This review contains spoilers for Umineko, Higurashi, The Decagon House Murders, Our Broken World, Everything is F: The Perfect Insider, as well as And Then There Were None. Other stories are also mentioned in passing in ways that might suggest minor spoilers. Proceed with some caution.
I think it’s very unproductive to say that the only truth is that there is no truth. When they say “there is no truth,” in actuality, most people automatically believe in a truth that there is no truth. Generally, this attitude characterized highly fashionable Japanese postmodernism during the 1980s. In those days college students used to carry about the texts of Derrida and Deleuze just like accessories. They often referred to “deconstruction” or “rhizome,” but it was just because the terms sounded smart and fashionable. And now, no one reads Derrida. It went out of fashion. The same thing can be said about failed metafictions. Metafiction attempts to erase the existence of its author, the authority of its fictional world, who is even analogous to God. Poor metafiction, however, transgresses the fictional order of realism so easily and arbitrarily that it provides the author with much more authority than that of realistic fiction. At this point, the fiction is no longer a metafiction that implies there is no truth, but a fake metafiction that makes propaganda for the truth that there is no truth.
Kiyoshi Kasai
I suppose, given the significant length of this review and its belatedness, a minor introduction is in order.
I just could not get into Umineko. There are many elements I enjoyed, and I even thought I was going to be a “fan” of it after the first four episodes. But as I traversed deeper into the Chiru episodes, what were once minor quibbles turned into a fundamental dispute with the approach of the entire story and with its author, Ryuukishi07, himself. To some extent, I would have been happy if this review never saw the light of day. While I have many, many problems with Umineko, I did not want to be a blunt source of negativity for its fans. However, there are important things to gather from a close study of where I believe Umineko went wrong.
Most crucially, I wanted to communicate to Umineko fans that enjoying Umineko and understanding it are not automatically one and the same. There is often a temptation among fans of anything as inherently impenetrable as an extremely long visual novel franchise to think that it is simply doomed to be misunderstood by the prejudices of those who could never comprehend its scale and depth. However, I hope the following review will demonstrate that, while visual novels are still doomed to a level of obscurity by certain trends, Umineko fails to breach the wider consciousness primarily due to problems of its own making.
This review will be, outside of these short introduction segments, broken up into three Parts: A, B, and C. Part A is deceptively the most important from the standpoint of “reviewing” something, despite being the shortest and least substantive. It most succinctly answers the question why I don’t actively recommend Umineko to people, even if those reasons are more trivial than what follows in Parts B and C. While I’ve tried to make the review at least readable for those who are here without reading any of Umineko, I think Part B is the section that will by far have the most value to those people. Part C naturally follows from the logic of Part B, but I suspect it will be to the benefit of Umineko readers rather than a general audience.
Catch up: What is Umineko?
Umineko: When They Cry is a serial anti-mystery doujinshi visual novel developed by 07th Expansion which was in parts, or episodes, released twice per year between 2007 and 2010. Anti-mystery here being used as a piece of Japanese genre jargon in reference to a piece of mystery fiction that is highly subversive or deconstructive. In other words, in the context of genre jargon, anti-mystery is mystery fiction that is in some way standing against its own genre. (More on this later.)
The immediate plot concerns the events of the three-day long family conference of the exceedingly wealthy Ushiromiya family on their private island of Rokkenjima. (This is the point where you should check out if you plan to read the novel or the manga and have been ignoring the spoiler warning.) This is not merely a pastiche of the many remote mansion whodunit mysteries of the popular imagination, but more specifically a reference to the premise of And Then There Were None by the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie.
And Then There Were None follows ten guests who are all invited to a private island and then are murdered one by one. However, since no one else appears to be on the island, the readers are initially presented with a seemingly impossible crime. All ten guests are killed one by one, until finally the police find the bodies in a state that could not be explained as being solely the result of suicide. This mystery is only resolved due to a message in a bottle framing device that explains to the audience exactly how the murders were committed.
Umineko begins with the same premise: Eighteen guests are residing on Rokkenjima during the family conference and are utterly cut off from the outside due to a typhoon. Slowly over the course of the first episode of the story, all eighteen are disposed of in horrific locked-room murders. Throughout this episode, surviving characters insist at each turn that this massacre might be the work of the secretive witch Beatrice, whom the audience does not see. Once all eighteen are removed, and a message in a bottle is found in the epilogue, any reader would sensibly expect some explanation from the killer about how the crimes were committed. Instead, the message insists that all eighteen were killed by the magic of the witch Beatrice, not by humans.
Subsequently, the second episode dispenses with the audience’s illusions of a straightforward explanation by having Beatrice finally appear in front of their eyes as the nineteenth character on the island. At this point, the plot leaves behind the pretences of a conventional mystery setup and instead begins a meta-mystery framing which will become standard for the rest of the narrative: While we watch a new variation on the Rokkenjima massacre each episode, avatars of Battler, our perspective character, and the witch Beatrice, carry out a debate from the perspective of a world that exists almost parallel to the audience. Battler seeks to prove that witches do not exist, and that the massacre was a series of locked-room murders using tricks conventional to mystery novels. Beatrice, on the other hand, insists that she simply killed the guests using magic. In other words, the core narrative loop of Umineko is watching a whodunit story with seemingly no resolution and witnessing Battler and Beatrice debate whether that story is a mystery or a fantasy—or, in the framing of Ryuukishi07, anti-fantasy or anti-mystery.
Part A – Umineko is not misunderstood, it alienates
The promise of Umineko
The basic setup of Umineko sounds like an immediately compelling premise with which to frame a meta-mystery. And that is largely because it is. Many of Umineko’s greatest moments occur when it simply lets its strong characters and the strength of this premise shine. The regular scenes of Battler and Beatrice drinking tea while debating the logic of dozens of classical style locked-room mysteries, with Beatrice straight out insisting that every assumption the audience holds about mysteries might be nothing more than a sham, makes for fundamentally compelling drama. And the core cast of Umineko are all strong characters, allowing each run through the massacre of Rokkenjima to deliver on being a satisfying, character driven thriller.
Unfortunately, Umineko takes several missteps in trying to keep this promise of exciting drama alive. Several persistent fumbles in Ryuukishi07’s approach to narrative leads to an awkwardly paced story, an ever-present inability to build proper tension, and an oftentimes meandering sense of thematic momentum. Through these consistent problems, Umineko manages to construct an inherently compelling situation that is populated with great characters, whilst also alienating any readers who demand certain standards in other areas of narrative construction.
In consideration of this paradox, reviewing this, or any other Ryuukishi07 work, carries with it an important balancing act: Even as Ryuukishi07’s work is filled with mistakes that doom them to attaining only middling popular attention, there is an authentic core appeal that cannot be denied. For some audiences, connecting to strong characters and emotionally resonant moments are not preconditioned on other, seemingly tertiary, arguments about its structure compared to other works. Therefore, in this case, it is important to clarify that criticality is not for the sake of invalidating enjoyment of a text, but for the sake of validating the perspective of those who came to dislike it in good faith.
So, the purpose of the critical tone of this review is not to contradict those who enjoy Umineko—at least, not exactly. Instead, it is to reject faulty tropes which are all too easy to fall into for fans of a text that happens to have detractors. I would like to make it clear through this post that those who felt alienated by Umineko, especially by the content of the Chiru episodes, were not alienated due to a lack of understanding. Instead, it was precisely because of decisions that Ryuukishi07 made in regard to what to communicate in this story, and how he chose to convey it.
The medium is the message
Before we continue, here is a question: What is the single most important feature of Umineko in regard to shaping its content as a text? The answer is not, as some may guess, Ryuukishi07’s intentions or habits as a writer. Nor is it the preferences of its readers, or even the history of the mystery genre. The answer is simply the fact that Umineko: When They Cry is a serialised, doujinshi visual novel. Every aspect of its design, and each of its strengths and weaknesses, are contextualised by this fact. Umineko’s primary flaws manifest most visibly in the form of its sluggish pace, and this fact must first be understood in the context of being told in a medium that is already famously prone to long stories.
Visual novels are, inescapably, novels with graphics and sound. Or maybe they are just video games without conventional gameplay. It is a medium defined by such ambiguities, existing in the grey space between traditional narrative and the new age of interactive media. However, leaving aside this issue of greyness for now, visual novels also face a particular incentive structure in their creation. Like most pulp media, visual novels generally cannot be successful by way of “casual” or “mainstream” popularity, which utilise low returns per customer, but high total volume of sales, in order to be profitable. All the more so in doujinshi markets, where the main vector of success is not direct sales, but fans that can participate in long-term engagement with the circle: Visual novels exist not just to be popular in their own right, but to attract the kind of customer likely to also consider fan discs, side material, art books, CDs, et cetera in future Comikets (or other doujin markets).
These are incentives and traits they share with other small scale, indie video games. However, the lack of gameplay in a visual novel is paradoxically likely to incentivise more demanding expectations from the audience. While an indie video game with a single refined gameplay loop, let us say a platformer or a roguelike, can be completed by a single developer relatively quickly and with few assets, visual novels have a far more brutal floor. Regardless of how long or short the word count of the story is, a visual novel must complete sprites for every major character at a minimum, not to mention including music and sound effects, oftentimes voice acting, programming and scripting, and other diverse requirements. Put another way, unlike indie games where unique gameplay and high-quality assets create market value on their own, visual novel development is first and foremost in service of the text and story. An indie game with costly assets can usually rely on the quality of those assets to help it stand out from the crowd, whereas the mindset of a visual novel circle is often in the opposite direction: They must create a story that is exceptional and grand enough to sell the costly assets that go into visual novel creation.
