Fourth Day
Progress: Higurashi Arc 1, End of Chapter 4.1
Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. They all got what they deserve. As far as I’m concerned, the end of Chapter 3 was a happy ending. Really, I don’t even see the point in the rest of the story, we got our satisfactory conclusion right there.
Jokes aside, Chapter 3 was a very satisfying read. I don’t think my expectations have been subverted quite as much by any story as they were by Chapter 3.11 in quite a long time. I thought I could see how the rest of the Chapter would play out at the end of 3.10, all of the foreshadowing seemed indisputable. Yet, not a single thing went as expected.
Chapter 3 lacked the more impressive thematic writing and emotional balance of Chapter 2, which retains its provisional title of best Higurashi Chapter. However, Chapter 3 finally allowed Higurashi to shine as a thriller without being held down by the weaker writing of Chapter 1. It feels like we are finally in the last stretch of the investigation. The clues have been collected.
Now that all the suspects are assembled, I have an announcement. **** ******, you are the culprit! Well, not quite. There’s no detective competent or informed enough to make such a declaration in this story. And catching the culprit in this case won’t solve much of anything, as we learned disastrously in the closing events of Chapter 3.
Finally giving the underwritten hero the spotlight
Satoko has always been the missing piece in the structure of this story. She is a heroine who is relegated to play the role of a side character despite holding the key to various mysteries in her backstory. So, having her take centre stage in Chapter 3 is an incredibly important decision. It finally allows us to move beyond Higurashi merely being a fight for survival in a world of secrets and intrigue. Now, we finally know of the various curses and legends and the basic layout of the powers that run the village early into the story. The only question is what are the other secrets arrayed before us, and how will they stop us saving the girl?
This much was predictable and was partially addressed in the previous post. What caught me off guard were the full implications of this shift. By moulding the story into a more tangible shape earlier in the timeline, before the day of the festival, we finally gave Keiichi something he has sorely lacked in the previous two Chapters: enough agency to become his own character, and finally participate in the story as anything other than a helpless victim.
In fact, in this case I can finally say: Keiichi Maebara! You are the culprit!
Chapters 3.9 and 3.10 easily take the cake for my favourite section of this visual novel so far, even if Chapter 2 is my preferred whole Chapter. Keiichi is finally someone we can understand in terms of his own motivations, strengths, and crushing weaknesses. He is competent enough to murder a man, but not mature or brave enough to face the consequences of such a decision. No more is he just the scared child who was murdered by a force beyond his understanding in Chapters 1 and 2. But he is, at the end of the day, a child.
His murderous plot is exactly the right balance of meticulous yet comically shoddy that one would expect an intelligent teenager to put together. Over the course of a tense couple of days and nights he plans, prepares for, and carries out his homicidal operation. Each step of the way, he makes small mistakes or overestimates his chances, always dangling on the edge of complete and utter failure. But he makes it. He makes it out the other end of this crazy night with only a few small mistakes that he can cover up with some good luck.
However, Keiichi is many things in this Chapter, but lucky is not one of them. If anything, you would have to be especially unlucky to have your murder victim walking around alive the next day. And of all the mysteries Higurashi has laid before us up to this point, this is the one that has me most stumped. I just don’t understand what happened from Chapter 3.11 onwards. I can concoct a weak hypothesis that explains why Mion and the others might fabricate the existence of the “second Keiichi” in order to corner him. They were suspicious of his involvement in the murder, after all.
If they knew of Ooishi’s investigation and that Keiichi was being tailed, they might well have cooperated with a plan to have Keiichi reveal the location of the corpse by deceiving him into believing the murder was unsuccessful. However, Satoko is clearly telling the truth as she knows it when she believes her uncle to be alive. Long after the time for such deceptions to be over, she does not abandon her story that her uncle was alive after the night of the festival. Perhaps she was just delusional, but such a weak explanation is completely unsatisfying.
All of this said, Chapter 3 did provide a lot of answers for other mysteries. Miyo Takano is all but confirmed as at least one of the people behind the murder of Jirou Tomitake, as I suspected. And the secret reasoning behind the fervent attention on the dam project by both sides is now given a more credible explanation with an understanding of the hidden danger of Onigafuchi Swamp. With the mysteries behind the Three Families, the Watanagashi, a viable suspect standing out for the Oyashiro-sama’s Curse and Onikakushi incidents, and various other small details becoming clarified, we are closing in on a solution.
Tomorrow’s post will likely be a wrap on the Questions Arc of Higurashi. We will finally have reached the point in the detective novel where the detective applies his little grey cells to organise the various clues and thereby come to an epiphany-like deduction. Even though there was enough content in this Chapter for me to write more, I am going to save it for tomorrow, when I will talk about the Questions Arc as a whole and share my own attempts at deduction. Fear not, though. That will not be my last Higurashi post. Whether or not I decide to keep blogging each Chapter as I complete them, I will have at least one more Higurashi post once I complete the game. I can already tell it will be dealing with the relationship between shakai and shindenki mystery literature, two words which are at the heart of the identity of Higurashi. And once that is all over, I still have the main course which was the reason I was reading Higurashi to begin with: I’ll be taking on Umineko.
Look forward to it.
