Review of Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru
| Subject | Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru |
| By | Helpfulness: 12 Vote: 10kaisouroku on 2022-08-14 last updated on 2023-08-14 |
| Review | NOTE: The following review of Umineko contains my interpretation of the text, and is intended for those who have completed the story or who do not care about spoilers. It therefore assumes knowledge of Umineko. I have also written a short spoiler-free review of Umineko on its Question Arcs page at w4771 to serve prospective readers. Umineko no Naku Koro ni is a masterpiece—and not a masterpiece of complexity or density, as its length and reputation might suggest, but of almost classical clarity. It's very rare that you encounter a prose work whose fundamental idea is so beautifully simple, so elegant, that it defies explanation that it has never been correlated before when the available components have been available for centuries. The core symbolic or motivic elements of Umineko no Naku Koro ni—gold and magic—are used to express an abstract formulation that is endlessly engaging yet fully lucid and consistent. Put briefly, it connects the idea of the philosopher's stone (which is made of the prima materia or 'single element of the world' in Beatrice's description during her monologue in EP2) to the biblical assertion that God is love from 1 John 4:8. God being the first thing or creative element of the world among other things, Umineko derives from this the claim that love is the element of which the philosopher's stone is composed. Those with a little interest in the occult will know that alchemy refers not only to the physical process of raising a base metal to gold but the spiritual elevation of consciousness; Umineko depicts these concurrently, with the tangible Ushiromiya gold in the microcosm and the Golden Land in the macrocosm (alongside the Bernkastel & Lambdadelta metaverse). The two golds even share a leitmotif—the former playing whenever a character discovers the Ushiromiya gold, the latter when Ushiromiya Battler makes his valedictory entrance into the Golden Land in the closing moments of the story. It's a remarkably simple symbolic operation: with love, you find the gold—physical and spiritual. Without love, it cannot be seen. So what, then, is Umineko? It is the story of the Ushiromiya household being raised to gold, or the Golden Land, by their family alchemist, Beatrice. This is the reason why she introduces herself in EP1 not as a witch but as an alchemist: her function was always to enact this transmutation of the Ushiromiya characters. The 'decline of a family' is a common novelistic trope; Umineko could be understood as a burnished and decadent 'post-decline of a family' novel, in which the Faustian dreams of patriarch Kinzo (and his illegitimate descendant Yasu) are finally reified for perpetuity in the Golden Land. Second question: if the Ushiromiya family are the spiritual object of this transformation, then who is the subject? You may have already guessed that it's Ushiromiya Ange: the only known surviving member of the family, the amnesiac Tohya excluded, and therefore the only one for whom the alchemical journey has immediate meaning. The journey itself is an epistemological one: it iterates on and relitigates the disaster on Rokkenjima that killed Ange's family on October 4th and 5th, 1986, adopting different premises each time in order to tease out a solution that is doomed to remain a mystery no matter how the basic constituents are organised. The question in the final analysis is: how can Ange know the truth about her family when the tools of reason and empiricism fail? The answer, and the thematic argument of Umineko: with the creative element that undergirds reality and guarantees its comprehensibility, as of an artist's promise to his audience—with love. In my spoiler-free review, I described Umineko with a musical metaphor, as a theme and variations rather than sonata form movement. This distinguishes it from, for example, SubaHibi, another very abstract visual novel, although in that case the musical metaphor falls apart since it never actually states its principal theme in full until the end. One of my problems with SubaHibi is that it tried to diffuse its thematic exposition throughout the story, only revealing its full hand very late: the whole story has come and gone before it openly states that the world is empty and without inherent qualities, while Umineko has asserted its basic metaphysics by EP2. It's for this reason that I don't take critics seriously when they find themselves surprised and irritated by the direction of Umineko in EP4 and beyond; if you didn't see it coming, you weren't paying attention. I was more deflated by SubaHibi's admittedly interesting existentialist-panpsychist conclusion because it was treated too much like a plot reveal, but this is a topic for another review... With that said, what are the variations of Umineko? The question of how we know the truth goes beyond the mysteries of October 4th 1986: in EP4, we're treated to an extended consideration of magic and imagination, the worlds we create