The net result of these forces is that visual novel developers must deliver a high value story in order to build perceived value into their product and allow it to stand out from the crowd. Competing on the basis of quality can only be done through talent and effort, not strategy. In other words, every industry incentivises quality products, so a visual novel developer cannot simply create a plan to insert more quality into their product. And so, the main vector of improving perceived value comes in the form of quantity. Increasing the quantity of assets does increase perceived value, but in a market dominated by the perception of story-first production, the returns on such investments are relatively low. Instead, the most effective way to sell a visual novel to a consumer, who could always adjust their preferences towards a low-cost paperback, is to offer a story with a large enough scope—and word count—to justify that higher price tag inherent to the delivery of multimedia assets. These incentives, combined with the practical consequences of structurally interactive storytelling (stories with choices), have led to a market where the conventional word count is significantly greater than what is expected in traditionally published novels. As a result, many famous examples are as many as half a dozen times the size of the practical word limit for a debut novel at most mass market publishing houses.
Regardless of the intentions or tendencies of individual authors, visual novels were always going to feature long word counts under such circumstances. Yet, even in this medium, Umineko is ridiculously long. Over a million words. For almost all readers, this level of sheer scope demands that the author pay careful attention to pacing and delivery, otherwise the story will fail irreversibly from its first steps. Unfortunately, this is where Umineko’s first and most obvious challenges begin.
Chewing gum and kicking ass; also, a lesson in scam artistry
Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? This is the title of a study published by Microsoft in June 2012. It seeks to answer a simple question: If the tropes of common scams, such as Nigerian princes, typo ridden messages, absurd claims of wealth, et cetera are so well known, why do scamsters still willingly rely on these tropes? The grim conclusion that the study comes to is that the benefit from the selection bias resulting from an obvious scam is more economically valuable than crafting a believable scam: A scamster can maximise their economic outcomes by crafting a scam so obvious that only gullible victims will fall for it.
Selection bias is an incredibly powerful force in human psychology, and much of it is far from problematic. It is for the best, for example, that those who live in cities are disproportionately those interested in an urban lifestyle. However, it is still extremely important to recognise that selection bias means that the fans of any given idea are disproportionately likely to be those who are insensitive to its contradictions and faults: A battlefield is likely to have a selection bias against pacifists and is therefore a dubious place to get a representative survey of people’s attitudes on violence.
The reaction among many fans of Umineko over the course of this review is likely to have been scepticism towards the implicit claim made that Umineko is too long. As we now make that claim explicit—Umineko is too long—we also need to explain why such a flaw has such low resonance among fans whilst simultaneously being overstated among critics: the answer is selection bias. Those who are least immiserated by a laboriously paced story are disproportionately likely to compose the fanbase of a 120-hour visual novel such as Umineko. This is, in other words, a fundamental manifestation of the subjectivity of fiction.
Regardless, while fans may bristle at these claims, they are important to properly consider if one wants to understand Umineko in a larger context than one’s own subjective impressions. Take, for example, Umineko’s use of extensive scenes within the metaphysics of a supernatural view on reality to represent events that have alternative mundane explanations, such as the magical battles that litter episodes 2, 4, and 6 in particular. Umineko’s fans will generally focus on the importance of this style of presentation to the overall thematic message of the text (which we will get to), but like any choice in fiction, these come with trade-offs. Trade-offs that are sensitive to the execution on the part of the author. What these scenes may gain in thematic texture that will eventually pay-off they lose in narrative efficiency. The combat in Umineko has a frustrating tendency to drag on and on in a constant barrage of nonsense powers that are given no coherent internal metaphysics, often only relaying the bare minimum of pertinent information to move the narrative along over the course of these lengthy scenes. In other words, every other goal the narrative has screeches to a halt in order to entertain those who enjoy Ryuukishi’s style of combat writing (which is ultimately a pale imitation of the style of Kinoko Nasu), and to gradually set in place a particular framing device which will pay off in the later stages of the plot.
Those who have finished and enjoyed Umineko might see little problem with this trade-off, but that is in and of itself basically the whole point. Trade-offs like this might accentuate the features that attract particular fans to Umineko, but criticism is also the task of explaining the absence of a particular fan as much as it is explaining the existence of another. The reason that Umineko has detractors does not come down to a lack of notoriety or vague prejudices against visual novels, but instead because the kinds of trade-offs and tendencies on display in Umineko are the hallmarks of amateurish writing, and some people have no interest in works of that stock. To be clear, some of these tendencies are, as explained under the previous heading, particular phenomena of the medium of visual novels. Much of the limited reach of Umineko can be attributed to attitudes and experiences that are shared by those that dismiss similarly lengthy but reputable visual novels such as Fate/Stay Night and Steins;Gate. However, that does not mean these criticisms are invalid, and more crucially to the content of this review, many of these criticisms are even more severe in the case of Ryuukishi07’s style as displayed in Umineko.
These criticisms do not end at the action scenes, either. The repetitive, looping nature of the stories Ryuukishi07 has chosen to tell with his When They Cry series often translates to repeated introductions and character beats. The tendency for the greater story to transcend the events of any particular loop also lends a feeling of triviality to much of the events. For all of the attempts to tug at our heart strings, there are only so many times someone can watch Eva or George die whilst remaining fully invested—all the more so with the knowledge that these characters will return in the next episode. This is all compounded by Ryuukishi07’s prose style that tends to repeat information for dramatic effect, often swaps perspectives in a way that also lends itself to repetition, and to top it all off Ryuukishi07 has a definitive tendency to soak in the atmosphere of a scene to the point of comical excess.
The consequences of poetic narrative layering
It is no secret to anyone who has read both authors that much of Ryuukishi07’s style is deliberately in imitation of Kinoko Nasu. A trademark of Nasu’s writing is the layering of metaphorical implications on top of fastidiously detailed worldbuilding. Despite being very thematically dense works, Nasu’s writings tends to spend relatively little time expositing the themes and philosophies of their characters. Fate/Stay Night, for example, never requires any scenes with the equivalent bluntness of the Banquet of Kings from Fate/Zero. Rather, the events of Fate/Stay Night develop poetic implications about their own meaning. I call this style poetic narrative layering, and Ryuukishi07’s commitment to adopting this style during Umineko becomes an increasingly prominent liability over the course of its runtime.
If not quite a strength, a source of reasonable intrigue with Umineko is its innovation to use a kind of poetic narrative layering as a cog within its key narrative trick: The fantastical scenes often shown by the audience rarely contain any direct clues in regards to the mystery of Umineko, but once it becomes clear that the supernatural elements of Umineko can be read as metaphorical representations of more literal events, it is possible to gather much more helpful poetic implications from these scenes. For example, the Shannon and Kanon focused prologue of EP2 is seemingly a character-focused introduction free of mystery for the first-time reader, but upon learning the rules of the fantasy of Umineko, it is possible to find several key hints towards the eventual solution.
The problem, however, is Ryuukishi07’s tendency to embrace this style as an aesthetic unto itself with little consideration paid to its necessity or benefit to the overall narrative momentum. And worst of all, once the audience recognises the truths of Umineko, these scenes become increasingly repetitive, often only transmitting a few sentences worth of information within dozens of minutes of poetic dressing. The Trials of Love in EP6 are a particularly egregious example of this: The clues towards the final solution of Umineko and its thematic implications contained within these scenes are entirely repeated from prior content, and yet these scenes will spend dozens of minutes re-establishing these ideas by way of poetic implication. Worst of all, these scenes repeat information within themselves: Each respective trial establishes each character’s commitment to essentially the same idea, that only one participant in the trial can survive (because they are all the same person).
The most frustrating examples of Ryuukishi07’s use of poetic narrative layering are, unsurprisingly, found in EP8. By this point, almost any reader should have solved the mysteries of Umineko, since they have been more or less explicitly explained over the course of EP7. Yet, EP8 is filled with metaphorical representations of simple concepts that frankly go on, and on, and on, and on. And on some more. I have my own criticisms of Nasu as a writer, but the secret to his success with this formula is incredible discipline in making sure that his uses of poetic narrative layering lead to a scene that is entertaining in its own right. Ryuukishi07, on the other hand, seems to value the aesthetics of writing a scene with both a literal and poetic meaning as its own goal, without much focus on the quality of either layer. The result is that Ryuukishi07’s prose is especially prone to repetition and insubstantiality.
Good characters with poorly plotted characterisation
If there is one unambiguous strength of Ryuukishi07’s writing, it is his characters. While I do not want to go overboard and confuse quality for perfection, the characters of both Higurashi and Umineko are usually well realised agents within the story and display appropriate depth. There has been the occasional misfiring, the odd bit of character writing that confuses emotional intensity and actual depth—Miyo Takano being the most salient example. Still, these stories are mostly able to present coherently constructed characters and give them interesting and meaningful things to do that also manage to further their character arcs. This can lead to some damn outright emotionally intense moments from time to time.
