Let’s read Umineko! - episode 4 - ????

Welcome, everyone. This is a special occasion. The end of the Question Arc.

If I had known it would take me eight years to get here when I began this project… well, I hope I’d still have committed to do it, because I am having a great time right now.

Last time, Battler found acceptable (if contrived) solutions to all of the magical mysteries in the game so far, but one: how did he himself die at the end of Episode 4? But really, the bigger question is of course the one Beatrice asked: ‘who am I?’

So now we have the ‘???’ part of the menu. In previous episodes, this coda has often been where a new character would be introduced into the narrative. But who knows what we’ll get this time.

We are introduced to a location called ‘unknown’.

The number is surely arbitrary, but here, with thousands separators:

Fragment#5,610,984,236,153,928,423,602,349,852,639

That’s about \(5.6\times10^{30}\) in scientific notation.

We find ourselves in the background where Eva Beatrice found the gold in Episode 3, overlaid with a magic swirl. It’s full of sweets. And then we get… a straight up Bernkastel/Lambdadelta yuri CG??? Like they’re cuddled up making eyes at each other?

Before I get too excited about this development, I should note that the narration doesn’t exactly match this illustration, so maybe one of the artists on the PS3 version took some liberties.

Whatever we make of the CG, they seem a lot more chill with each other than they have been in the past. They’re talking about the game that just passed. The conversation quickly passes to Battler’s weakness to emotions; both witches feel that if Battler followed this too much, it would take the game in a bad direction.

Previously I was theorising that player! Beatrice was the one weaving Ange’s story, but actually it would make more sense that it was Bernkastel…

Bernkastel: ………In truth, I wanted to have her support him a bit more before playing her out. She really did play and discard herself straight away. What a waste for a piece that required so much preparation.

Lambdadelta: takes credit for the ‘no saying her name’ rule. I couldn’t find that stated explicitly in a previous liveblog but I did find a previous conversation between Ange and Lambda in chapter 7, in which the ‘rule’ is alluded to but not explained. It’s possible I should have been able to read between the lines and connected it to the whole ‘Gretel’ thing.

As Bernie laments that Ange did not live up to the effort she put in, Lambda refers to Ange as ‘super OP’, another cute modern translation.

Lambdadelta: 当然でしょ、あんなズルい駒、とっととリタイアしてくれないと困るわぁ。

Well, yeah? That piece was super OP, I needed her out of there, like, yesterday.

‘Super OP’ here is transluating ズル ,zuru, which according the dictionary means foul play or cheating. Lambda uses a lot of slang and childish phrases in the Japanese like the mimetic filler(?) ‘totto’ here, so this is a great way to get the same vibe across in English.

Bernkastel comments that ‘an innocent kid’ such as Ange is very easy to manipulate as a piece. This is interesting, because it implies that the players do not directly control their pieces, but have to persuade them to act according to the player’s strategy.

The fact that ‘piece!Ange’ operated on the game board plane where we’ve been referring to ‘player!Battler’ and ‘player!Beatrice’ makes things especially confusing! As much as some pieces (mostly the demons) seem to know the wider context at times, this really seems to be mixing up the ‘levels of reality’.

Anyway, we are explicitly told that Battler did not solve the game in the last chapter.

Bernkastel: In fact, didn’t Battler just solve almost all of the mysteries so far?”

Lambdadelta: Huuh? Not even clo~se! Almost all of Battler’s blue truth is wrong! Beato’s wishy‐washy red is full of holes. Anyone with half a brain could slip through it easily just by rattling off some random BS.

Lambda, suddenly serious now, points out that some of Battler’s solutions, though unchallenged, aren’t even valid. Beatrice’s line

I guarantee the identities of all unidentified corpses

in the first game should have negated one of Battler’s earlier solutions, just like the reveal about Kinzo, but Beatrice didn’t press the point.

Lambda decides to throw in some red truths of her own. Re Kanon in game 1, we get:

Lambdadelta: Kanon did not die in an accident.

For the Genji, Kumasawa and Nanjo clockwise triple kill is denied:

Lambdadelta: Genji, Kumasawa, and Nanjo were not killers!

Finally for Natsuhi:

Lambdadelta: The thing that shot Natsuhi wasn’t a trap, it was a real shooting murder with a gun raised and trigger pulled!