inside ourselves—the invisible inward things that help us confront the ugliness of human affairs. This episode, which focuses predominantly on Ange and Maria, is my personal favourite: an extraordinary paean to the boundless world of the spirit. These truths, which are fundamental to experience and make one indomitable, cannot be seen without love. If I may speak from my particularisms, EP4 bypassed my emotional defenses entirely in its depiction of the inner child, specifically with regard to the Maria character—no other visual novel has ever engaged my heart so completely as in this chapter. In EP7, we see another function of Umineko's metaphysics: when the discovery of the physical gold drives the Ushiromiya aunts and uncles to murder, the narration notes directly the parallel between gold and magic in the physical and spiritual realms respectively. The gold is pure potentiality, like countless inward dreams wanting to be made manifest, so many dreams that the avarice of the siblings means nothing: the killing that ensues is tragic and pointless. It only happens because to truly embrace that wild abundance requires accepting the same love that reveals magic—they discovered the gold, but they never truly saw it. Finally, there is the interpersonal consideration of the problem of knowledge, and perhaps the most convincing: how do you know if someone loves you? This is first alluded to in EP2, when the thematic motto makes its first appearance: '"I'm sure you'll be able to see a deep blue ocean,"' says the lovestruck Shannon to her frustrated coworker Kanon, looking out at a marine vista that is by no means so richly saturated. '"After all—" Without love, it cannot be seen.' But it's not until EP6 that this more personal treatment of theme gets its proper due, in one of Umineko's most inspired scenes of dialogue. This dialogue occurs over a chessboard, between Umineko's philosophical antagonist Furudo Erika and the neutral arbitrator Dlanor A. Knox, and it not only explores interpersonal truth-knowledge but serves as a crucial thematic bridge for the entire narrative. Erika is such a critical presence that she deserves independent consideration, but it suffices to say that her statement that 'Because of love, you end up seeing things that don't exist' during this scene is the clearest rejection of Umineko's metaphysics asserted by any character. Dlanor engages her in dialogue about her philosophy, and they set up a miniature gameboard for a debate on Erika's ex-boyfriend, who she believes cheated on her. During this game, Erika provides eighty-four points of 'blue truth' evidence (the game's term for truth-claims derived from inductive reasoning) that her boyfriend cheated on her, while Dlanor provides only six points proving that he still loved her. Dlanor loses, and is forced to acknowledge the superiority of Erika's reasoning; however, Dlanor then points out its limits: 'You still have not denied the six points of blue truth evidence that I showed to claim that [he] still loved you.' This epistemic limit to empirical observations, as of those a paranoid and jealous man makes when he believes his wife is unfaithful, is demonstrated cleanly and without compromising the philosophical consistency of either character nor reducing Erika's worldview to the sum of her experiences. The balance and equality of this exchange, neither denying the power of inductive reasoning nor submitting to its monopoly on truth, are enough to demonstrate the seriousness with which Umineko engages with its epistemological themes. Such lucidly beautiful moments are the literary equivalent of clear ice water, and just as satisfying. This is the point when we turn to the greater mystery of Rokkenjima, and also when I become somewhat more speculative on the nature of the red truth specifically: at the end of her conversation with Dlanor, Erika states that she became a witch to raise her blue truth to the red truth, which is arguably the most revealing claim any character makes about the latter. Unlike the blue truth, the qualities of the red truth are more ambiguous, but it is this line of Erika's that provides a hint as to its meaning. Taken alongside Ange's claim in EP8 that the gold truth is born of belief, we can distinguish the red truth in the following way: the red truth is the truth-claim which is not believed volitionally, but assumed. Erika, like Ange, is a Witch of Truth; like Ange, she met Bernkastel in a perilous location and made a deal to know a truth that could not be reasoned out in blue: the red truth. That deal, as should be obvious by EP8, involved her suicide, just as Ange's did: Erika jumped off the cruise liner and made her blue truth red. Put another way, any reasoning about Erika's boyfriend has to now involve her suicide; her truth will be assumed because of her suicide, not believed by choice. The gold truth, conversely, is the truth-claim that is chosen; it is what you choose to believe when the blue truth fails, as it did for Ange and Erika. Ange chose; Erika did not, and paid for it with her life. In this way, the alchemical journey is also one of self-overcoming, for not only Ange but Battler, as