Posted in The Orient

Four days plus change of When they Cry, part 4

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. Keiichi Maebara! You are the culprit! Higurashi races towards an exciting mid-story climax.

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Posted in The Orient

Four days plus change of When they Cry, part 3

Chapter 3 of Higurashi is not a wholesale break with what has come before by any stretch of the imagination, but it does make a pretty decent departure from the status quo.

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Posted in The Orient

Four days plus change of When they Cry, part 1

Both of the major entries in the When they Cry franchise, Higurashi and Umineko, have been on my radar for a while. And so, I am going to read Higurashi.

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Posted in Film and television Literature The Orient

An abridged stylistic history of Japanese mystery fiction

All human stories have two eternal subjects: sex and violence. These, combined with the two primordial genres of Ancient Greek theatre, grant us a basic vocabulary with which we can categorise some of the “raw material” which makes up basic storytelling — all human societies create stories about romance, tragedy, war, comedy, and crime.

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Posted in Book reviews Literature The Orient

Zaregoto, the Debut Novel and the Nihilism of Failure

‘Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle (The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User)’ was the debut novel of the Japanese mystery and young-adult fiction author Ishin Nishio. It is a novel that has something to say, and is successful in saying it, while still being a viscerally satisfying work of fiction.

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