However, characters on their own rarely make a story great: While characters can be compelling or engaging in their own right, they must inevitably interact with all of the other pieces that comprise the larger system called a story. While a poorly told story with excellent characters is still valuable, it is also still flawed; this is precisely why Umineko is a good story that is nonetheless doomed to be overshadowed by the work of other authors with the necessary talent to excel in all aspects of storytelling.
The character of Rosa provides the quintessential example. Rosa is a deep and multi-faceted character; her relationship with Maria, her daughter, is the basis for some of the story’s most resonant emotional beats. The simple joy that envelops Maria when she is treated well by Rosa anchors the audience to the simple hope that this family will reach a happy ending, but the completely abhorrent way Rosa sometimes lashes out in rage at Maria also reminds us why that happy ending seems like nothing more than a fairy tale. Rosa is also one of the few characters we never truly understand. Was Rosa truly seeking a new romantic relationship in order to escape from the responsibility of caring for Maria, or was she trying to build a new family, escape from her debts, and provide a stable home for Maria? This is not just interesting character writing, but an early demonstration of the kinds of meditations on truth and objectivity that will eventually form the core of Umineko’s themes.
Unfortunately, Rosa’s characterisation is also demonstrative of the structural problems that plague Umineko throughout. The core of her characterisation takes place in self-contained flashback sequences that bring the bulk of other plot development to a halt. These sections are laser focused on a relatively small number of characters; they take place almost entirely outside of the Witch’s Game, the central framing device of the whole narrative. These facts alone would be troubling for certain readers, but Umineko’s flashbacks and asides tend to have a particular problem developing narrative momentum. It is usually an important feature of refined storytelling to ensure that any lengthy sequences which are removed from the typical aims of the plot have some other episodic narrative purpose. This is to provide narrative direction for the flashback and allow the building of coherent conflict and tension.
Such sequences in Umineko are too often inhibited by a lack of such direction. And even those that have some episodic conflicts are saturated in the pacing problems that are prominent across the rest of the narrative. The flashback conflict over the broch featuring Beatrice against Shannon and Kanon in episode 2 does serve some narrative function and have its own sense of momentum, but these are thoroughly inadequate in proportion of the scope of the sequence. The same is true of the extended time spent in Natsuhi’s perspective during episode 5, wherein the facts established are so simple that they could be explained in a simple five-point list, giving large stretches of the episode a feeling akin to filler content.
This is the key paradox that makes Umineko’s exceptional runtime feel like more of a curse than a blessing. Even while there are some exceptional characters who are more than happy to soak in the screen-time necessary to be developed, many such scenes are plagued with the unmotivated pacing that makes Umineko occasionally feel directionless and simple-minded. The structure of the scenes used to develop characters is at least as important as the quality of those characters in their own right. In other words, a good character who is confined to weak subplots is still capable of serving as an example of failed characterisation.
Such problems are yet another exemplar of the central challenge of talking about Umineko: For those who are not sensitive to such pacing issues, the characters, themes, and best moments of Umineko might leave a pleasant taste in their mouth. From such a position, the readers who are left most enamoured with Umineko might wrongly assume that those with a more lukewarm impression, or especially those who quit partway, felt the way they did because they are ignorant to the value of the story. This overgeneralisation is in error: There is no sense in blaming the audience for their response to Umineko’s imperfections. It is all too easy for a snobbish defence of a story by its fans to become an irrational insistence that a text must be flawless simply because it has meaning and value for them.
Part B – Mystery vs anti-mystery
Umineko as mystery, an introduction
Much of the amateurism on display in Umineko’s writing is at least in service of setting up dramatic payoffs and a compelling sense of intrigue. The fundamental innovation of the plot of Umineko, the gimmick that it lives or dies on as a matter of simple entertainment is its overriding mystery. As a matter of entertainment, it serves its purpose admirably. The central trick, based around unreliable narrators who are constrained to particular rules, is not exactly ground-breaking, but it does find a reasonable middle ground between being brutal enough to sustain such a lengthy mystery without resorting to outright cheating. That is more than I could say for the solution to Higurashi, and so that deserves some praise. While the repeated locked rooms start to drag after dozens of hours, they each do serve to inform any speculation about the eventual solution—sort of. And Battler’s extradimensional debates with Beatrice are genuinely engaging.
However, as we’ve seen from the previous Part, Umineko as a matter of mere entertainment is a concept whose value is excessively predetermined by how put off one is by the phrase “120 hours; self-published”. Most people, perhaps rightly, do not have the patience and time to take a chance on that kind of work rather than reading a steady diet of more consistent and more approachably sized options. There are, after all, enough interesting novels out there to keep one entertained for a whole lifetime. Rather, what really determines whether Umineko is a novel that is worth those 120 hours in some deeper, critical sense is not whether it can entertain for those 120 hours, but whether the substance it offers in exchange for that time stands up to real scrutiny.
I could, in a section focused on discussing Umineko as a mystery, consider whether the mystery itself holds up. Upon replaying chunks of EP1 and EP4 for this review, I’m quite sure that Shannon and Kanon are on screen together in ways that don’t quite match up to the rules Ryuukishi07 outlines for himself in the eventual resolution. But this does not really do justice to what Umineko wants to say. Anyone who followed along with my live-blog knows that Umineko is at least reasonably solvable at EP4—and anyone who is seeking simple and pure entertainment from Umineko can be satisfied with that. The mystery, while flawed, will keep you entertained. Ryuukishi does have a tendency for only writing one kind of psychological trick, but he can do that trick well sometimes.
What really matters if we are to consider the value of Umineko beyond simple entertainment is what its mystery means, because it certainly carries meaning. In order to do so, we may have to deal with some terms that might be new to some. So, let’s get those definitions out of the way:
- Romanticism: a term in culture for the dominant cultural ideology of the 1800s. Characterised by a faith in passion, self-expression, and individualism.
- Modernism: a term in culture theory for the dominant cultural ideology of the late 1800s through to the 1980s. Characterised by a search for self-contained meaning that rejected the traditions of pre-modernity.
- Postmodernism: a term in culture theory for the dominant cultural ideology from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Characterised by relativism and scepticism towards concrete sources of meaning.
The detectives of modernity
The dominant mode of criticism in the early 20th Century was one of extreme media independence under the framework of modernism. The schools of literary modernism, such as imagism, surrealism, formalism, futurism, et cetera all shared a view that works of literature should each be a unitary whole. In a world rapidly being transformed by industrialisation, the uncertainty and false assumptions of the pre-modern world were cast aside in favour of the deliberate construction of a new, logical mode of artistic expression to match the world as was contemporary to modernist art. This logic was chiefly expressed by seeking a unified, scientific theory of literature to explain the conventions of the past, and eventually discard them in favour of superior styles worthy of modernity.
A key manifestation of this approach was a philosophy of scepticism towards genre itself. Genre, as previously explained on this blog, was seen as a collection of tropes and clichés that interfered with the poetic power of literature. It was argued that genres, which rely on similarities between literature, merely cause the audience to recognise, rather than freshly experience, art. The perfect art envisioned by the modernist did not just rely on the recognition of prior art by the audience, but on a fresh and profound sensation independently evoked in the audience by the work of art. Through the aesthetics of their prose and narratives, modernists sought art so beautiful that anyone could understand it, regardless of their individual context.
Just like any utopian theory, this approach to literature could only survive a confrontation with reality for so long. In the first place, the modernist belief in textual independence was doubtful for their own works, let alone for works of an alternate heritage: What would be the point of James Joyce’s Ulysses without the deep cultural familiarisation of the titularly referenced Odyssey by Homer? While the modernists liked to imagine a concrete unit of meaning that could be stored and reflected by their art, the truth has always been that art exists in an autonomous swirl of culture that shapes and creates it in equal degree to the will of the author.
Even leaving aside the issue of unintentional cultural leakage, the imagined ideal of textual independence was far from desirable in its own right. This image reflected the particular sensibilities of the time, in which literature that could use poetic devices to capture a new and vivid aesthetic connection was seen as more valuable than the easy-to-understand messages and plots of traditional art.
In the eras of pre-modernity, narrative did not exist to immerse the audience in new worlds but instead to teach. Art did not just exist for the sake of individuals; the culture of the pre-modern world was predicated on unbroken links between the present and the past, the shared culture and religion of a community was at least as important as the enlightenment and meaning that art held for a particular individual. It is hardly surprising that the ideal for textual independence was only developed in the post-Enlightenment world of rugged individualism which had inculcated a culture of human independence.
Even if the didacticism of the pre-modern world was transformed by modernity into a new set of ideals, the tools developed by pre-modernity survived in popular entertainment and were put to other uses: Because of the didactic intentions of traditional forms of storytelling, the ability to compress and transmit complex information was essential to their purpose. The familiarisation which was seen as a failure of poetic aesthetic by modernist scholars actually served an essential purpose in allowing complex ideas to be effectively and efficiently communicated. The much-lauded independence of modernist literature could be viewed as a lack of sophistication in the system developed by pre-modern cultures. Since the purpose of the text was to instruct the audience in the theology of a shared system of value and inherited information, this shared tradition of unified understanding could be used to further compress and complexify the art within the framework of its intended didacticism. In other words, because the audience shared a culture, meaning could be stored and imparted with greater efficacy than what became possible in the modernist ideal.