he struggles with his amnesia. This interpretation of the red truth has the following implication: in episodes of Umineko like 1-5, in which we explore possible solutions to the Ushiromiya mystery, the red truths are assumed truths or premises adopted in order to create a solution in the forgeries written by Tohya. They are if/then keys which make the mystery solvable, but they are not absolute, as each new gameboard involves new red truths; they could become fixed if the hobbyists and enthusiasts who obsess over Rokkenjima ever reached a consensus. Ange prevents this consensus from happening in EP8: in the macrocosm—the metaverse—she chooses the gold truth and protects the memories of her family from the goats in a large-scale repetition of her reconciliation with Maria in EP4, finally reclaiming her title from the forgery as the Witch of Resurrection; in the microcosm, she finds Battler, stops the public release of Eva's diary, and opens the orphanage. As above, so below. In my view, which you might call the Ange-centric interpretation because it considers Ange the psychological subject of Umineko, the events of the earlier episodes more represent Ange's encounter with the forgeries than they do the process of Tohya Hachijo regaining his memories. It is also a more metafictional interpretation because it situates Umineko's frame narrative as a self-conscious creation, the dream of Ange: Ange the writer, Ange the witch, Ange Victrix. Contrasting this would be a Battler-centric interpretation, which considers Ange an assistant to Tohya/Battler's psycho-alchemical journey, of which Umineko is the record, to reconciliation with his former self, represented by his reunion with Beatrice in the Magic ending. In the final analysis, the difference is not enormous, but the emphasis shifts: if the frame narrative of Umineko is a magical creation of Ange, Battler is not the subject but one of the objects whom she is resurrecting, but if Battler is actually the subject of Umineko, the story is a depiction rather than a perspective or creation. In other words, rather than understanding Umineko as a story related by Ange, we understand it as a story about depicting Battler's journey from a disinterested standpoint. I think both of these are arguable, but I lean towards the former for two reasons. Firstly, the gold truth as claimed by Ange in EP8 requires a believing agent; because Umineko's frame narrative is arguably the path towards this gold truth, the natural choice for the believing agent here is the one who advanced the belief: Ange. Secondly, the Halloween riddles and, more notably, the choice presented to Ange (and the player) during EP8 confer a suggestion of agency on Ange; the Trick ending that is presented as an alternative to the Magic ending portrays Ange alone, suggesting that Tohya/Battler's presence in its counterpart is a function of Ange's decision. Of course, all this thematic exposition would mean little without the cast who express it. To consider what makes Umineko's characters so distinct, it's worth making a comparison to another visual novel. In Tsukihime, the maids of the Tohno manor, Kohaku and Hisui, are two of the best characters, and there are some very clever details about them: even the choice of the girl 'outside' (Hisui) vs 'at the window' (Kohaku) represents a psychological divide between Shiki's freedom from the familial sin of Tohno, as in Hisui's ending, or being embedded in the house, as in Kohaku's. The way these two are depicted is extremely effective in a dramatic sense: their respective roles as 'good girl' and 'scapegoat' reflect a familiar abuse situation, and all the details of the characters illustrate those roles. Hisui is persistent, romantic, longing for escape; Kohaku is cunning, self-sacrificial, unable to escape. With the former, Kohaku's plan succeeds and Shiki escapes. With the latter, it fails, and he's entrenched. It's very good, and the characterisation serves the dramatic structure of the story. On the other hand, we have Umineko's Rosa, one of the most well-drawn characters in the visual novel. Two moments have always stood out to me as excellent examples of Ryuukishi07's character writing. The first was mentioned in my short review: when Rosa confesses to Kanon in EP6, seemingly quite spontaneously, that she's spent her whole life feeling like a ghost. This comment—so offhand, so totally unnecessary—has the authenticity of close detail, of mundane observation. It's very common for Umineko in indulge in such digressions into ephemeral feeling, but the only thing that comes close to that in Tsukihime is when Kohaku talks about being unable to love around the time of the h-scene with Shiki. Even so, unlike Umineko's off-the-cuff confession to a stranger, Kohaku's self-description still serves a dramatic role, foreshadowing her plan to betray her lover. The second moment occurs when Rosa is ranting at Maria in the meta world, an episode in which she blames her daughter for her unhappiness: how she wishes she could drink and be free like a young woman, how in a hungover state she covered herself in makeup to attend Parents' Day at Maria's school, how