higu 7

Expectation plays a lot into how you perceive something. Before experiencing media you probably have two waypoints: 1. It's [genre], 2. It's (hopefully) good. While this works as an efficient way to find something to your interest, it can diminish the impact. If you get exactly what you expect, you can only be delighted so far. Sometimes I wish I had the luxury of just experiencing something like that with no forewarning, so the emotional impact hits even more. I have a problem where I'll go into something acclaimed and spend a lot of time thinking to myself 'I know this is going to get good, but when?', which distracts a little from the experience.

My entry way into Higurashi was part of a cascading set of experiences of subverted expectations. I first found it via /r/visualnovels recommendations, having never heard of visual novels until I'd just recently played the Zero Escape games. I played those games due to curiosity in their premise: Having to solve puzzles to escape locked rooms in a cross between Professor Layton & Saw. While it delivered on that concept, it wasn't long until I transitioned from 'why is there *so* much exposition' to 'I gotta hurry up and solve this puzzle so I can get back to the story'. Even saying there's a story to those games is concealing so much.

Higurashi is a similar case. Depending on where it comes from, I feel it generally gets introduced as either a mystery series, or a horror series (with a dash of anime tropes). Most descriptions mention the fact that everything is nice and care-free until someone turns up dead on the night of the village's festival. As someone quite fond of murder mysteries, it's already pretty easy to win me over, so naturally I go into it expecting a peculiar murder case, and ensuing drama as we try to pin down which character you assumed to be friendly is actually behind it.

While it may have started as a mystery, as I continued to read the first chapter, it turned more into psychological horror, as you experience Hinamizawa through Keiichi's lens, effectively just as new to the town as he is, and completely unaware of any hidden secrets. The first person perspective with his primary motivation being to survive makes for an especially gripping climax. It's really not clear if he's going to make it out alive, or who is really after him.

I have a lot of respect for fleshed out world-building, where it feels like every character is the main character in their own story happening irrespective of the ordained protagonist. The more you go through successive chapters, the more you find out this is true. Not only does every character have their own motivations & problems, but they're acting out on them in kind. Oddities in the initial narrative slowly piece together in a 'planned from the start' way.

A lot of this is thanks to the unique framing device that the story takes on. Most chapters of the story are different versions of Hinamizawa in June 1983. Some things are constant, some things are different, but you're always learning more and more about the world with each new examination. Initially when you see Keiichi hanging out with his friends, there's no foul play to suspect, but in reality you grow to learn that they hide broken homes behind them; Keiichi is the only one of the 5 who actually lives with both of his parents.

However that framing has just mostly been left to itself. Most characters live out their lives like the current story you're reading is the only one of their lives...because it is! Over and over again, they'll meet up with and befriend Tomitake, but you as the reader knows that he'll die in a matter of days. The primary exception to this is Rika, who seems to have divine powers. Initially dismissable as village folklore, the further you go through the story, the most explicitly she starts to acknowledge this. Her conversation with Rena in Tsumihoroboshi is supposed to be deliberately misleading to her perspective as Rena fills in the vague parts in such a way to fuel her conspiracies, but she's also speaking as she is as a wink to the audience, effectively admitting that after everything inevitably goes south, we're going to just restart the month with the next chapter anyway. Rika makes it clear that she's the one character with this knowledge, and expresses astonishment when Keiichi briefly seems to tap into similar experiences.

With this in mind, I felt as though the story was heading into a Groundhog Day scenario, where Rika alone is re-experiencing everything, and so all the slight/significant changes that happen between chapters are the direct/indirect outcomes of her attempts to save Hinamizawa whose population tends to go extinct towards the end of the month. The eternal struggle being that the one person given this power is the person least equipped to do anything about it, living eternally in the body of a small girl. A lot of her actions are very unclear prior to this chapter, as she rarely takes an especially active role in the story, but more importantly, she frequently ends up gruesomely murdered outside the shrine, in a manner so over-the-top as to seemingly tell the audience it's not suicide.

