First quarter day (the change)
Progress: Higurashi Arc 1, End of Chapter 1.9
These posts will be quite the rushed affair compared to the normal content of this blog, but it is an unavoidable outcome. After all, these will be daily posts made almost invariably in the dead of night. So I apologise for the reduced quality, but perhaps they will be viscerally satisfying enough to compensate.
Both of the major entries in the When they Cry franchise, Higurashi and Umineko, have been on my radar for a while. I have lost count of how many times I have been asked what I think of either one upon mentioning that I am a mystery fan. And the only honest answer I can give is that I have no clue. I don’t know crap about these visual novels.
And so, an opportunity presented itself in this holiday season, and I have four days (and today’s change) where I will have the most pure stretch of free time that I have enjoyed in a long time. Around one hundred hours to spend as I please. And so, I am going to read Higurashi. Umineko will likely have to wait, because knocking out Higurashi will be a giant task on its own.
Although I myself am ignorant, I will say now that all of these posts will have spoilers from this moment onwards. Up to the point I have reached, at least.
My prior impression of Higurashi is, as I’ve said, basically nothing. I read the first few scenes a decent few years back, but tired of the original artstyle and decided I’d come back to it after looking into the various artstyle choices. So I can honestly say the only things I knew about the story of Higurashi were these two facts: It takes place in a rural town, and it has a somewhat dark turn somewhere along the line. (That second fact I had simply absorbed through cultural osmosis without any concrete spoilers or reasons for thinking so.)
However, I had been exposed to Ryukishi07 briefly before. He had contributed a route to the visual novel Rewrite, and had clearly been given a decent amount of creative freedom based on the result. From that I gained some sense of his chops as a horror aesthetician and a writer I was at least mildly curious in. Yet, Higurashi was not too prominent in my backlog. Until I recently came across an essay written by Ryukishi07 on the form, tropes, and logic of detective fiction. Those who have gained a sense of my genre preferences may be unsurprised to learn I found this essay to be a delight, despite having to carefully read around the proper nouns that were likely to be spoilers for his stories. At that moment I knew I had to read Umineko, his more directly detective focused story. And that necessitated reading Higurashi first, according to his fans. And so here we are.
My thoughts on Higurashi thus far
Those who have read the visual novel (all of you, I hope, if you want to reasonably get anything out of these posts), may find this an odd point to start with, but it was the most important concept rattling around in my brain. Let’s talk about closed circles for a moment. A closed circle refers to one of the core rules of mystery fiction: The crime and investigation must be reasonably closed off from outside interferences so as to produce a fair list of suspect. Without a closed circle, one is not dealing with a mystery, merely the whims of an author who is lying to his audience; or at least, the conventional wisdom goes. The presence of a closed circle is achieved by adherence to three nested rules:
- Since none of those within the closed circle can be completely ruled out, there exists a minimum number of suspects equal to the number of people within the circle.
- Conversely, since interference from the outside is impossible, there exists a maximum number of suspects equal to the number of people within the circle.
- In the name of fair play, the closed circle must not be suddenly breached late into the story and the culprit must exist within this established list of suspects.
I bring this up to deal with two contradictory notions which cannot escape my brain at chapter 1.9, relatively early into this story: This is clearly not a conventional detective story, but instead a horror thriller, about a story larger than can be deduced with the petty clues of a mystery novel. And yet, in so many other ways, Higurashi is built with a careful and deliberate understanding of what it means to be a mystery novel, and prods the audience into throwing away its layers of supernatural misdirection, and engaging with it on that level.
Keichi is always being prodded to remember that there is no such as curses, that humans must have committed these crimes, and he must be ready to face the truth once he comes to understand exactly what that is. In perhaps my favourite section so far, chapter 1.8, the deliberate dread being built by the rising spectre of a “supernatural” threat is juxtaposed with the motif of Clue(do), and the sudden emergence of a detective who refuses the accept the premise of a “curse” into the story.