The intentions of pre-modernist literature were chiefly didactic, but by modernity, literature had become a commonplace and recreational artform. While modernist scholars sought an ideal of independent literature, the above methods of using shared knowledge and culture to complexify art came at a great benefit to the entertainment-focused writers of so-called “genre fiction”. It was in this environment that mystery fiction rose to the top of the popular imagination in its so-called golden age. Some critical examples, such as the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, pre-dated the rise of true modernism, and were most closely connected to the cultural sense of curiosity typical of romanticism. The genre of mystery fiction that became popularised and codified in the early 20th Century, and especially in the 1920s, was done so with a specific lineage to these earlier traditions and largely ignored the trend towards textual independence typical of modernist writers.
Mystery fiction theory fundamentals: The author is a corpse
Modernist critics drew a decisive separation between what they considered “pure literature” as compared to the contrary “genre fiction”, which they imagined as a lesser form only suitable for entertaining the masses rather than ascending to the realm of meaningful art. As discussed above and previously on this blog, the modernist theory of “independent” forms of art fell apart, and resultantly so too did the basis for their theory of genre fiction as mere entertainment. Although a critic may legitimately claim that a particular work has more or less artistic value, every genre has coherent reasons and meaning behind its existence. This is equally and especially true of the golden age of detective-based mystery fiction from the 1920s through to the 1940s.
The brazen disregard mystery fiction showed for the attitudes of modernists extended beyond merely justifying its own existence. Mystery fiction rejected the modernist obsession with fresh artistic experiences and instead sought a paradoxical ideal of originality within categorical unoriginality: Mystery fiction combines familiarised symbols, composite pieces that are easily recognised, into an original resolution such that the ending, and only the ending, is surprising and defamiliarised.
The peculiar combination of a surprising resolution built out of unsurprising composite parts is the key definitional trait of mystery fiction. Subsequently, a second key trait arose directly as a logical consequence of this structure; mystery fiction was, unlike almost every other genre in the history of literature, strictly and formally codified so as to specifically include and exclude certain practices. This was done in the pursuit of the nebulous concept of “fair play”. Fair play refers to the subcultural expectation among audiences of mystery fiction that in order for the ending to be truly “surprising”, it must proceed logically from the “unsurprising” familiar elements that preceded it. It was reasoned that if an ending did not arise from the rest of the text, it was not truly surprising or original but instead capricious and arbitrary.
Codification and rulemaking transformed the unique relationship between the familiarised and defamiliarised within mystery fiction from a general tendency into a systematised standard for the genre. Take as an example the second rule of Ronald Knox’s decalogue, “all supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” By formalising this restriction and having it accepted by readers, an explicit boundary was established which precluded supernatural stories from being classed as mysteries.
This tendency is especially obvious in the rules established by Van Dine, such as his third, which declares that “there must be no love interest in the story” and thereby removed any attempt at a romantic mystery from the “true” canon of the genre. Of course, these rules not only established the boundaries of the genre, but also collected together the minimum elements of what was expected in the golden age. A clear example can be found in Van Dine’s seventh: “there simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.”
All of these attempts at codification were designed to emphasise the core nature of mystery fiction as a genre that progresses towards an unexpected resolution by way of expected and standardised means. These rules came to be highly valued by both readers and authors of mystery fiction insomuch as they solidified the concept of fair play. Because of these rules, a reader could reasonably trust that any unexpected resolution at the end of a mystery novel would be composed of the easy to understand and codified genre conventions found throughout the story. A logical consequence of this formula was that, even as the resolution was unknown to the audience, the audience could reconstruct this resolution from the familiarised composite pieces that had been deemed permissible by the codification of the genre.
What followed naturally from the logic of the structure of mystery, as defined above, combined with the conceptual frameworks of fair play and codification, was a third and final definitional pillar of the genre: gamification. No matter which English dictionary one relies on, a game will be defined as being in some way participatory or dynamic—in contrast to art itself, which has no such implication. Art, as understood by modernism, was something that the author crafted fully formed, and the audience could only receive or fail to receive the author’s intended artistic expression. However, no matter how cleverly an author may hide the eventual surprise resolution of a mystery, the consequences of fair play and codification ensured that it is technically possible for the audience to, in a surprise rebellion, use reason and deduction to usurp control from the author and pre-empt the intended reveal. In the golden age, authors took this challenge to their almighty power head on; golden age mystery writer extraordinaire John Dickson Carr himself called the genre:
A hoodwinking contest, a duel between author and reader. “I dare you,” says the reader, “to produce a solution which I can’t anticipate.” “Right!” says the author, chuckling over the consciousness of some new and legitimate dirty trick concealed up his sleeve. And then they are at it – pull-devil, pull-murderer – with the reader alert for every dropped clue, every betraying speech, every contradiction that may mean guilt.
John Dickson Carr
In the natural evolution from romanticist art to participatory artform, the mystery genre achieved something remarkable: it was the first form of creative narrative that was systematically and automatically deprived of true authorial control. Instead, the author took on the role of game master. This game master makes use of a set of predetermined, codified tools in order to create a secret, surprise resolution and hide it within the narrative. Then, the audience accesses their own database record of these tools in order to uncover this hidden solution and thereby wrestle control of the narrative away from the author.
An essential conclusion comes into clear relief from this analysis: The codification of mystery genre conventions into well-understood tools, combined with game-like participation from the audience, completely blew apart any semblance of the modernist model of textual independence. In a crucial sense, every mystery was a dialogue within the shared genre database of the audience and the author, with no independent text remaining.
The value of participation: Agency as narrative meaning
Mystery fiction, in its early rejection of authorial dominion, crafted a special kind of art that allowed for audience participation. Like any attribute of art, this participatory element did not and does not magically provide an inherent or objective source of meaning. Instead, the audience derives meaning from a work precisely by way of relative comparison. While other forms of narrative continued to emphasise the importance of the author—the rise of auteurism in the 1940s makes for a key example—mystery fiction provides an alternative experience where the audience defines their own artistic experience insomuch as they master the tools of the genre.
It is no coincidence that the conventions of mystery fiction became the most rigid and codified, and therefore oriented towards participatory dynamics, in the inter-war period following the First World War. Those countries that were geographically protected from direct destruction—namely Britain and the USA—but nonetheless experienced mass death via battle and disease (only for the war to end ambiguously), suffered a particular kind of trauma. In the pre-war period, death was hardly uncommon, but it carried an undeniable degree of dignity: people died for logical reasons in situations that felt within the control of society. The mass death of the First World War was different. Death in that war was banal, distant, and offered no agency to those left behind. Hence, mystery fiction.
Mystery fiction offered a special sociological ritual where those left behind by the war, especially women, could undergo a process where death is treated with great importance. The mystery novel debanalified death and, most importantly, offered a participatory element where the death could be intimately and logically interrogated by the reader. To outsiders it may have looked like a meaningless game, like nothing more than a crossword, but to readers of mystery fiction the narrativity was reflective of a deeper emotional weight that separated the artform from being mere idle entertainment. This was a game that carried unique emotional weight and served a unique purpose in a world where death had been banalised by the horrors and nihilism of the First World War. It was only the overwhelming victory of the USA in the Second World War that broke this spell for much of the English-speaking world. However, Britain has continued to be infected with a lingering, if reduced, mystery fiction fever as their once-great empire has slowly collapsed over the course of the post-war 20th Century and early 21st Century.
The explanation presented above should not be confused with any suggestion that those who find meaning in mystery fiction are all war widows who have been overwhelmed by fits of nihilism. On the contrary, mystery fiction has persisted as a valuable segment of literature for all kinds of people. An exploration into the original circumstances that characterised the connection that mystery fiction found with its audiences is no more definitive than the same exercise would be with any other genre: for example, it would make little sense to try to explain the Saw franchise in the light of the particular sociocultural anxieties of the Cold War that shaped earlier slasher films. Rather, it is the basic form, the skeleton of the meaning originally found in art that informs our understanding of what subsequent meaning will be found in similar art in the future.
Gamified mystery fiction continued to provide a unique form of agency to its audiences throughout the 20th Century, even as the unique miasma of the inter-war period dispersed. In particular, the primary audience for the genre continued to be women, who felt a consistent lack of agency in the male dominated economy of the early waves of feminism. However, as postmodernity came into prominence in the zeitgeist during the 1980s, and relatedly as the grand narratives of the Cold War fell into sharp decline following 1989, agency became a scarce sociological commodity.
The 1986 problem
Umineko exists in a very particular metatextual context; it is not just mystery fiction in the above, predominantly Western, tradition. Umineko is a work of Japanese mystery fiction released 20 years into the “honkaku renaissance”—an explosion of interest in traditional-style gamified puzzle mysteries among Japanese readers and authors that begun in 1987. This period is also known as the shinhonkaku boom, and it carried profound implications for mystery fiction theory beyond merely entertaining the Japanese market.
Some of this theory was covered as a case study in a prior post, but its core deserves to be repeated here. Classical mystery fiction brought agency to its readers through its particular structural peculiarities: An orderly status quo would be suddenly and violently destroyed by a murder or other such crime, an inescapable echo of the violent recent history of reality. However, unlike the real world which denied agency to so many, the familiar and comforting tools of the mystery novel would allow the audience to solve the crime alongside the detective and re-enact the symbolic reconstruction of the world from chaos to order. Shinhonkaku, the name for the new style of Japanese mystery that developed from 1987 onwards, evolved this formula by necessitating an even deeper level of deconstruction that had to be reconstructed by the events of the novel.