Bernie tells her to stop this, because this is undermining Beatrice’s narrative in which the bullet was deflected by magic. Lambda laughs it off like, oops.

For the second game, we get further denials:

Lambdadelta: When the six were murdered in the chapel, the culprit was inside the chapel!

She scoffs at Battler’s frequent ‘trap X’ plays. Then, finally, on the Kanon name inheritance theory:

Lambdadelta: The only one who can go by the name of Kanon is the person himself! No other human can adopt that name!

Finally, for the Natsuhi’s room mystery:

Lambdadelta: After the master keys came into Rosa’s control, never did any of them leave her hands! Except for the time when she lent one to Battler to unlock Natsuhi’s room.

This blanket denial merits an entire dispassionate ara, ara from Bernie.

Lambda insists that Beato was just acting, once again just setting up to knock Battler’s supposed victory down in a future game. She says Beato still has some ‘hellishly brutal’ moves, and she subtly signalled it by lowering one of her arms at the end.

To Lambda, this is all a reprise of the ‘North Wind and the Sun’ strategy. And she’s confident the ‘penalty’ she’s threatened Beato with for losing will keep her motivated…

We get an example of one of Lambda’s ‘penalties’. She’d lock Bernie in a castle with 12km long, 10m high walls, with magic and ‘cheating’ disabled. Bernie immediately calculates that such a castle would have a volume of $1,440,000,000\unit{m^3}$. Lambda explains that this would gradually fill up with gems, one per day, until Bernie is buried in them. Bernie offers to go into an even bigger version with shorter walls.

Lambdadelta: Really?! That would make it 3,600,000,000 m³, you know?! The penalty would take more than twice as long! Aaahh, you’ll be my prisoner for such a long time?! I love you Bern, I really love yo~u♪

Lambdadelta playfully clung to Bernkastel, who yawned, looking bored, as she stroked Lambdadelta under the chin as though playing with a cat…

So yeah ok the CG is not taking many liberties after all, they’re gamer gfs! Or at least happy to flirt about it, Bernie seems to no-sell it. Well, indeed. Bernard Suits imagined that in a utopia with all material needs and desires easily met, the only thing to do would be to take on games that introduce artificial difficulty. Apparently Umineko takes it further: along with games, the world of witches seems to consist entirely of really convoluted kink scenes. Which, I suppose, are a type of game under certain definitions, so that works out.

This brief interlude of witchy flirting passes quickly and we get back to gamer talk. Despite their mocking of Battler, Lambda is still betting on an infinite draw, and Bernie is of course bettling on a Battler win. They both agree that there is absolutely no chance for Beatrice to win outright. In part because if Beatrice starts winning outright, they’ll both start conspiring to undermine her.

Bernie expresses some small amount of sympathy for Beatrice, as a ‘toy’ of Lambda or the pair of them, who exists largely so Lambda can get at her.

In unison they agree:

Beato certainly cannot win. And there will be absolutely no miracles.

And we get the actual credits scroll.

I wondered at one point if Sakutarō and Ange had the same voice actor. The answer is… Ange is played by Satou Rina, and Sakutarō by Chihara Minori, so no.

Incidentally, the voice actors in this game do an absolutely fantastic job. Whatever you might say about the PS3 version’s art being overly clean and sterile, I can’t really imagine playing the game without the voices. They add so much.

This time around, there is a second credits scroll with the people who worked on Umineko-Project—mostly screen names. There’s quite a lot of them! Huge thank you to all of them for giving such a wonderful presentation of Umineko.

That was… quite a brief coda, but it does at least give us a few constraints on the earlier mysteries! Which means… we are now theoretically at the point where we have sufficient information to solve the whole game. I’m not quite sure that’s actually feasible though because there are a whole lot of confounders.

With the end of the episode, we get some additional information on the ‘Tips’ screen:

Tips

This time around, our tips all concern the functioning of magic.

Mariage Sorcière

A witches’ alliance formed by Lady Maria (the Witch of Origins) and Lady Beatrice (the Endless Witch).

The two of them created a groundbreaking new system of magic, thereby granting Beatrice—whose magical power had begun to decline—immense new magical power.

You could probably say that it was through the formation of this alliance that Beatrice gained the Endless Power in the true sense.

