author’s note: this analysis will only be covering the four chapters of the initial higurashi when they cry series - onikakushi, watanagashi, tatarigoroshi, and himatsubushi. the remaining four chapters, the “answer arcs”, will receive their own right up under the page for higurashi when they cry kai. please be advised that as of the time of writing, i have only played these first four chapters, and as a result, conclusions drawn or predictions made may not reflect my final views of higurashi when they cry in its entirety.

an additional note - this piece comes with a content warning for topics including abuse, trauma, death, and sexual misconduct, both in context of the fictional work and within the context of the author’s real life experiences. please be advised, should those topics be uncomfortable for you to read or partake in discussion about.

“o! the dead! 27 people / even more, they were boys
with their cars, summer jobs / oh, my god... are you one of them?”
- sufjan stevens, "john wayne gacy, jr."

heat rises from the ground in waves, thickening the air and blurring the horizon. the afternoon’s dry scent of grass and foliage. the wanton laughter and excitement of children living out dog days, wrestling, screaming, giggling, sharing secrets, telling stories - a tiny, forgotten slice of their world seemingly cut out of the cloth of modernization remains their kingdom. 1983; a revolutionary shift in culture, a new change of scene. let the children lose it, said bowie a decade prior. these are their days and this is their sprawling, rural dominion. i remember my summers. i remember the feeling of those middle school years, going to beaches and boardwalks and campfires with my friends. i remember the feeling of my first attractions, of kicking myself about things i said to those people with faces and names i can no longer recall, tossing my nokia flip phone - my first - around and waiting for a text back on that terrible signal and hoping my data would last the weekend.

any way you slice it, those days seem natural, comfortable and desirable from any outsider’s perspective. indeed, i find myself looking back at those aspects of that time with a smile while writing this. but context, as always, defines everything. while all of these things are true and i am capable of siphoning fondness and nostalgia from the memory, when the camera zooms back - i was in a living hell. by that age range - say, 13 - i’d experienced a great deal of death and loss, some firsthand. dcfs had made regular appearances in my homes, there had been explosive arguments in both of my parents’ houses, some turning physical. hands and words and neglect had been used against me as a child enough to call a regular occurrence. addiction and its results were every bit of a piece of my developmental years as learning my times tables. by the last visit i can recall taking with friends to those places, where i must’ve been around 14 - about the age of higurashi’s main cast, i’d been sexually abused at least twice by people i trusted. i felt betrayed by institutions that the government had told me would fight to protect me and my brothers. friends couldn’t do much but offer safe havens for temporary stay and hope for the best.

in my 20s, i consider these summers a double-sided coin. i don’t reject one half of that reality in acceptance of the other. often, i feel as if these different compartmentalized sections of my past - to borrow from the grateful dead, these attics of my life, exist in different planes of existence from one another. but part of recovery from trauma, part of equanimity with oneself, is the acceptance, love, and patience with the person you’ve been and the places you’ve been - and to find unison by tying all of those strings together. upon learning that the sole writer and creator of this series, ryukishi07, was a social worker prior to leaving in order to tell this story, the pieces all began to click, and i shared a much needed, heaving, cathartic sob of release alongside higurashi’s third chapter. for the first time in this medium, i feel directly spoken for, understood, loved, apologized to, heard, and fought for by a work of art on this intimate a level. i’ve experienced many titles i hold dear that i appreciated and knew the subject matter to be well-researched, sensibly handled, and passionately discussed. this may be the first i’ve seen where i truly believe this to be a story the author needed to tell, enough to lay down his career and push to make that happen. i’ve described higurashi as “a collection of cries for help”, and that extends beyond fiction. these cries are likely those of children, of families, ryukishi knew, worked with, and felt for. this is living testimony of people like us.

here is our cry for help.