By the late 1980s, while mystery fiction was still a successful genre, much of its core purpose had been cannibalised by other cultural touchstones. Crime fiction as a general theme had already broadened out into all kinds of subgenres. Noir, procedurals, true crime, psychological crime, and all manner of alternatives to the classical mysteries of the golden age kept audiences attracted to the aesthetics of crime entertained. Additionally, the unique allure of the gamification of narrative permitted by mystery fiction was becoming a tad dated in a world of Dungeons and Dragons and, increasingly, video games. Most crucially, a core pillar of mystery fiction, the surprise resolutions, were becoming increasingly impractical.
In the crudest terms possible, mystery fiction could not work if the resolutions were boring—and the game had been largely solved and rendered stale as far as audiences were concerned. As established above, the gamification of mystery fiction was an essential ingredient in producing the sensation of agency that filled them with meaning. The audience needed to be able to grasp familiar tools and toil away towards a secret, defamiliar underbelly that would reconcile the contradictions within the narrative and bring order, as well as control, to the world. However, generations of familiarity with the conventions of the genre combined with new forms of entertained started to blunt the intensity of this sensation. Audiences had seen most resolution a dozen, or even several dozens of times. The sensation of agency had been stripped away in favour of the dull taste of falsehood by the cruel passage of time.
Still, fans of the genre persisted. The shinhonkaku generation in Japan were avid readers of the classics and had also come of age during the cultural zenith of postmodernist discourses. They saw an opportunity to breathe new life into the genre by crushing it into pieces and reconstructing it from the ground up. By turning familiarity with the genre into an explicit weapon in the battle between author and audience, shinhonkaku mysteries changed the formula; all whilst retaining, and even enhancing, the sense of gamification that had rooted the genre in its golden age.
Mystery fiction found its renaissance by relying increasingly on metafiction, and in doing so found a new source of agency for the audience. To quote Kiyoshi Kasai, a key critic of the era: “Metafiction attempts to erase the existence of its author, the authority of its fictional world, who is even analogous to God.” However, Kasai also warned of the potential for metafiction to run amuck, “poor metafiction, however, transgresses the fictional order of realism so easily and arbitrarily that it provides the author with much more authority than that of realistic fiction. At this point, the fiction is no longer a metafiction that implies there is no truth, but a fake metafiction that makes propaganda for the truth that there is no truth.” Shinhonkaku was the quest to chew up mystery fiction and reconstitute it into a new source of agency for postmodern readers, whilst walking a careful tightrope to avoid pitfalls of poor metafiction.
This quest begun with The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji in 1987. The novel is, like Umineko, built directly and intentionally on the foundations of And Then There Were None. The novel follows a group of university students, isolated on the island on which a wealthy family built the titular decagon house. To be explicit without pre-empting the story too much, the necessary, violent things happen as demanded by the genre. However, the twist is that the cast are all members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, one of the most famous groups for mystery enthusiasts in Japan. Needless to say, rather than being simply helpless victims, they at every step attempt to use their genre savvy to solve the mystery and escape the situation. In other words, while classical mystery fiction followed a detective attempting to solve the crime purely using literal clues, The Decagon House Murders followed a cast that added the conventions of mystery fiction as an element of the investigation itself. And, needless to say, the solution was sufficiently devious to accommodate this approach.
The full history of shinhonkaku mysteries is beyond the scope of this review, but it is sufficient to say that the genre evolved considerably over the course of the two decades that followed from Ayatsuji’s novel. Ayatsuji’s own The Labyrinthine House Murders and Kenji Takemoto’s Apocryphon of Ouroboros were seen as major leaps forward in the metatextual potential of mystery fiction. Ryuusui Seiryouin produced meta novels in the JDC series so dramatic that he became a taboo unto himself. And the author that would go on to earn the title of the fifth “Great Mystery”, Outarou Maijou, made his debut. This is all to say that many of the formats that Umineko experimented with, a story within a story, the word of “god” within a mystery, the explicit gamification of narrative, et cetera had all become part of the common language of the genre by the time it came onto the scene starting in late 2007. And so, it is striking the efforts that Umineko goes to in order to not engage with its peers.
As you may recall, the mystery of Umineko is more or less constrained to an isolated island off the Japanese coast during the year 1986. This is a striking date, set exactly one year before the shinhonkaku revolution. As the plot of Umineko progresses, it slowly becomes clear that this date was not chosen in order to engage in a debate with its peers of the shinhonkaku generation, but instead out of an attempt to minimise debate with them. The metanarrative of Umineko is chiefly concerned with the tropes and conventions of classical mysteries of the kind that existed prior to shinhonkaku. In doing so, it pulls a slightly devious sleight of hand by avoiding texts that had already addressed its most valid points.
I call this oddity “the 1986 problem”. From the very beginning, by choosing this setting, Umineko is signalling an intention to stick to a particular lane. Doing so would be respectable as a deliberate choice—there are many cases of great retro art managing to comment compellingly on the past without particular attention being paid to the present. However, the eventual direction the story takes finds it slipping out of its lane in increasingly prominent expeditions, until it is eventually tackling topics far beyond the limits of 1986. And even while it does so, Umineko tries to have its cake and eat it too by continuing to frame its themes in the context of the pre-shinhonkaku world.
Anti-mystery vs anti-fantasy
In order to understand the 1986 problem, and the deeper metatextual antagonisms it hints at, we will need to take a deeper look into the particular discourses within Umineko and its place within its genre. Umineko, in the words of Ryuukishi07, represents a struggle between “anti-mystery” and “anti-fantasy”. The plain reading of how Ryuukishi defines these terms means that, in most contexts, “anti-mystery” is simply fantasy and “anti-fantasy” is simply mystery. However, there are reasons for Ryuukishi to use these slightly esoteric terms instead.
Anti-fantasy, in Ryuukishi’s telling, is the stubborn insistence that the truth must and can be revealed by logic. It refers to those who are likely to think of the various logical inconsistencies in any mythological story and demand that an author cannot simply declare something to be so—it must be established via evidence and scientific rigour. Anti-mystery, in Ryuukishi’s formulation, is the direct product of the “devil’s proof” and the “late Queen problem”: no matter what claims are made about the logical structure of a mystery, the author has nigh unchallenged power to alter the equation and therefore the answer. As a result, an “anti-mystery” mindset is one that maintains a flexible perspective on the idea of truth, since there is no one truth.
What those who were introduced to these terms purely through Umineko may not know is that “anti-mystery” is a phrase with a storied lineage in Japanese mystery literature, going back to the 1930s. Among mystery fans, an “anti-mystery” refers to epoch defining novels that managed to deconstruct the genre in some profound and long-lasting way. In particular, among mystery fans, anti-mystery refers to deconstructive mysteries styled after the five Great Mysteries. These five being:
- Dogra Magra by Kyuusaku Yumeno (1935)
- Black Death Manor Murder Case by Mushitarou Oguri (1935)
- Offering to the Void by Hideo Nakai (1964)
- Paradise Lost Inside the Box by Kenji Takemoto (1978)
- Disco Detective Wednesdayyy by Outarou Maijou (2008)
What these and other anti-mystery works share is a radical attitude of deconstruction that goes far beyond that of the shinhonkaku generation. The shinhonkaku generation and their style more akin to meta-mystery sought to use metatext to reconstruct the original purpose of mysteries, anti-mystery destroys mystery at its foundations in order to find new meaning by stripping mysteries of their original meaning. These tendencies are invariably vague, as there is little agreement among Japanese critics as to what the limits and purposes of anti-mystery are—much less a consensus to be reached looking in from the outside. Nonetheless, in invoking such a term, Umineko deliberately steps into this debate. In doing so, Umineko suggests that its deconstruction of the mystery genre will, like the anti-mysteries before it, find some new meaning after stripping away the foundations of the genre.
Much of the thematic conflict of Umineko takes place in the context of the “Witch’s Game”, which is a meta-mystery frame for an ideological conflict between an anti-fantasy position which posits that supernatural explanations for the Rokkenjima cannot be accepted as a matter of logic, in opposition to an anti-mystery position that there is no single truth that can be accepted about the Rokkenjima incident. Indeed, the climax of Umineko, the moment which the dozens of hours of storytelling builds to, is Ange’s own decision on this dichotomy. For the first half of Umineko, Battler is representative of the anti-fantasy side of the conflict, shooting down any possibility of a witch being behind the deaths. However, after Battler’s dramatic conversion to the anti-mystery side from the end of EP5 onwards, Ange becomes the primary avatar of the anti-fantasy position.
Despite all of this talk of conflicts and dichotomies, Umineko makes a very curious choice in Chiru. While the first half of the story was more ambiguous about the points made by each side, Umineko Chiru is a full-throated defence of Ryuukishi’s vision of anti-mystery and a polemic against anti-fantasy. The anti-fantasy position on the deaths on Rokkenjima is proven to be canonically, unambiguously incoherent by the end of EP7. The story is reframed from within the events of Rokkenjima to an outsider’s view, where it is explicitly declared that Ryuukishi is capable of inventing infinite solutions with infinite potential culprits, which means that the facts from Ange’s point of view, outside the island on that day, are completely liable to the late Queen problem. From here, during the climatic EP8, the player is presented with their one and only real choice in this otherwise kinetic novel: should Ange accept the anti-mystery position that there is no truth about Rokkenjima, or should Ange stand by her anti-fantasy position and continue seeking the truth. Ryuukishi07 makes his intentions overwhelmingly clear with this choice, the anti-fantasy choice results in an inescapable, unambiguous bad ending. For all of the pontificating about a battle between the two, Ryuukishi07 only really believes in one side.