Article 1 requires members to accept each other as witches and respect each other’s magic. At one point, young Ange was invited into the alliance, but she was later excommunicated.

Since I tend to interpret magic largely in terms of art, I read this as a creatively fulfilling collaboration. We’ve discussed more than a few times recently that a game played with others, even if it’s just a game designer handing you a single player game, is far more compelling than one that you make up and play solitaire.

System of Magic

A foundation upon which to create magic. In particular, it refers to a system by whose shared usage magic power can be gained without conscious effort.

You could say that writing down their own system of magic and leaving it to future generations is one of a witch’s life works.

However, systems of terrific magic power are correspondingly difficult to comprehend, and shared usage of them is troublesome. As a result, none will appear to bear the burden.

If a system’s magical power is simple, there will likely be no difficulties sharing it, but as a result, the system will be reduced to having no greater effect than a simple good luck charm, and will ultimately be forgotten.

Leaving a system of magic for later generations while simultaneously maintaining that balance is the true joy of witchcraft.

(Extremely game developer voice:) well obviously, witchcraft is a metaphor for game development. The ‘magical power’ is a way of viewing the sublime ‘meaningful play’ that emerges from a good game played well. What else could it be?

For real, speaking as someone who likes to spend her time writing ludicrously overdetailed liveblogs, I do think this is a nice statement of the value of complexity in games, as well as long serial fiction and the like. There’s something about a really huge, involved work that gives you something to sink your teeth into, but the barrier to entry is of course correspondingly higher…

Grimoire

In short, a grimoire is that into which a system of magic is written down and transmitted to later generations.

The most famous grimoire in the world today has a 2000-year history, is still in circulation, and is said to be continuing to acquire new alliance members even now.

It is forbidden to speak the true name of that grimoire, and it is called simply “the Book”.

This one’s pretty easy: they’re talking about ‘the Bible’, which in English is usually a reference to the Christian holy text or by analogy to something similarly authoritative, but this word derives ultimately from the Greek βιβλία (‘biblía’) which simply means ‘books’. So we are basically just saying ‘the Book’.

The connection between magical grimoires and religious texts is made often; for example, most of my citations from the Keys of Solomon come via the Internet Sacred Texts Archive which collects both. (By the way, have you all come across Dr Justin Sledge’s channel Esoterica? If you want to hear a guy with a really soothing voice make some extremely deep and rigorous dives into the history of occultism and religion, you can’t ask for better!)

Beatrice’s Titles

As a witch, Beatrice holds the two titles of “Endless” and “Golden”. Because these are originally titles from separate systems of magic, it can be said that she possesses two systems.

The Endless Witch has its foundation in “Endless Creation”, and is the root of her unmatched endless magical power.

The Golden Witch has its foundation in “Magic Realization”, and her magical power to make the precious metals of fantasy manifest in reality gives the miracle of manifestation to all faint forms of magic.

The two of these were polished even further through Mariage Sorcière, elevating them to a system of magic called “Endless Realization”.

In that sense, she should now be called neither the Endless nor the Golden Witch, but by a new title that is a fusion of the two.

The Gendless Witch? The Elden Witch? Heh, I think Fromsoft already got that one.

A lot of esotericism seems to involve mashing words together with a very serious tone and making up weird hierarchies, but there is something here. I’m not sure the origin of ‘Endless’—perhaps this was devised by Maria—but the ‘Golden’ power probably has to do with Kinzo’s ideas about magic. My interpretation of this passage is that it’s obliquely addressing how the Mariage Sorcière game is a synthesis of Maria’s original ideas about magic with the mythology around Beatrice and Kinzo.

Regarding Witches

The definition of a witch is vague, but the most accepted theory is that one is a witch at the point when they gain a power surpassing humans and are able to use it freely.

And the world—or possibly fragment—in which that can be freely used is called their “territory”. Most witches cannot leave their territory, but those who are capable of transcending its boundary at will and wandering the fragments are called “voyagers”.

In the story, Bernkastel and Lambdadelta fall under this type.

At first glance, this would seem to correspond to the notion of ‘fictional universe’. However, I think we can also view it as an explication of Ryuukishi07’s broader cosmology/magic system, in the ‘shared universe’ of his works?