she looked at her awkward, introverted daughter with spite as her behaviour embarrassed her in front of the class and other parents. Again, beyond the cruelty of the words, what strikes one is the mundane quality of these experiences: one could well imagine that Ryuukishi07 heard such miserable reports during his time in social work. This psychological nuance is anti-dramatic; it's not there to serve or develop the action of the story but merely to express the inner lives of characters, arbitrarily and often beautifully. This is probably why Umineko feels so novelistic at times compared to its visual novel contemporaries. Other examples of this nuance abound: the tenderness shown by Eva towards Hideyoshi in EP1-3 that foreshadows the affectionate personality she displays in later depictions, the asides that note Hideyoshi's willingness to make a fool of himself to improve the mood of others, the exploration of Kyrie's deep envy of Asumu and jealousy towards Rudolf, Natsuhi's fond and nostalgic descriptions of the early years of her marriage during her tea breaks with Beatrice, and even the more divisive characterisation of George, the quintessential overachieving mommy's boy. Most of these items aren't particularly relevant to the dramatic action; but crucially, they are relevant to the thematic needs of Umineko. Through the depth and complexity of these kaleidoscopic miniatures, which begin as soon as the family arrives on Rokkenjima and take place both in the mundane world and in the metaverse—where the characters are uniquely able to speak and act with honesty—the reader is invited to make their own judgements on the Ushiromiya family, to look at them with the 'eyes of the heart', in the words of EP7. No detail is spared: you can see everything these personae could be, and like Ange, it is your job to decide which of their aspects will prompt you to claim the truth. As such, the digressive and wordy quality of Umineko is not needless but critical to its expression: these are not dramatic actors but mutable psychological personalities in the style of a novel. The claimed inspiration of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None is somewhat misleading here; aside from the 'message in a bottle' motif, and the minor use of pastiche in EP1's depiction of a 'Western manor mystery', with its faintly Edwardian/early 20th century atmosphere, there is little to compare between Christie's dry and clinically plot-driven approach to mystery writing and Ryuukishi07's abstract and psychologically intense style. This touches on domains beyond character: the manor in Christie, for example, is barely described outside the essentials, while the Ushiromiya manor is treated as an object of decadent fascination. To borrow Jean Cocteau's famous description of Proust, Umineko is more a 'giant miniature' than a dramatic narrative. Despite this psychologically realist approach, Umineko is careful never to psychogise or medicalise its characters particularly. We never have to hear about Rosa's BPD diagnosis, or enter into the tedious details of whether Maria has a developmental disorder; their personalities are not reduced to inevitable outcomes of childhood experiences or psychiatric categories. They are psychologically real, not psychologically pigeonholed. It's funny to see this story called 'preachy' by some critics, since unlike many other visual novels and eroge (including many great ones), there's a distinct lack of 'superego' in Umineko; even the most troubled characters aren't held up to a social convention of the hypothetical healthy human being, institutional values and principles are not used as a reference for the good, and in all cases the human personality is presented simply as such and on its own terms, no matter how divergent and misunderstood are the contents of that personality. If Umineko is preachy, it's only because it's individual—it gives voice to personal values indifferent to and independent of normative standards, and does not kowtow to social morality as such even when the characters believe things that will be disagreeable to some readers, such as the ideas expressed during Rosa's abuse of Maria in EP4—or, of course, those expressed by Yasu in EP7. It is rather the clamorous forces of convention that are frustrated: the desire of the anonymous goats, and of Ange when she met Bernkastel, to punish Eva and besmirch the name of the Ushiromiya family for their perceived wrongs. Considering this, it's arguable that Umineko is the rare Faustian work in the grand style: beyond good and evil, full of infinite love. Insofar as Umineko has a moral program, however, it is derived from and secondary to its epistemological claim; that is to say, Umineko is more concerned with the true than the good, but of course the two can never be fully disentangled. In most cases, what the reader considers good will depend on their reception of this claim about truth, which informs the actions of characters who believe it, such as Maria, as well as those who disbelieve it—and that means it's time to talk about Erika, the aforementioned philosophical antagonist of Umineko. From the Ange-centric