i didn’t have a hinamizawa growing up. my childhood was spent away from the rural sprawl and the vast expanse; just the opposite really, most was spent in and around the bustle of the city or in low-income neighborhoods. but there remains solidarity in the background. we felt firsthand growing up the effect of the affluent and capable vying for leisure over equity. when the game would make the off-hand remark about hand-me-down p.e. uniforms or thrift school clothes shopping, i had to smile because that’s the world i knew well, too. it’s a weird time to reflect on. middle school is a strange period; kids are learning things about themselves, about others, about ‘adult things’ in the world, and conversation about it tends to lean into the comical to avoid discomfort. the higurashi cast reflects this from some of the first conversations in the game. i definitely grimaced at some of the more crass bits of dialogue but in the grand scheme it’s more relatable than i feel it is expository. i wasn’t even popular in school at that age but i found solidarity with kids goofing off and just not really knowing what was going on. going with the flow and learning as we figured out how. higurashi reflects that inquisitive age, with all of its embarrassments, in an earnest way.

the aesthetic direction of the game hammers home that era and those sentiments. i’m of the firm belief that the original art and music is the way that higurashi should be seen and heard, because every bit of its personal charm, handmade expression and amateur auteur bursts to life in a way so much more endearing and captivating than the re-releases’ “cleaned up”, standardized presentation. the voice acting work included in the sound novel release completes the picture, with the most passionate and powerful performances i’ve ever heard in a video game, across the cast. it’s the buzz in the microphones, it’s the jpeg artifacting around the complicated hair sprite work, it’s the hand-airbrushed photo backgrounds, the mp3 quality soundtrack that truly piecemeals together the authentic 2002 experience that higurashi embraces and dilapidated equally. higurashi outright requires and demands its context - lodged in the midst of key’s iconic run of air, kanon and clannad, alongside the blossoming mind bending shift towards meta and surrealist writing coming from works like tsukihime and ever17. in order for higurashi to become truly timeless, you must accept it and consider it as being exactly from its era, with all of the patchwork handcrafted humanity that took it there. there is perhaps no atmosphere in gaming as heady, surreal, and uneasy as hinamizawa’s. the shrill singing of the cicadas, the warm afternoon glow, and the lynchian pacing of keenly awkward line after line. the feeling never quite lets up.

and it’s through these imperfections and because of the odd sprite clipping and engine pauses and clipping audio peaking that an effect that could not be replicated intentionally by a modern counterpart occurs. somewhere in onikakushi, the group i’m playing with expressed this uneasy feeling that something lurks within the game itself. in ways, higurashi truly begins to feel like a living being, or at least, the vessel for something much angrier, saddier, and grief-wracked - a host for a bellowing beast scratching at the walls of the game window and begging to be heard and understood. the feeling never quite goes away, even with the shift away from psychological horror in later chapters to lean into societal/political power-vaulting and intense melodrama. higurashi oftentimes leans into sensationalist, breakneck moments and twists, but everything remains grounded, logical, and heartfelt at the core, so what could in a lesser story become jarring feels like a natural symbiosis within its context. on a similar note, where many works influenced by higurashi would prefer the route of “x character initially appears to fill x anime character stereotype but this is actually lampshaded and not true at all because of x circumstances, and when said circumstances are revealed, x character drops these traits and reveals a ‘true’ personality”. this isn’t subversive writing - at least, it’s not smart subversive writing. ryukishi doesn’t abandon the idea of who his characters are at face value, rena remains rena, mion remains mion, satoko and rika are very much themselves - but it’s the complexity with which they’re built upon that makes those foundations so strong. their seemingly archetypical first impressions become cornerstones of their personality and their dependencies as people. when rena lashes out in protection of rika at keiichi, of course it seems natural. of course mion has complicated feelings about her responsibility to her family and her never-ending comparisons to shion - of course it drives her mad that the results of her ‘go-getter leader’ backbone keeps the boy she loves from noticing her. and of course… of course there’s a reason why satoko vies so hard for the attention she does. no wonder she finds joy in being noticed. of course she flourishes in the environments where she gets to be the one provoking a little bit of light-hearted fear. juxtapose those children against the adults that permeate these first few chapters - the adults are every bit as interesting, fulfill the same “stereotype of the genre that’s actually the cornerstone and foundation for something much grander”, but when it’s just these characters in the spotlight, or better on their own, it’s like a completely different world is playing out with different morals and perspectives. hell, there’s an argument to be made that ōishi is higurashi’s most complex, enticing, and interesting character. every bit the shit-eating pig he comes off as at first - and every bit more come the events of say, chapter 3, but it’s still unclear what his agency in everything is, what his beliefs are, and why he’s so intently involved. irie, takano and tomitake remain key figures and if himatsubushi is anything to go off of, i get the feeling there’s an entire story of their own on the horizon. there isn’t anyone here to just fill up time or support a gag. one of the strongest casts in fiction that i’ve come across.