Another angle on it is to imagine a ‘territory’ as a world constructed inside a person’s mind. To transcend a territory is to introduce your ‘character’ into their imagined space. But then this would not be rare, it would be accomplished by any author of fiction—or indeed any player in an RPG.

Perhaps a witch requires something a bit more than simply a fictional character. If we imagine a person as defined as something like a process or algorithm, what Baru Cormorant termed an ‘inner law’, then to transfer across such a barrier is to instantiate a close-enough copy of that algorithm on someone else’s brain-substrait. In other words, you need to create an ‘introject’ into someone’s head for your witch to be a ‘traveller’.

Hmm, I think this whole ‘plural culture’ language is a magic system all of its own…

Regarding Voyagers

Worlds of different fates and circumstances are called fragments, and witches who are able to cross the ocean of endless fragments are called voyagers.

It is also another name for a high-order (high-level) witch, and witches who are unable to leave their territories cannot compare with their power.

However, perhaps because they do not have specific territories, their personal values are unstable, and it is easy for their souls to become faint. As a result, it is not rare for voyagers to disappear like scraps of seaweed in the ocean of fragments.

This accords with the idea of a witch being something computational in nature. If a process or data gets corrupted, it will no longer be the same thing.

Another interpretation is ‘witch as otaku’: the witch goes out and searches for fictional narratives of all sorts. As the existence of this liveblog attests, fiction can have a profound effect on you. But with so many different ways to make meaning, what anchors you?

Regarding Creators

Creators are sacred beings who can create 1 out of the sea of nothingness.

They can give birth to 1 from 0, give birth to the endless, and then return it to 0 again in a falsh. They are freed from all restrictions, and the voyagers sometimes even call them gods.

In that sense, perhaps the Witch of Origins, Maria, who is promised to become a Creator, may be called a “chosen one”……

Voyagers fear that the end of their own journey is to become a Creator. As to why they would be frightened of evolving into a higher-order being, none can understand except they themselves.

Very interesting! In light of the previous, I think perhaps one interpretation is this: becoming a game developer, writer, musician etc. changes how you look at games, writing, music etc. It is no longer something you can receive as a complete, monolithic thing: as your familiarity grows, the fingerprints of a production process and wider culture are on it, the space of variations becomes more visible, and the ‘magic’ of discovery shifts somewhere else. But at the same time you see the sheer amount of work behind every thing. And to have any hope at all of making something, your own time is increasingly filled with creating, not exploring the works of others that inspired you in the first place.

Which is to say, just as many animators don’t end up watching much anime, I barely play games anymore now that I’m a game dev—but the process of creating games is a game so rich that you could say I am still having a great time with games.

I have been pursuing this transformation for my whole life, so I don’t think it’s bad. But you could say you lose something when you transition from the stance of a fan to the stance of creating your own stuff.

Character screens

It is now possible to access death screens we didn’t get during the game. Mainly that’s just Battler:

Battler

Missing.

Bound for hell in the witch’s embrace. But to the witch, that hell is the Golden Land.

You can also try pressing the ‘Execute’ button on Beatrice, and you get this:

Beatrice

It is futile for a human like yourself to dream of killing me.

Even if you fire bullets at me, they will merely bounce back as though by a mirror and strike you down.

However, there is one single way to kill me.
You grasp this method in the palm of your hand.
I doubt a mediocre fool like you could ever do it, of course.

Kihihihihihihihihihihihihi! *cackle*cackle*cackle*cackle*!

I believe we’ve seen it before, but it’s interesting to read it again after the last chapter!

I wondered if I might be able to get some information on Ange’s death in 1998, but while you can switch Ange’s outfit, you can’t access any death info.

There are in fact both alive and dead screens for the briefly mentioned Chiester556 on the Witch Side, and even a character design:

Chiester556 (living)

A quiet girl who is always being teased by everyone.

But that is because they all love her very much.

The trumpet is her specialty. Everyone skips to her lively tone.

Chiester556 (dead)

A weapon of the Sisters’ Cavalry, which serves Pendragon.

Although 556 was a quiet girl who was always being teased, she was loved by everybody. However, luck was not on her side, and she suffered a brutal death in a battle with the black witch.

She was a state-of-the-art weapon, and added color to the Sisters’ Cavalry, which had the strong flavor of an honor guard.

556 was in charge of squad fire support. She shot not to kill, but to protect her allies.