It is when seen from this light that Umineko reveals its true nature: Umineko is not interested in the agency afforded to audiences by the original vision of the mysteries of the golden age. Umineko is consistently chiding these stories for not having the “heart” to care about the motives of the victims and the culprit, and the emotions at the heart of the crime. It sees gamification as a callous and indifferent exploitation of tragedy, something that takes the emotions that belong to the participants of tragedy and hands them over to the “intellectual rapists” (Umineko’s words) in the audience who want to gamify tragedy. This belief is explicitly and repeatedly assigned to the anti-fantasy side of the equation. In other words, Umineko’s eventual thematic resolution is a polemic against the “gamification of tragedy”, which, as established at the outset of this Part, is the explicit purpose of mystery fiction. Umineko is, at its core, not mystery fiction: It is an attempt to deconstruct the genre at the foundations, like the anti-mystery that came before it, and insert its own vision of anti-mystery, which rejects the genre of mystery as embodied by the anti-fantasy mindset.
The late Queen problem
Ryuukishi07’s vision of anti-mystery, a rejection of the singular ideal of “truth”, is fundamentally built on the late Queen problem—he says as much in an essay. Therefore, it is worth taking a moment to expand on this slightly obscure idea. The late Queen problem refers to a generalisation of the theories put forward in Rintarou Norizuki’s article Early Queen Theory, first published in Contemporary Thought in 1995. Norizuki’s article was a deep study into several representative classic mysteries by Ellery Queen. Norizuki, as later clarified by Kiyoshi Kasai’s own commentary on the issue, had uncovered two key problems with the notion of fair play in his analysis of these texts:
- Is an in-universe explanation offered by a detective inherently fallible and subject to alteration?
- In offering a solution to the crime, does the detective play the role of an arbitrary god?
While both problems have some implications for the themes of Umineko, Ryuukishi07 was chiefly concerned with the implications of the first problem. To quote Ryuukishi, “after the reader finishes reading … and receives a concrete answer, he or she has more or less accepted this truth. Even so, if the ‘late Queen problem’ exists, then there’s no guarantee that what is being revealed … is the real truth.”
Fair play, as previous established, formed a key pillar in the construction of the philosophy of gamification which powered the original form of mystery fiction. The late Queen problem in its original form was intended as an unresolved question, something that mystery author and audiences must consider before they can wrestle with the logic of gamification. Ryuukishi, however, has more definitive conclusions. In his essay on the matter, he considers the late Queen problem inescapable. Accordingly, to quote him once more, “even when someone falls down dead right before our eyes, and a locked room is established, and there is suspicious evidence everywhere, we still can’t begin our deduction.” Ryuukishi’s understanding of the late Queen problem forms a pincer attack with the philosophy of anti-mystery whereby gamification itself is incoherent. Ryuukishi rejects the emotion of gamification with the invocation of the “heart” of mystery, and he rejects the logic of gamification via the late Queen problem. However, these two angles of attack rest on the same assumption: That the author is a god.
Gamification, as previously established, is deeply associated with the idea of constructing an “authorless genre”, one where the audience has a high degree of autonomy over their interactions with the narrative. Shinhonkaku mysteries took this idea even further, erasing the individuality of the author by reconstituting the genre into a metafictive discourse that considers all of mystery fiction a collective entity to be considered in the solution of any single one. In that context, the late Queen problem is not so much an interrogation of the logic of mystery novels, but a theoretical exercise in considering the power of authors over this genre that inherently rejects individuality. Even if, at an ideological level, the structure of mystery novels does away with the power of authors, as the ones ultimately writing the work, the author can challenge this power by twisting and stretching the limits of “fair play”. This is the essence of the late Queen problem at the level of abstraction.
The codification of mystery novels into concrete rules and setting limits on the genre has historically been the greatest defence against the late Queen problem. If an agreement exists between author and audience to never breach a shared understanding of the late Queen problem, the game can proceed despite the logical implications of the problem. This is fundamentally the origin of elements such as challenges to the reader: A breach of the fourth wall by the author to assure the reader that, from this point onwards, they need not worry about a last-minute twist based on the late Queen problem. Of course, an author can simply ignore this agreement. A writer might, after offering an unambiguous challenge to the reader, introduce a series of significant clues that upend the previous understanding of the case and therefore lead to an entirely unpredictable solution. In this case, it ultimately falls to the audience, not the author, to enforce the limits of codification.
As a result, we invariably return to the question lingering beneath both Umineko’s exploration of the late Queen problem and Ryuukishi07’s theory of anti-mystery: How much respective right do the author and audience each have to exert power over the world of fiction? For those who believe in the original power of mystery, the audience has the ultimate agency to decide their relationship to the work through gamification. For those that embrace Ryuukishi’s vision, the author invites the audience as simple guests, since only the author can bring truth to a world with no one truth. This is, with some consideration to the language of Ryuukishi07, the battle of mystery vs anti-mystery; beneath its camouflage of mystery, Umineko is an anti-mystery proposition declaring that mystery, a genre born from the gamification of tragedy and trauma, is insensitive to the heart of trauma, and should be broken down and reconstituted on the basis of a new vision of empathy.
Part C – The goats have hearts
Whose cat box is it anyway?
It was… [ellipses abbreviated for the sake of sanity] a crowd of people with goat heads. Their outfits were all different. Some wore suits, while others were dressed casually. However, all of them were covered with darkness, and all of them had goat heads. Ange … could hear the words spoken by the goats.
“…Kyrie and Rudolf are the culprits.”
“Battler is the culprit… Battler is the culprit…”
“…Battler culprit theory. Battler’s family culprit theory…”
Umineko, EP8
“…Endless possibilities are hidden within the cat box. …Because of that, those outside the box can imagine the insides to be any one of an infinite number of things. …It would seem those endless delusions are the true nature of these creatures.”
Umineko, EP8
“…Those people… …They’re lowlifes, making up and passing around stories, imagining the tragedies that might have unfolded for us on this island… They found it so interesting that I never talked about the truth… that they kept on creating tragedies one after another for their own enjoyment…”
Umineko, EP8
It is difficult, even with an endless series of quotes, to express just how mean spirited the banquet of goats gets. Umineko has passages that attempt to express how entertaining a mystery can be, such as Yasu’s backstory segments involving Battler, and so it is a bit much to say that Umineko hates mystery fans. But, when it is time for the final showdown between our cast of characters and the forces of anti-fantasy (mystery), Ryuukishi07 sees the goats as beneath contempt. He has absolutely no patience for those who attempt to gamify and trivialise the struggles and trauma of his characters. And while this is an understandable impulse, it is also the foundation of the philosophical collapse that Umineko gradually suffers from.
Between the start and end of Chiru, Umineko develops from a metafiction about genre into a metafiction about Umineko itself. Much of this process is subtle, but by the time we reach the goats of EP8, the shift is complete. We have introduced an explicit author of the events of Umineko in the form of the Hachijous, the framing devices of “magic” and the world of 1998 have become fully merged with a commentary on the process of trying to solve Umineko, beyond any diegetic role those narrative devices serve. In this context, it is clear that the “goats” of EP8 are avatars of those mystery fans who have, in unrelenting gamification of the pursuit of truth, engaged with Umineko in a way that Ryuukishi07 finds perverse.
It is not, despite being a rather subtle distinction, the enjoyment of mysteries that Ryuukishi castigates the goats for. Umineko’s final act is a polemical defence against “outsiders” who wish to define tragedy for those within the “cat box”, the metaphorical construct that separates those who experienced the truth first-hand from those that merely look for it from the outside. Through the character of Ange, we learn that there is a process within the metaphysics of Umineko for being invited into the cat box, for coming to a truth that the narrative looks favourably upon: It is only by being invited in by those within the cat box, by those who own the tragedy, that an outsider may “respectfully” learn the truth.
The goats, on the other hand, represent the intellectual rape of the cat box. They are akin to the backstory of Erika Furodo: A girl who drove away her love because of an uncompromising pursuit of the truth. The goats view the tragedy of Rokkenjima as merely a source of entertainment, without the “heart” necessary to respect the residents of the cat box, and so they can only consume Rokkenjima and destroy those inside the cat box. And they do so while citing the theories and tropes of mystery fans, eager to reach the truth at the end of the story by any means necessary. Ryuukishi positions EP8 as the final rebellion against these kinds of fans. Ange rejects learning the truth by way of intellectual rape, and instead accepts the truth offered by Battler, leading to a happy ending where the cat box is protected from the outsiders.
By walking through this metaphorical journey, guided by Ryuukishi07, the audience is hoodwinked into looking favourably upon a resolution that is distorted several times over from the truth of the genre it is criticising. The cat box was never anyone’s possession, much less something to be hoarded by a dragon (Ryuu-kishi). Most of all, the goats he imagines are even more illusory than any supernatural power.