When I started Minagoroshi, I was surprised at just how up front the narration was about the meta workings of this world. It felt like I was taking reading comprehension as many things I'd speculated were laid out clearly, even the curious fact that whoever seems to go crazy in a chapter is spurred on (intentionally or not) by Takano and/or Ooishi fueling their paranoia. Something casually slipped into the text is the observation that in regards to events that happen consistently, there's something that apparently doesn't happen in Watanagashi/Meakashi, asking the reader to think what's different about those chapters to explain this. It's pretty clear that it's implying that Rika dying at the hands of Shion (or...herself) results in Hinamizawa avoiding the killer sulfuric gas leak. This in itself implies that the gas leak is not just a Vesuvius-esque tragedy, but something ritualistic, possibly deliberate, and that Rika's death by way of Watanagashi is somehow part of that (or maybe just that Oryou or Kimiyoshi are responsible but this is the one chapter where they're kept out of commission). Thus the mystery turns back to 'What exactly keeps happening on that final day that we don't see?'

At last we get an extended look into Rika's perspective which immediately gives a promise to the reader that we're finally going to see things unfold first hand. I expected to see Rika going through frustration, both for knowing what's inevitably going to happen, and the fact that she can't seem to stop it. Instead the mood that shows itself for much of this chapter is really just defeated misery. It's made clear that she's lived in this world for hundreds of years, and the only thing she's really trying to avoid is her own death, which her free will seems to allow for some variation in terms of the date, but it's an inevitability that always chases her until the end of June 1983. An interesting aspect of it is that she struggles to remember exactly how things end, so she has no idea who or what is killing her.

But she's not just depressed about her grim future, but in fact also her present. She is trapped in a hellish concept where mostly the same things happen over and over again, but she is expected to act as though she's seeing it for the first time. Seeing the club's board game activities play out exactly how Rika expects is soul-crushing. It also lays another interesting foundation onto the concept. The different scenarios aren't just caused by Rika, but rather the frivolous nature of will. Tomitake & Rika always die because someone has a very strong will to make it happen, but the club members frequently play different games because Mion usually decides their club activities at the last minute with no strong inclinations. I initially liked the idea that the scenarios were all different because Rika was one of two or more people also in the same situation, whose collective different decisions all tragically kept cancelling each other out to the same result, but I also really enjoyed the prospect that the only variance in the universe is which games Mion decided to play, which all seemed to have a butterfly effect trickle out. After all, if they hadn't ever gone to the toy store, Keiichi never would have upset Mion and caused the chain of events that unfold. Maybe Satoko's uncle showing up is the unintended result of the club's punishments, which are frequently noted to be witnessed by much of the town at times. It'd be an aptly silly resolution to all the hours we've witnessed them playing Old Maid & Cluedo.

Another rough moment is when you see Rika try and fail to get Keiichi to recall the previous chapters, a miracle that happened just once before. When he cannot replicate it, it's like seeing the one dot of hope for Rika from the previous chapter just washed away. However Keiichi turns out to save the day anyway, as Rika confides in him about the monotony of her life, and unwittingly, Keiichi goes out of his way to change what seemed to be pre-determined fate. What follows is some of the most uplifting moments in the entire series for me. You see simple actions prevent the tragedies of Meakashi and Tsumihoroboshi. Everything is going perfectly until Satoko's uncle inexplicably shows up to ruin everything. What follows is a complete detour from the initial promise of the chapter so everyone can do what they can to save Satoko.

Thematically, it's a really powerful set of moments, with Keiichi's combination of sheer determination and social engineering winning over the entire town, all in order to put a stop to the unconfirmed actions of a man he's never even seen. If not for the extra tips between chapters, I'd start to worry that there was a big misunderstanding with Teppei actually being innocent and all this fuss not helping at all. The scenes from his perspective are actually really fascinating because you can see him fighting his internal urges to get what he needs. Satoko's protection of Satoshi's room creates a bizarre power dynamic in the house where neither is getting a good deal. Satoko finally accepting her friends' help and getting rescued, is another great moment.