There are also variants for Maria. They are accessed with the ‘execute’/’resurrect’ buttons but appear to actually mean witch/non-witch.

Ushiromiya Maria (alive)

A little mage who has inherited the black blood from Kinzo.

Unlike Kinzo, she was gifted with natural talent, and began to tread the path of the mage while still young. That said, her power is still weak, and she is no more than an apprentice.

However, she is skilled with enchantments, which bestow magical power upon objects, and the magical items she creates compete with those of the Meister class.

Maria

The Witch of Origins who will live for the next thousand years. Possesses the motherly magical power to give birth to 1 from the sea of zero.

At a glance, her magical power is weak. However, 0 will never become anything but 0, no matter how it is multiplied. But the 1 she gave birth to will eventually surpass the heavens.

Protected heavily by Beatrice, who understands her true value. She is in an alliance with Beatrice.

There’s lots of other lore on the Witch Side but I think I’ve mostly quoted it as it came up? If anyone is reading along and would like me to pull something out, though, do let me know!

Can we solve the mysteries of Rokkenjima?

This is the last chance I have to answer the questions before the game starts providing answers, so let’s take a crack at it!

The first question we have to solve is, what is even the mystery?

For example, the question of ‘what happened on Rokkenjima’ could be viewed in one of two ways. The first is to intrepret all four games as hints towards a hypothetical Rokkenjima Prime, and see if we can deduce what happened there. The second is to take each game in isolation, assume each one has its own unique mundane scenario behind it, and try and solve those, then draw what conclusions we can about the bigger picture.

Along with ‘what happened on Rokkenjima’, though intimately related, we have who is Beatrice? Whether we have to solve one timeline or four, we won’t be able to get very far without solving this part.

I’ve pretty much spelled this out already, but my working theory is that the answer to ‘who is Beatrice’ is along the lines of…

• Kinzo kept a woman named Beatrice prisoner in Kuwadorian until she died in 1968. Kinzo never got over this, putting up a portrait and writing the epitaph riddle etc.; as a result, the ghost story of Beatrice still haunts the mansion.
• someone who lived on Rokkenjima—likely one of the ‘-on’ servants from Kinzo’s creepy orphanage—developed a complex inner world of magical fantasies to cope with their rough situation, sooner or later taking inspiration from the Beatrice mythology.
• this person became familiar with the secret tunnels under Rokkenjima, giving them an unusual freedom of movement.
• this “someone” became friends with Maria, and realised she was doing something similar. together, they created the shared imagined space called Mariage Sorcière.
• something mysterious happened involving this person and Battler in 1980, around when Ange was born.
• at some point after that, a very young Ange visited Rokkenjima and got involved in Mariage Sorcière. however, she scorned the game and got kicked out.
• this “someone” began identifying more strongly with their Beatrice persona.
• during the 1986 family conference, Battler returned to Rokkenjima for the first time in six years. somehow, this kicked off a series of events that led to the deaths of every member of the Ushiromiya family.
• the “someone”, as the sole survivor, wrote fictionalised stories about the events on Rokkenjima in which a Beatrice character confronts a Battler character by posing a series of mysteries.

I think this answers the broader frame, although it doesn’t solve any of the specific mysteries. However, we’ve seen that the solution to some of the mysteries is now to deny that the events depicted onscreen happened at all, even if no magic is displayed.

We know that at most 17 people were on the island during the massacre. We can posit that it is fewer, if we can find some way to merge or deny the existence of further characters.

Let’s now move on to considering individual games.

For a given game, we have two sources of ‘reliable truth’:

• things stated in red text, which are absolutely true but may be phrased in a deliberately misleading way. if not otherwise stated, these are attached to the point on the timeline they are spoken. I have not resolved whether these are globally true or true for that game.
• things directly witnessed by piece!Battler. these can be assumed to be true at least for that game, but there’s no reason to think they’d be true of Rokkenjima Prime.

More tentatively, we can also assume that for the underlying truth, the ‘setup’ of the game—the characters present, their motivations, and so on—is more or less the same each time. So, for example, when Beatrice appears on the stage in Episode 2, either this didn’t actually happen (because Battler didn’t see it) or that must be one of the known characters pretending to be Beatrice.