We are all but being told that although we are meant to be terrified, this is not the fantastical, impossible crimes of a shindenki mystery novel, but instead the kind of concrete crime that is committed by human beings. And so, we are in a detective novel as much as a horror novel.
So, back to closed circles. The one place where such reasoning begin to break down. Higurashi, in a phrase, has an unbelievably small closed circle. Such that the entire premise of mystery solving goes out the window. If we are to trust in the basic decency of the author to have the culprit actually appear in the story before the crime, or at least sufficiently close so as to not constitute a mockery of fair foreshadowing, there are only 5 suspects for the all important murder in Higurashi.
Miyo Takano, Mion Sonozaki, Rena Ryuuguu, Rika Furude, and Satoko Houjou. There are, for all intents and purposes, no other individual suspects. And yet, we know that physically, there are no combination of viable suspects present here. Mion and Rena have something approximating a weak but satisfactory alibi. Miyo’s involvement in the abstract seems inevitable as the mystery of this village unravels, but her doing the deed itself seems deeply unsatisfactory. And the other two escape guilt by the following means, which also redeems all of the other three to some degree: The physical capability to murder a man. This crime required a group of people, stated to be at least four by the text — which we can reasonably extend to mean at least five when counting schoolchildren among the culprits. In other words, for this closed circle to completely cover this crime, all five suspects must be guilty, and even then it stretches credibility.
It is for that reason that one can only reasonably present one suspect and therefore one culprit thus far: The village itself.
This is not to say that the whole village is simply in on a conspiracy of murder, with nothing further to be explained. That kind of simple explanation would be lame. Instead, that seeing this murder as the mystery itself, with all the clues laid out, only awaiting the deduction of a brilliant detective, is missing the forest for the trees. The mystery has yet to unfurl in front of us, and so it is too early to talk about concrete suspects, closed circles, and locked room.
At least not until we take Ryukishi07 at his word and talk about the late Queen problem.
The “late Queen problem” is a string of words which should be completely unfamiliar to most Western readers, so let’s take a moment to unpack it. The late Queen problem refers to a structural challenge identified by Japanese novelist Rintarou Norizuki in his analyses of detective fiction tropes. It posits that there is an eternal lack of fairness inherent to any detective fiction which does not metatextually explain its own structure to the audience. It can be most clearly stated as such: How does the audience know with certainty when all of the clues necessary to understand the crime have been exposited? In other words, how does the audience know when they have reached the end of the foreshadowing, and can reasonably begin to theorise?
The short answer is that the audience can never be certain unless the author tells them so.
Even in a hypothetical mystery story where the reader can perfectly articulate a logically flawless explanation for the crime, they cannot know with certainty whether future clues will undo this case by contradicting the logic of this deduction. Even a case which cannot be logically contradicted can still be undone simply by introducing evidence which shifts the blame onto another culprit by means of manipulation. In other words, even a flawless case against suspect A can be undone by introducing a piece of evidence proving they were framed or manipulated by suspect B, so long as this information is revealed before the point where “evidence collection” is complete. This presents a problem when “evidence collection” can stretch on for eternity, right up until the final reveal of the culprit. This is, in essence, the late Queen problem.
Ryukishi07 seems to have a particular fascination with this problem, as he believes that manipulation of this problem is the secret to the “anti-mystery”, a term used for mystery novels so groundbreaking in their ability to contradict the established conventions of the genre that they shift the genre into a new era. And it is on full display in Higurashi.
While we are told repeatedly to be ready to solve this mystery using logic, we must also come to understand that what we are facing now is merely the prelude to the later mysteries in which our current mystery is nested. We are only now dealing with the case of victim alpha who was killed by suspect(s) A. We still must encounter the cases of suspects B, C, D, or E before all the clues can be assembled and we head for the a realm of the mystery novel within this horror novel.
Our friendly detective gives us the real advice among all of his talk about logical deduction: ‘You don’t have to become a detective. Just go on living as you have up until now. Just let me know if you notice anything.’
