Tsumihoroboshi is Ryukishi’s masterpiece. This chapter is not only my favourite of Higurashi, but one of my favourite pieces of fiction in general. It continues Meakashi’s theme of showing tragedy as avoidable, but while Meakashi is one of Higurashi’s most tragic chapters, Tsumihoroboshi is a brilliant work of anti-tragedy. This chapter reveals just how important the slice of life scenes are to Higurashi as a whole. The common perception of Higurashi is that it uses the facade of a cutesy story about friendship to reveal a gory psychological horror story. Tsumihoroboshi reveals Higurashi as something very different. It’s a story about being able to confront all of the horrors of the world, all of your sins, all of the evils you’re capable of committing, and still being able to come out of it believing in love. I find Ryukishi’s optimism is believable because of how painfully aware he is of human failings and the world’s failings in general, but it’s also clear that he has faith that we are not condemned to those failings.

On the narrative level, Tsumihoroboshi is perfect as an “answer arc”. Rather than retelling Onikakushi from a different perspective, Ryukishi answers it through telling a new story. The adoption of shifting perspectives is one of his strongest choices here because it allows the reader to reach the answers implicitly. Rena’s perspective is a standard Higurashi storyline at this point, and the desire to find the answers to the mystery makes it easy to buy into what we see until we return to Keiichi’s perspective and realise that Rena is tragically mistaken. Because of the similarity between Rena’s storyline and Onikakushi there’s already an implicit confirmation that Keiichi really was just paranoid. The direct confirmation is saved for a point where it serves an emotional purpose rather than the simple answer. The shifting perspectives also serve a thematic purpose for a theme that is evident in Ryukishi’s work as a whole - emphasising just how easy it is to get lost in your own perspective and fail to take the challenge of understanding the other. It’s interesting how solving Onikakushi’s mystery requires looking beyond the perspective you’re given and trying to understand what you’re not given access to. I think it’s fair to argue that Ryukishi isn’t the strongest mystery writer, but one thing he is great at is utilising the audience participation of a mystery and weaving it into his empathetic storytelling. His work does not just inform us of empathy’s power, but challenges us to actually engage in it meaningfully by looking beyond the information and perspectives we’re given. Much like Meakashi, Tsumihoroboshi’s answer could sound unsatisfying on paper, but Ryukishi’s weaving of it into the drama is so brilliantly done that it works excellently.

Tsumihoroboshi is also one of the strongest chapters in terms of presenting religious themes in a secular context. This chapter still emphasises faith and miracles, but its primary theme is sin and atonement. It confronts each character with their own sins and failures. The junkyard scene is a dialectic between Rena and Keiichi’s worldviews regarding friendship and trust. Rena challenges Keiichi’s worldview of friendship and loyalty by detailing the club’s collective sin of inaction during the time where Satoshi and Satoko were being abused. This sin does not make any of the club members horrible or evil people, but it reveals to Rena the inadequacy of friendship - we enjoy other people’s company, but when we can’t help them in times of need how much does that friendship really mean? Rena values friendship for giving her moments of happiness, but it is not something that she has faith in like Keiichi does. I find this scene resonates so much with me because of my own personal flaws of cowardice. While Rena’s argument is the one refuted by the narrative, it’s something that holds a lot of weight. Fortunately for the narrative, Keiichi’s refutation is even stronger, especially when he points out that Rena’s cynicism is ultimately a coping mechanism so she can accept her action of murder as the only possible outcome to her situation. Meakashi sets up this arc’s theme perfectly by emphasising how pointless and avoidable the tragedy was, resisting the initial fatalism of the question arcs. Tsumihoroboshi builds on it with an explicitly anti-fatalist worldview - if we accept sin as an inevitability, then we will continue dwelling in it. Keiichi argues that we should accept our sins as a part of our selves, but we should not accept them as inevitable, and that we can always become better people in the future despite our sins. These worldviews are nothing new, but the scene makes the dialectic truly resonate because it feels as if the series up to this point has been building up to it - we have witnessed the darkest depths that these characters are capable of, but we also know that their love is true.

Another key scene in this chapter is Keiichi remembering the events of Onikakushi. I love how this is delivered after we’ve come to the ‘answer’ of Onikakushi ourselves, and so the direct confirmation is more about the emotional context than any expositional purpose. This is a scene where Keiichi’s worldview is put into practice by having him confront a greater sin than the collective one of the club members. Here, he confronts that whatever state he was in that led him to shooting children with a BB gun was one that consumed him in another world. The scene is so heartbreaking because Keiichi remembers with such affective intensity that it’s as if he really did just kill Rena and Mion - rather than separating this sin as something that another version of him did, he takes it on and acknowledges that he is capable of evil. Acknowledging that you are capable of evil and actually being evil isn’t the same thing, of course, and Keiichi embraces that he can still choose to be good. Much like Watanagashi, he chooses friendship as a faith in the face of evil. While this faith may have been naive in that chapter, here it’s a perfect defense mechanism from falling back into evil. His monologue about how he’ll continue to love Rena as she kills him just as she did when he killed her is just as perfect a representation of love as martyrdom as the climax of Watanagashi. I really love how the religious subtext of Higurashi is brought out in these scenes to give the sense of an epic sweep to this intimate tale of friendship. Representations of love as a spiritual power are usually reserved for romance rather than platonic love. That doesn’t mean it’s absent in media (‘the power of friendship’ is a common trope, after all) but Tsumihoroboshi really makes it mean something by rooting this power in the specifics of the actual character interactions/dynamics.

Finally, the chapter’s climax is the point where Higurashi reaches its synthesis - it’s the scene that all of Higurashi was building up to. This is a story about children who have their childhoods robbed of them. By this chapter, we understand that this happened long before the story of Higurashi began. Everyone has had to confront something that they shouldn’t have at their age, and while this obviously extends more to Satoko and Rika than anyone else, nobody is truly innocent. This is why the club games matter - they’re a space where they get to reclaim this innocence and childishness rather than lose it entirely. This is made explicit when Mion mentions that the club was formed to give Satoko and Satoshi a place to find comfort in while they were being abused at home. They’re not a facade and they never have been, both in-universe and in the story as a whole. The goofiness we see at the beginning of each chapter are just as core to the characters as their traumas are - in the club games we see that their trauma does not define them. This reclamation was possible after the tragedies of 1982, but this is the first time where it’s become possible in 1983. While Higurashi has returned to the purity of friendship in its suspenseful moments before, Tsumihoroboshi is the first time that the childishness of the club games has returned in a serious context. They’ve been kept separate for so long that the development is truly unexpected - it initially feels like a breach, as if the story’s rule of keeping the silly and the serious firmly divided has been broken. It also breaks the rule of having every chapter end in tragedy, and it’s this breaking of the story’s ‘rules’ that help to make this scene’s anti-fatalism so powerful. Once we get over the rupture, it becomes clear that this scene was truly earned and that these ‘rules’ were always set up to be broken. This is where Higurashi was always heading, and it’s something truly beautiful.