Reading that section however was a little frustrating. Usually on re-reads, I find myself breaking down individual scenes/chapters in terms of what they bring to the story, be that a thematic thread, or a more tangible action where something happens (and how significant that something is to the overall plot). But when I was reading this the first time I was already feeling aches in the pacing. Somewhere between a third & a quarter of Minagoroshi can be summed up as Keiichi and increasingly larger company going to the childcare center, making the same demands, and being rejected, only to return the next day with more people. This is an extreme simplification, but it's the most dragged out the story has ever felt for me, especially since you're largely anticipating the night of the Watanagashi to find out what happens with Tomitake & Takano. I will admit though that it makes for a great showcase of the lengths that the main gang will go to, in order to help each other out. It's a theme that makes for a really cathartic pay off at the end of the chapter.

When the festival arrives things do pick up as expected. The villain's reveal is relatively dealt with quickly, which was fortunate for me because it's been the worst kept secret of the whole story for quite a while now and I was worried it would be the big climactic reveal of the chapter. It does make for the biggest suspension of disbelief in the series for me, as I find it tough to believe that Rika couldn't have worked it out herself. The only way I can see it is as a classic example where your initial trust in someone makes you dismiss any act of suspicion. It's like how in a murder mystery, you need at least some base line of reliable interpretation of events, only then can you suss out the uncertainties.

Once that's been uncovered, we get to see the true extent of the culprit's control and just how unavoidable their gambit really is. I feel like the best way to instil fear into an audience is to present a character whose survival instinct is in full effect, only to have it whisked away anyway. Effectively it's avoiding cases where a character feels too dumb to live, and you realise that you couldn't do much better if put into the same scenario. What I really liked about the climax was the teetering of the dynamics. The situation keeps flipping between utter doom and glimmers of hope, where you start to really root for the main cast to get through it. It makes it all the more stunning just how suddenly the tables are turned for the last time. It does make for a powerful moment when Rika decides her own horrific terms, in a great moment of dramatic irony for the villain, but also a touching realisation of the new found hope she's received from her friends.

The elephant in the room here is that I haven't mentioned Hanyuu yet. I don't feel I know enough about her yet and she feels more like a plot device than a character at this point, acting as a foil to Rika and allowing her internal struggles to be more animated. You get the idea that she's the one who still needs to find her place in the cast, with her visibility being limited to Rika feeling like a metaphorical interpretation of her own feelings of isolation. I'm really interested to see when and if she does start to click in with the main ensemble. It feels like Shion gets retrofitted into the main ensemble only in this chapter, so it wouldn't be the first time it's been done.

In the end, we finally get one last big reveal, as we get an explicit look into The Great Hinamizawa Disaster. This whole section threw me for such a big loop that I had to re-read it shortly after just to make sure I was taking everything in. It's a seriously chilling set of scenes that really pays cadence to the idea that observed tragedy will always hit harder than reported tragedy. Like if you were ever numb to the fact that the entire village was wiped out, this whole sequence goes some ways to make it the saddest part of the whole story. Not to mention we get to see an even bigger scale of survival instinct being rejected, as it feels like every single person in the village is monumentally doomed. This includes the few supposed survivors of the incident, whose future fates become even more tragic as you finally can piece together everything that's going on in the epilogue for Tatarigoroshi.

We've gotten to see into the actions of the culprit, we know the who & the what now, we just need the ever so important details of the why. Partly because their plot is so incredibly twisted with no clear end goal (for one, do they just disappear from society forever, how is this accommodated?), and also because it's really not clear what's really going on in their head. The previous chapter deliberately throws a mis-direction, but you have to wonder just how much of what they say matches up to what they think. I'm really excited to see how it sticks the landing.

The main point I brought up at the start of this was the subversion of expectations, and how it can immensely strengthen your experience with something. What I liked most about this chapter is how often it just kept doing that. I came into it with certain expectations of what was going to happen and the perspectives it would take, but it kept making the things I expected into minor trifles, while the bigger picture was much more involved. Tsumihoroboshi was a big turning point for me when it became clear that the scope of the story was far more than just a murder mystery. The stakes were technically the same, but they felt more gripping when the nature of the tragedy kept unfolding. There have been elements of friendship & trust interwoven from the very first chapter, but I found with these two back to back chapters, they're pushed to their pinnacle. It's the big sticking point when all the seemingly endless slice of life chapters pay off with catharsis. All of a sudden I 100% believe the motives of the main cast and I'm 100% rooting for them to pool together their individual strengths to come out on top.