiichi's house at the end. It seems like they may somehow be the adults who were previously demoned away? I'm actually really fuzzy on the story here. I think the demoned away people are:
- Potentially the dismembered foreman. I'm not really sure what parts of him were found and how they were affirmatively identified.
- The partner of the person who fell into a river? I can't remember this story at all. They supported the dam project? I think they were Satoko's parents??
- The wife of the shinto priest, imagined to have thrown herself into the swamp. (Rika's mother?)
- The child of the murdered housewife. Satoko's cousin?
- Satoshi, the student who "transferred out". Mion's brother???
I feel like something doesn't add up, though. It felt like we were being told that the mysterious strangers outside were all adults, but two of these demoned away people are mere children.
I need to go back and check who was actually confirmed dead and who just disappeared, and to check the confirmed family relationships.
During Keiichi's final phone call, Ooishi identified that he was in a phone booth because it was quiet. He later seemed to be surprised that he had only just noticed the cicada song. I think this is just providing some evidence that the booth was opened or broken into? I'm not really sure why it is significant, but it seems to be constructed like a clue.
My gut feeling is that glassy-eyed Rena and Mion are channeling Oyashiro-sama, while whatever is happening to Keiichi is something else, since it feels like there's two or three factions acting against each other and trying to figure each other out.
I'm not sure if Keiichi ever told Mion about the needle in the mochi explicitly. He thought he did, but he just talked about it as a cruel surprise. It's possible they were talking at cross-purposes. It's possible Mion really did just put Tabasco sauce in the mochi.
Okay so here's one possibility: Keiichi is plagued by a demon that is messing with him. Mion and Rena are aware of this or of this as a possibility, and have to be very circumspect to avoid telling the demon things that would help it. The demon is doing things like putting the needle into the mochi, or making Keiichi believe there was a needle, to isolate him and make him distrust his friends. It's also persuading him to get the bat and things like that. Or maybe Mion and Rena are not fully aware of this, but are being directed by Oyashiro-sama who is?
This might go some way to explaining why they seem so hot and cold with him, and why they are so secretive. It's notable that they don't do a huge number of terrible things to Keiichi and he spends a huge amount of time stewing in his own head about what's going on. It might be easy both for him and for us to inflate or skew the significance of small things and paint crises and murderous conspiracies where there are just pranks and caution.
Did Keiichi fuck up during the Watanagashi? Did the others? Were there rules he broke? Did he do something (or fail to do something) that caused this demon to become attached to him?
Could Keiichi have killed Tomitake? There's strong circumstantial evidence he killed Mion and Rena. But then there's a strong parallel between the death of Tomitake and the apparent death of Keiichi, suggesting the same perpetrators. If Tomitake was killed for the same reason as Keiichi... perhaps we should look for evidence that Tomitake was under the same kinds of influences as Keiichi? Tomitake is one of the few people we know who leaves Hinamizawa regularly. Could he also have done whatever it was we think Rena and Keiichi did? But if it was something associated with the Watanagashi then either he survived unperturbed for at least a year or he was struck down within hours. Maybe we should look for evidence he caused trouble for the same people? He could have seen something he shouldn't have. I wonder which villagers we saw interact with him...
The description of Tomitake's corpse suggests he clawed his own throat out. This seems kinda implausible but maybe I guess?? There was a lot of very awkward description of evidence of contact with a wooden plank. I guess it's possible somebody went to a lot of bother to make it look like he clawed out his throat after the fact? I don't like this "drug that makes you claw your throat out" concept.
We need to think about who removed something from the clock. We cannot assume that it was really a syringe, as Keiichi's account doesn't seem entirely reliable. It's also possible Keiichi removed it himself, possibly without retaining the memory, if he is possessed or otherwise has multiple identities fighting over his body.
Well, that's all I can really think of right now so far as observations go. It will be interesting to see how things develop.
As for how I found it... I enjoyed it. I feel a bit unmoored, but not so bad as I did early in Umineko. There was definitely a period before any red text was brought in that I found Umineko very annoying and wanted to table-flip the whole thing, because it just felt like a bait and switch, promising something solvable while piling on ridiculous, unbounded supernatural theatrics. I guess I'm a bit more prepared for it if this story goes similar ways, though I wonder if we'll get anything so structured as the coloured text to rely upon.
It makes be feel infinitely older than Umineko did. Keiichi may only be 16 to Battler's 18, but the school setting and the relative lack of adults makes it feel very different. Keiichi feels very young... He's very human and very immature, and can be frustrating to listen to, moreso than Battler. I feel like Battler was a creepy jerk to begin with but softened over time and was always very warm. Keiichi feels... stuck inside his own head, uncomfortably so. Unwilling to talk to people in very self-destructive ways. It's more obvious that he's a child and doesn't have a good mental model of other people. (Though to be fair I was a teen who didn't appreciate how concerned adults might be about a weird sad kid writing about suicide much as Keiichi didn't seem to see how his parents might feel about him expressing concerns about his own death.)
Similarly, the adults we do see are very removed. Ooishi seems to exist in another world. He comes from the detective realm, he doesn't belong to this world and is unmarked by it. He does not have authority here. Tomitake is... weird. We rarely see him interacting with other adults, but he spends all this time with the children and nobody seems to comment. He comes and goes. We're not really sure why he comes here at all, other than maybe nature photography. He doesn't have anchored relationships. So he doesn't really have any grounding effect. It's still a story about children. Chie feels like a placeholder. It's odd that she has character art when Keiichi doesn't. But the overall effect is that I feel further from this story.
It will be interesting if we ever get to see the girls from their own perspective. From Keiichi's perspective they seem opaque, mature, self-assured. Like, they all seem to know who they are far more than Keiichi has any idea of himself, even if they're much younger. Even thought Rena can seem indecisive and Satoko gets upset easily, they seem much stronger personalities. I wonder to what degree that's due to perspective and to what degree these are simply part of their character. Maybe it's just Keiichi who's a bit of a wet lettuce.
Thanks for bearing with me. I'll report back after episode two!