Tohya Hachijou is the worst character in Umineko
This may seem, at this point in the review a rather trivial and petty point to make. The loud-spoken and overconfident older woman archetype that she fulfills is not universally beloved by any means, but selecting a major character with thorough development as the worst character in the story instead of the dozen or so extremely minor characters might seem like a stretch. If such thoughts were running through the minds of any readers, I must apologise, since you have probably misunderstood the title. I don’t mean Tohya Hachijou (Ikuko Hachijou), I mean Tohya Hachijou. In other words, Battler Ushiromiya from the year 1998 is the worst character in Umineko.
This criticism is not made in the sense of pure entertainment value, as if to say that the problem is Tohya’s lack of characterisation. After all, although removed by a few degrees by an amnesiac plot device, Tohya is Battler, the main character of Umineko—and I will happily concede that Battler is a protagonist I enjoyed very much. The problem with Tohya is what he represents. Tohya crystalises a vague implication of Umineko’s that, once realised, defeats Umineko’s chief reason for existence. Because Tohya exists, the cat box of Umineko is not something that can be more or less ethically engaged with in terms of a systematised, universalised moral philosophy, but instead it is something controlled by its creator.
The original theme of Umineko, that one must approach tragedy with “heart” and respect, was a fairly serious criticism of mystery fiction—at the very least as Ryuukishi07 saw it. He positioned mystery as far too indifferent to the tragedy and trauma implicit in the plots that it gamifies, and he therefore deconstructed the genre as a call to action for fans to approach the genre with a new, more empathic frame of mind. From this perspective, the problem with the goats is not that they are mystery fans per se, but that they approach mystery from the mindset that Ryuukishi07 is attacking. The existence and role of Tohya reveals how pretextual this nuance turns out to be.
Throughout Chiru, those who attack the cat box from the outside, and refuse to accept the mythology chosen by those within the cat box to recontextualise the tragedy that took place within, are the antagonists. Bern, Erika, the goats, Eva’s journal, and many others are all metaphors for this kind of relationship to the cat box. Ange’s arc, which becomes the main vehicle for EP8 and the climax of the story, is meant to serve as an instruction to the audience of how to ethically engage with tragedy, how to gamify it in a way that is compatible with Umineko’s deconstruction. Eventually, Ange is able to do so by accepting the mythology of the witch Beatrice, as chosen by those within the cat box.
Some have misinterpreted this as being a point particular to the form of this mythology, and therefore have concluded that Umineko is a call to mass delusion or a rejection of material reality. This is missing the mark. The point of this resolution is not the form of what Ange chooses to believe, but rather the boundaries set in place in terms of who is framed as seen as being welcomed into the cat box and who is instead seen as an intellectual rapist. The one who determines that, it turns out, is not the individual trying to enter the cat box, but instead its owner, Tohya.
The initial suggestion of the existence of Tohya Hachijou, as a mysterious author who is behind the Twilights that we see in Umineko, implies that there is some outsider who is able to understand the cat box: someone that knows the full truth and was therefore able to enter the cat box respectfully and completely. However, the woman that the audience is led to believe is behind this, Ikuko Hachijou, turns out to only be the public face of Tohya Hachijou, the only surviving victim of the tragedy of Rokkenjima. This revelation radically reshapes the metaphorical implications of Umineko. There is no longer any implication of characters being able to independently and respectfully enter the cat box. It is no longer the truth that allowed Ikuko to separate herself from the rapist goats who use the cat box as mere entertainment, it is purely the consent of Tohya, a survivor, that separates her from these goats. The latent implication of this, which is held consistent throughout all of Chiru, is that anyone who does not receive the consent of Tohya, regardless of their underlying attitudes, is simply a goat: If Ikuko had behaved precisely as she had, without the consent of Tohya, she would have been a mere goat.
If we return again to the inescapable reading of Chiru as metafiction about Umineko itself, the full and weighty implications of Tohya becomes manifest. What makes the gamification of Umineko more or less ethical is not any particular underlying harm or principle: anyone can be a goat, after all. Instead, the sole arbiter of one’s relationship to the cat box is its owner, Ryuukishi07. Umineko is a totalising rejection of the autonomy of the genre from the concept of an author, who Ryuukishi07 deifies anew.
The myth of the goats: 1986 redux
It becomes exceedingly obvious that the underlying nature of the goats is irrelevant to their place in the Umineko pantheon once one notices that the beliefs of the goats were always vaguely defined and not based on any precise problem with mystery fiction. As established in the previous Part, mystery fiction gamified tragedies that were not just unrealistic but anti-real. In an era where death and tragedy had afflicted so many in direct and unavoidable ways, mystery fiction created thoroughly familiarised worlds that did not replicate the sensations of reality, and thereby allowed tragedies to be gamified and resolved in ways that were contrary to the cruel and uncontrollable whims of reality. The greatest irony of Umineko’s imagining of a mystery-like mindset that it calls “anti-fantasy” is that mystery is, and always has been, a fantasy: Mystery is a fantasy created in order to gamify a simulacrum of an overly traumatic reality in much the same way as the fantasy invented by those within the cat box of Rokkenjima involving witches and demons empowers the survivors to take agency over the events on the island rather than emphasising the traumatic truth they experienced.
What Ryuukishi07 contextualises as an assault on the cat box, the callous and indifferent theorising of the goats, is merely a manifestation of this fantastical gamification due to the existence of Tohya Hachijou’s Twilights, which produced fictional fantasies that could be gamified by those who were not present in the original cat box of Rokkenjima. Ryuukishi07 uses Umineko as a polemic against the goats for reducing the real trauma of victims by treating their past as mere fiction, but it was actually Tohya Hachijou, a metafictive avatar of Ryuukishi07, who turned this real trauma into the fictional Twilights that the goats read and theorised around. By taking the diegetically “real” tragedy of Rokkenjima and placing it within the familiarised tropes of mystery fiction, Ryuukishi07 was actually the one and only culprit behind the violation of the sanctity of the cat box.
Ryuukishi07 primarily reached this false conclusion because of his own lack of understanding of literature, but more particularly it was Umineko’s insistence on seeing mystery fiction in a particular way, that served Ryuukishi07’s wishes as an author, rather than seeing mystery fiction as it actually is. In that sense, the 1986 problem, which was explained in the previous Part, is not merely a trivial fluke, but a representative crisis at the foundations of Umineko’s metafiction. Umineko cannot recognise the changes to mystery fiction made in the era of shinhonkaku precisely because they so thoroughly undermined the individuality of the author, which Ryuukishi07 attempted to reassert in his deconstructive anti-mystery called Umineko.
Take, for example, Nisio, Isin’s 2003 mystery novel Our Broken World that upends the entire usual mystery fiction structure by creating a puzzle that is impossible to solve without deducing the motive of the culprit. Or take Hiroshi Mori’s 1996 novel Everything Becomes F: The Perfect Insider, where the detective, Souhei Saikawa, is largely motivated by empathy for the motives of the eventual culprit. In the context of these novels, and many others, Umineko is fighting a phony war against an enemy that has long since been recontextualised and understood by mystery fans. Ryuukishi07 is akin to the mythological Japanese soldiers who continued garrisoning islands in the pacific decades after the war had already been lost. Mysteries have already been so thoroughly reinvented in the age of postmodernism that the accusation levelled in Umineko is already thoroughly out of date.
The goats who assault Rokkenjijma in EP8 are actually the ones who, unlike Ryuukishi07, are embodying a time-honoured tradition of proper consideration to the impact of tragedy in fiction through gamification. When the Hachijous recreated the world of Rokkenjima as a fictional construct through their fictional Twilights, the goats did not merely take it as an opportunity to engage in idle entertainment, but by applying the clearly fictional tropes of mystery fiction to these fictional Twilights, they removed the events from the context of the diegetically real tragedy of Rokkenjima and created their own cat boxes in which they could engage in proper and respectful fantasy, which each no longer belonged to Tohya Hachijou.
The origin of the error: The world belongs to no one
Shinhonkaku was, above all else, a postmodern reconstruction of the mystery genre which, while ahead of its time, was too steeped in the presumptions and traditions of modernity for the world of the 1980s, and especially for the 1990s. In the world after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent Lost Decade in Japan, it was impossible for individuals to feel a sense of agency in the real world. And so, it was once again in the realm of fictional tragedy that a sense of agency was to be found. However, in the postmodern world where the grand narratives of modernity had collapsed, any source of rigidity that limited the autonomy of the audience became too tyrannical, whether that be the genre itself or, crucially, the author.
Let us return again to the quote with which we opened this review:
I think it’s very unproductive to say that the only truth is that there is no truth. When they say “there is no truth,” in actuality, most people automatically believe in a truth that there is no truth. Generally, this attitude characterized highly fashionable Japanese postmodernism during the 1980s. In those days college students used to carry about the texts of Derrida and Deleuze just like accessories. They often referred to “deconstruction” or “rhizome,” but it was just because the terms sounded smart and fashionable. And now, no one reads Derrida. It went out of fashion. The same thing can be said about failed metafictions. Metafiction attempts to erase the existence of its author, the authority of its fictional world, who is even analogous to God. Poor metafiction, however, transgresses the fictional order of realism so easily and arbitrarily that it provides the author with much more authority than that of realistic fiction. At this point, the fiction is no longer a metafiction that implies there is no truth, but a fake metafiction that makes propaganda for the truth that there is no truth.