Indeed, if there is a ‘correct mundane account’ for each game, it seems we need to posit that there is some underlying ‘simulation’ which is hidden from us, but where the characters are carrying out a mundane series of murders under their ‘real’ motivations, out of sight of Battler.

What does it take to solve a puzzle?

Let’s consider one of the wackier puzzles: the deaths of the six parents in the chapel in Episode 2, whose stomachs had been burst open and filled with candy. Battler’s eventual solution to this was a ‘trap X’ consisting of small bombs.

Do the murders matter?

At some point we will probably come back round to reveal the correct solutions to all of these murders, but ultimately what we’re concerned about at this point is not the solution to individual murders, especially if it involves pedantic close reading of the red statements like this, but a big picture story of who killed who on Rokkenjima and why.

At this point it’s been made abundantly clear that there is a mundane version of each game and presumably also Rokkenjima Prime, and that Lambdadelta has been able to take a look at it on the ‘player’ layer. She knows, for example, that someone shot and killed Rosa at the end of Episode 1, even though Beatrice didn’t put that in the magic narrative.

Beyond that, we do at least know one person who absolutely didn’t dunnit: Kinzo. Because he’s dead. That’s narrowed our pool of suspects… though unfortunately it does eliminate the character most likely to spontaneously go on a murder spree.

It does seem likely that the inciting incident for all the murders somehow relates to Battler coming back to the island. After that, I think all hell probably broke lose: rather than the Ushiromiyas being hounded by a mysterious assailant, maybe they just started killing each other. We’ve seen how quick they’ve been to throw accusations out.

Battler’s sin

So what was Battler’s ‘sin’?

I won’t go over everything that was said in chapter 17. We know that it has something to do with Rudolf’s affair with Kyrie, and Battler’s subsequent disavowal of the Ushiromiya name.

I’m not quite sure how to interpret the fact that player!Battler seemed to have an identity crisis and even disappear when Beatrice declared he was not the son of Asumu. Ultimately that resolved with little serious change to Battler’s characterisation: after he came back, he still remembered being raised by Asumu. So what I thought at the time, that we could conclude Battler of 1980 is a different person to Battler of 1986, doesn’t really seem to work anymore.

So when Beatrice says that his failure to remember the ‘sin’ is proof that he ‘died’ in 1980, does she mean this in a metaphorical sense? It’s confusing!

Whatever he did, it was something terribly important to (the person who became) Beatrice. Who would care whether Battler identifies with the family or not? As Battler observes, it seems to be between him, Rudolf and Kyrie. Unlike George and Jessica, he doesn’t seem to have any particularly strong relationships with anyone on the island—after all, he’s not even been there in six years. And we know little about what happened six years ago…

The riddle of the gold

OK, one last time. The last time I attempted the riddle of the gold was back in episode 3. Here’s the riddle again:

懐かしき、故郷を貫く鮎の川。
黄金郷を目指す者よ、これを下りて鍵を探せ。

川を下れば、やがて里あり。
その里にて二人が口にし岸を探れ。
そこに黄金郷への鍵が眠る。

鍵を手にせし者は、以下に従いて黄金郷へ旅立つべし。

第一の晩に、鍵の選びし六人を生贄に捧げよ。
第二の晩に、残されし者は寄り添う二人を引き裂け。
第三の晩に、残されし者は誉れ高き我が名を讃えよ。
第四の晩に、頭をえぐりて殺せ。
第五の晩に、胸をえぐりて殺せ。
第六の晩に、腹をえぐりて殺せ。
第七の晩に、膝をえぐりて殺せ。
第八の晩に、足をえぐりて殺せ。
第九の晩に、魔女は蘇り、誰も生き残れはしない。
第十の晩に、旅は終わり、黄金の郷に至るだろう。

魔女は賢者を讃え、四つの宝を授けるだろう。
一つは、黄金郷の全ての黄金。
一つは、全ての死者の魂を蘇らせ。
一つは、失った愛すらも蘇らせる。
一つは、魔女を永遠に眠りにつかせよう。

安らかに眠れ、我が最愛の魔女ベアトリーチェ。

…along with the Umineko-project translation:

We also know that all the killing and gouging is a wordplay, and per Kyrie’s insight in Episode 3, involves removing or modifying kanji somehow.