it’s in chapter 3: tatarigoroshi where my opening statement really comes into play, though. it’s here where satoko’s home life becomes the focal point of the story, and where everything about curses and rituals and yakuza and multigenerational sociopolitical powers is all stripepd away and the focus is given to higurashi’s most tragic character. it was around wrapping up chapter 2 where i learned of ryukishi’s history in social work. as satoko’s story unfolded and her life under abuse and neglect became clearer, this is when higurashi’s pinnacle emotional resonance began to take hold. for once, the feeling i got wasn’t just that the creator of a game like this knew about the subject, but that he really knew it on a serious, intimate level and needed to express that somehow. i shed tears for satoko. i shed tears for myself.

keiichi’s development and prophetic transformation come chapter 3 was a hellish spiral to observe. i’ve heard ryukishi compared to dostoevsky before, and this is the first time i truly see it. the comparisons to crime & punishment here are evident; the spiraling mind of a man turned to murder. chapter 2 may’ve been a look into a villainous mind (from our perspective), but this is something new entirely. keiichi is morally justified by his (and my) perspective in his actions, but the slippery slope out of sanity and into post-humanism is a mortifying one to endure. when all is said and done, the inevitable end of chapter 3 may be anticipated, but the depths to which it goes and the manner in which it plays out - in no small part thanks to the largely unsettling final sequence of “keiichi’s” final interview with text overlaying text and utter silence only bled out by radio static - could only be described as truly uncanny and haunting.

i tend to disagree with complaints about higurashi’s pacing - especially considering some of its contemporaries. i found most of the slice of life sequences pretty enjoyable, and some to be among my favorite moments of the early game. i look to watanagashi’s game tournament as an example of one of the highlights. tatarigoroshi’s baseball game led to some pretty amazing character moments from keiichi and satoko. hell, the only episode i didn’t love was the second of watanagashi, just because the perverted humor was a little too much for even my 70s-90s comedy manga raised ass to not get a little annoyed with. i think tatarigoroshi’s pacing remains the best of the four, and from what i understand the slice of life is reduced heavily moving forwards - and i think that’s a good thing. the sol content really benefited the pieces of the story it was there for, and i wouldn’t take it away. these characters wouldn’t have nearly the attachment and foundation they do if those sequences were gone. they feel like friends known intimately and passionately. that makes the chapters’ back halves as effective as they are.

i’ll save my analysis of higurashi’s use of the visual novel medium to tell its story until my group’s completion of chapters 5-8, but i have a working theory about what’s actually going on here, and i haven’t really found anything within the question arcs to disprove it. if i’m right about where this is going, i’ll be happy to talk at length about why i feel higurashi may’ve superseded the need for adaptation, and why i feel it is so integral that this story must be told in exactly the way this visual novel does it. for the meantime, before my theories are set in stone, here’s what i can say. background in the history of the medium here is crucial to siphoning every bit of higurashi’s post-genre approach that one can. it helps to know the formula of the multi-route visual novel, the structure of branching paths and that ultimate reward of a ‘true end’. although my thoughts and predictions generally leaned closer to true than not throughout the questions arc, i never felt above or on top of higurashi’s mystery - i never felt i understood more than i should from the author’s perspective. conferring with my playthrough’s small audience has led to some wild, intensely passionate discussion and we’re all chomping at the bit to see the payoff of the answers arcs. was it worth sitting through onikakushi three times before getting to move forward across various playthroughs? i only loved it and appreciated it more each way through. i can’t wait to be able to view, discuss and analyze the full picture. see you when i wrap up higurashi when they cry kai. as it stands, one of my favorite video games of all time, and hell, one of my favorite and one of the most personally effective pieces of fiction i’ve ever engaged with.