Kiyoshi Kasai
Shinhonkaku mystery sought to erase all sources of truth that could not be intermediated by the audience’s own subjectivity; this especially included the truth that there is no truth. Having that absolute notion of relativism prescribed unto them was, in and of itself, a denial of agency as tyrannical as the truth that there is a truth. Truth or no truth, the important thing in an era bereft of grand narratives and absolutes was that the audience be allowed to decide it for themselves; that the mystery fiction they read welcomed all to read it in the light of whatever truth they pleased.
Umineko’s fundamental error is that it rebelled against the collapse of modernist meaning in precisely the wrong direction. Umineko saw the imposition of foreign truths on an individual’s tragedy as problematic in a world of anti-mystery, where there is no one truth. The problem is that in a postmodern world calling for the supremacy of the truths of individuals is the same for calling for “a new truth of no truths”. What that actually became, instead of an acceptance of the demands of a postmodern era, was a retreat into romantic notions of individuality. Romanticism, as defined at the outset of Part B, was the dominant cultural attitude prior to modernity, where the sensations and truths felt by individuals in the passions of life reigned supreme.
Ryuukishi07, in seeing how the gamification of mystery fiction minimised the feelings of the characters, who are extensions of the author, falsely assumed that asserting the passions and truths of characters would lead to a reconstruction of the form of mystery fiction under a philosophy of empathy. However, Ryuukishi’s critique was actually built on his own individual perspective as an author rather than a holistic view of the place of the genre in all of culture. Therefore, it became an ill-suited vehicle for his own passion towards his own creation, which he wanted to protect from becoming the plaything of outsiders—the goats.
Despite all of Ryuukishi07’s protestations, the cat box called Rokkenjima does not actually belong to the victims, not to Tohya, and not to the author. It belongs to all of us, as we must each negotiate the constant tragedies in this mystery novel we call life. The goats are all of us, and we all have hearts, whether we have Tohya Hachijou’s permission or not.
Conclusion
Allow me to use these closing few words to answer the question that is usually the subtext of any review: Do I recommend Umineko: When They Cry? Despite my rather brutal tone in the last two Parts, especially towards the middle of Part C, the answer would actually be a yes if it was just more tightly constructed and consistent as a work of pure entertainment. Plenty of works make missteps with their attempts at deeper themes, deconstruction, and metatext. This alone should not be a reason to dismiss a work. However, usually those missteps do not play out over a runtime that could have been replaced by well over a dozen alternative novels.
I think an interesting irony of Umineko is that its philosophical missteps are going to become more, not less, resonant even as its beliefs are out of time with the genre it is deconstructing. The increasing virtualisation of culture is producing a chimera that is far different from the postmodern culture of the 1990s and early 2000s. In that culture, the notion of “an individual cat box, that should be protected from having the false truths of outsiders imposed on it” is a very natural way of thinking: We call that cat box our avatar, our disembodied identity that occupies social media.
So, despite my insistence that the logical basis for Umineko’s efforts at deconstruction is quite weak, in a world that is past the peak of shinhonkaku and has entered into a deeply neo-romanticist culture of virtualisation, it may ironically be that Umineko is increasingly likely to connect with people. And if you’re a young person, especially a student, with nothing but time on your hands, and there’s a good chance you’ll connect with Umineko, why shouldn’t you at least try it? I guess that’s a conclusion I can be satisfied with. But I can only hope that reading this review would lead to a more critical lens being taken towards the message that Umineko wants to offer.
Leaving aside the world of mystery novels for a moment, Umineko’s themes being applied to real tragedy and trauma is problematic in its own way. We live in a world of endlessly interconnected responsibilities and entanglements. None of us are an island to ourselves—unlike Rokkenjima. Would any of us really say that if something the size of Rokkenjima suddenly exploded, society at large has no right to seek the truth to that mystery? As a theory of sociocultural obligations, it is essentially immature. We are each born on this cruel rock called Earth in a state of destitution where no one owes us anything. And once we step out into the world, we find that humanity has constructed this world of plenty by working together, and then we have to negotiate our relationship to that collective. You may have your own cat box which contains the way you see the world, but learning to recognise that everyone else has their own cat box with their own truths, and that those truths may interfere with your cat box, is a little something called “growing up”. I’d recommend Ryuukishi07 try it sometime.
I believe the only conclusion that would suit the message of this post is that, when it comes to whether one should read Umineko or not, everyone should decide that for themselves. I think it would be best that those who were already interested in it go ahead and do so, hopefully with a critical eye towards the problems highlighted in this review. And those who were already uninterested should go ahead and read several other things instead as a better use of their time. Like all things in life, you need to live it yourself, not expect anyone else to do it on your behalf.
Post-script
I know that this has already been ridiculously long, and I won’t feel bad if you check out right now. But I also thought this would be the best place to discuss some of the things that were cut from this review, since I expect some of you might be curious. Originally, there was a draft of this review that was much longer than this finished product; the main differences from this version were that the discussion of romanticism was much longer and there was an extensive section dealing with the mystery of Umineko from the perspective of pure entertainment.
The reasons why the section on romanticism was cut should be pretty self-evident. Part C worked well enough with only a brief reference to the topic, and any more of a detailed investigation into esoteric literary theory than is absolutely necessary is just plain boring. Doing so when it isn’t needed is just privileging literary theory beyond its actual role as a tool to help focus one’s thinking and make your conclusions more logical.
As for why I cut out a section on what I think many people would have found very interesting, the merits of Umineko as a mystery… I can only say that the finished product wasn’t terribly exciting, and it did not particularly reinforce the strength of the other Parts. There were plenty of things to nitpick when it comes to the plot of Umineko, but none of it was so egregious that it stood out from mistakes that other mystery novels make all of the time. The discussion into whether the system of unreliable narrators counts as “fair play” was mildly interesting, but I hope you will all agree that the discussion of fair play in the context of the history and theory of anti-mystery was a more productive investigation into the topic. So, I hope this post-script will suffice as a location where people can get my general opinions on that aspect of Umineko: Ryuukishi07 is kind of same-y with how he writes narrative tricks, so it wasn’t that standout, but it wasn’t weak in a way that would drag down the story either. It was just kind of there; entertaining, but not doing anything that interesting either.
Damn you cooked with this.
DAmn you cooked
I agree, he cooked
Well this was an interesting read.
Yeah, pacing is the biggest flaw of Umineko as a work of fiction. I usually recommend starting straight from the manga instead, it is way more tight. Trueblood Umi fans hate the idea, but better pacing makes the work so much more resonant on every level.
Yeah, the magical battles and symbolism are very much “conceptually brilliant, practically questionable”, and so is the increasing lack of tension re tragic death scenes.
The latter part of the review feels rather bizarre. I am pretty sure that the author didn’t define Tohya as being the one to decide who is a dirty goat and who isn’t, or as “owning” a catbox. Owning a catbox is a ridiculous notion, as is negotiating over it for that matter – what happened is what happened, what was written is what was written, and that is that. Tohya or Ange may or may not like how other people treat the story (that, yes, Tohya himself, in a fit of bad judgement of his own values, decided to release into public), but the portrayal and insulting of goats is nothing more than Tohya’s own grumbling – not grumbling without cause, mind you, Ange had a hell of a time living in the shadow of speculations (whether the in-story reason excuses the out-of-story meanness towards certain types of fans isn’t for me to decide). But the author has absolutely no authority over whether the speculations of others reach the truth or not, and the respect they feel or don’t feel towards the tale doesn’t impact whether they are right or wrong.
In think that the central failure of Umineko as a philosophical statement is a failure to properly consider probability. Umineko is well-aware of how ironclad logical reasoning is, but logic can only produce certain conclusions from certain premises, so once the premises are at least a little undermined, Umineko seems to think that the conclusions are left completely for personal interpretation, and empathy delivers correct answers even as reason is able to do nothing. This is not so. The laws of probability are just as ironclad and omnipresent as the laws of deduction (whatever George and Jessica said during the party!) and principled refusal to update probabilities when presented with merely uncertain evidence is just as much a denial of reality as asserting that 2 times 2 is 5. For a reader acquainted with probability, Umineko’s latest parts in the VN can’t read as anything else but a call to delusion – at LEAST a call to delusion in specific circumstances where accepting the truth can have little further positive impact.
Which I personally don’t think is a totally bankrupt position, but it’s not a position I would want a president of my country or a designer of my car to hold.
I should also note [And this paragraph technically contains spoilers for the manga] that Umineko absolutely doesn’t disprove the anti-fantasy standpoint within itself. On the contrary, it shoves it in your face, with no refutation. In the manga, it straightforwardly confirms in red that E7TP is the truth. In the VN, that implication is still sufficiently strong that most people who care about establishing the truth come to the same conclusion with good certainty – heck, look at Ange’s reaction upon learning the truth – whatever it was, it was absolutely horrific for her. We are being told by the embodiment of analysis and realism, the “cat inside the box”; and on a different occasion by the embodiment of authorship, that what simply happened was, well, that. Everything after are attempts to wrestle with it, and it is indeed a heroic act of magic/self-delusion to retain the anti-mystery perspective after.
Good post though, even if my philosophical statements disagree with yours a lot. You really did cook.
The manga of ep8 is far and away better than the vn imo, for sure. Only thing that’s missing is Ricordando.
@UselessCommon agreed, manga for episode 8 is peak.
Like Chef Boyardee, Your rhymes are truly cookin.