My current thought is that the ‘head’, ‘knee’ etc. might refer to radicals. For example, ‘gouging the head’ might refer to removing the topmost radical. Admittedly, it’s kind of tricky to map body parts to parts of kanji!

Unfortunately, we still do not have much more of an inkling of the key. It’s supposed to be something you can figure out from Kinzo’s backstory with the use of an atlas, but we did not actually learn very much more about Kinzo’s backstory in this episode!

But, OK, rereading episode 3 chapters 10 and 11, Kyrie and Eva agreed that the ‘sweetfish’ part of the riddle was mostly intended to lead you to think about the sea. If I look around a map of Japan and nearby countries, I can find essentially no place names with six characters. Thinking about ocean currents as a type of ‘river’, I do find the Kuroshio Current aka ‘Black Current’. This current runs broadly North, up along the East coast of Asia, as part of the North Pacific Gyre.

If we guess that the ‘sweetfish river’ is the Kuroshio Current (a big guess!), that suggests we might want to look at the south end of the Japanese archipelago then. There is a long chain of islands stretching nearly all the way to Taiwan. However, while I see a lot of 町 kanji in the names of cities, I’m not seeing much in the way of 里. If we go all the way to Taiwan, I can spot a label on the map for an area called 望古里, but that’s going the wrong direction along the ‘sweetfish river’ and it’s a bit inland so it doesn’t have a ton of shores.

Most likely, I’m interpreting 里 far too literally in looking for that exact kanji/hanzi in a place name. But I’m not quite sure of a better strategy. For example, in Sakiyama I found a ‘former site of Sakiyama Village’ (崎山集落跡). This is a village, but probably isn’t the village, and it’s definitely not clear what shore would be the one ‘the two speak of’. This may be another wordplay, with ‘the two’ referring to, for example, two kanji in the name or something like that? Similarly, on Yonaguni (which is the first island you reach travelling northeast from Taiwan), I found a tiny beach called ‘二畳ビーチ’ (two tatami beach), which has the number two in the name… but let’s be real, I’m grasping at straws here. Whatever it is, it must be a big enough thing to stand out in an atlas in the 80s. I doubt it would require you to know about Two Tatami Beach on the island of Yonaguni.

OK, let’s consider another dubious angle. In this episode, Captain Kawabata brought up the battle of Iwo Jima in relation to the tunnels beneath Rokkenjima. Could that be a hint somehow that Kinzo had history there? Probably not… Iwo Jima is way out in the pacific, and I don’t necessarily see any promising strings of six kanji here.

I don’t seem to be able to solve this, and I could spend a lot of time scrolling around the map and getting nowhere. So I think I will have to concede victory to Kinzo: even with Kyrie’s hints, I’m still stumped. I think once the ‘key’ is revealed, I will make another attempt to solve the rest of the riddle.

I kind of wonder—did anyone in Japan solve the riddle of the gold before 2009, when Episode 5 was released? If so, hats off to them. It feels like something that will be ‘oh, I see’ once the solution is revealed, but very difficult to piece together beforehand!

Final thoughts

The twists and turns of this narrative are amazing. I would love to write a work this intricate and far-reaching. Equally, a work as funny and rich in character. Perhaps I will try! It’s been too long since I wrote any fiction.

I hope this has still been entertaining to read along! I think most of my readers are probably Umineko fans who know how it all ends, but I know at least one person has been keeping pace reading alongside me. Either way, I am trying to give this liveblog the effort Umineko deserves. I know a lot of the fun is watching me struggle to guess and theorise about what’s going to happen, so I’ve tried to theorise a lot.

With that in mind, before I embark on the Answer arc, I have a question to you: are there any mysteries you’d like me to try my hand at before we go on? Any subjects you think I should consider? Anything oblique things you want to say before mischieviously cackling ahaha.wav-style? This is your chance!

Otherwise… as a little hint of what is to come, here is the tooltip for Episodes 5-8 in the menu:

Good Morning. As the story crosses into its second half, the tales woven by the Golden Witch have been exhausted.

All that remains now is to understand them.

Perhaps new Game Masters can offer a fresh perspective.

All the more strange! I hope Beatrice will still be around, even if she’s no longer directing the show… Will we be revisiting the old scenarios, or concocting new variants? Time will tell.

<Have a nice dream>.