perspective, Erika is the second-most important character in the story—the direct antipode to Ange in the Magic ending and her ultimate partner in the Trick ending. Her rejection of magic, unlike Battler's reactive and undisciplined arguments during the Question Arcs, is systematic and coherent; she's convincing in a way that only the best philosophical antagonist can be. Love makes you see things that aren't there; reason and empiricism are the only reliable means of knowing the truth; magic is no more than pretty lies—these aren't merely consistent claims but arguably downright sensible. She's no mere cynical and contrary stooge for the story to humiliate but a bewitching personality abundant with energy and wit, from her quixotic hatred of Western cutlery to her increasingly manic outbursts of English to her self-designation as an intellectual rapist. It's difficult not to love her on her own terms, to feel a thill at the sheer efficiency and rapacity with which she accumulates her early victories in EP5—and even more so in EP6 during arguably the work's most famous scene—knowing even so that her resistance against the metaphysical order that Umineko has established will end in failure. Perhaps it's because Ryuukishi07 understands as well as anyone the excitement we feel at seeing an individual standing alone against established conventions; having depicted magic from the other side in Maria and Ange's childhood struggles to be understood, he shows no inhibition in allowing Erika to unleash her devastating intellectual assault against the whole narrative. Such attacks never come off as perversity because Erika's position is fundamentally substantial. It's the opposition more than the consensus that is the measure of a 'novel of ideas', and Erika's opposition is exacting and relentless. Indeed, while Umineko is anti-positivist, it is not, unlike SubaHibi, anti-empiricist. The truth-value of inductive reasoning is acknowledged throughout the narrative via its device of mystery storytelling—the blue truth is the means that brings Battler to Beatrice, after all. How could a universe built on love not wish to be understood—just like a great mystery is written to be solved? The reader can even submit to Erika's victory themselves by selecting 'Trick', which brings us to Umineko's last and cleverest expression of theme: that the truth, not only for the characters but for the reader, depends on love. What I mean to say is that Umineko possesses a Rorschach test quality: what you believe happened on Rokkenjima says more about the truth of who you are than it does about the truth of that incident. By showing you Bernkastel's gameboard in EP7, the story dares you to believe it: to take the cynical road and think badly of these characters after you have been exposed to them at their worst and their best. By showing you the famous 'Happy Halloween!' scene in EP8 depicting the Ushiromiya family as loving and affectionate, it dares you likewise to believe the opposite. What's distinct here in Umineko is not that it can be interpreted in more than one way. Stories with multiple interpretations are common: however, in most works, the literal events of the story are not the matter under consideration. After Umineko, you might emerge thinking that Kyrie is definitely the killer and that Ange is just thinking otherwise to cope. You might go further and believe that Ange ought to let go of her faith entirely, adopting in essence Erika's position, as she does in the Trick ending. You might think, like Maria, that the magic was all real. You might think that the incident was no more than an accidental explosion, and the personalities of the family members were distorted by the envy and cruelty of the goats, but the magic is nonetheless just a symbol. You might come up with your own theory unrelated to all of these. In any case, your ability to draw a conclusion for yourself depends on what you love about Umineko—perhaps even what you love about truth, and it's therefore revealing about yourself. You really cannot know anything about Umineko without a demonstration of that love. It's very rare that you encounter a prose work whose fundamental idea is so perfectly expressed that the mere act of engagement with the text forces an engagement with its theme in absolute terms. This is why Umineko is expressively perfect—it's a work whose thesis is self-demonstrating: from the moment the reader starts to wonder what the answer to the mystery is, it's already too late. You will be forced to consider a truth that will always remain contested, that will never reach a consensus, and no matter what your thoughts are, you will display nakedly not the facts of the Rokkenjima incident but only your own 'eyes of the heart'. Umineko no Naku Koro ni doesn't only express and develop its extraordinary idea but rather completes it—trusting, finally, that the disposition of your spirit will permit you to see not an emptiness without truth, but the transparent fullness of truth, like that deep blue ocean which becomes no less abundant for how easily the water slips through your fingers. After all—without love, it cannot be seen. |
| 12 points |