Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 5

Hey, we’re back! Comments from the last ep:

anarchistserum: I’m glad you lived to meet Erika! I love her so much, even when she’s polite enough to be a bit dull.

I’m also glad I lived! Here’s to not dying stupidly on a roundabout.

Looking forward to seeing Erika in action…

As it happens, I missed it last time, but there is an additional page on the Witch Side character screen for Erika:

Furudo Erika

Bernkastel’s double and servant. Also a piece who has manifested in the human world.

Because she is human, she cannot use magic and the like. However, because she is in contact with Bernkastel in a higher world and can appeal to her to use higher-world miracles and authority on her behalf, it would probably be no exaggeration to call Furudo Erika a human capable of wielding the power of a witch.

Therefore, even though she is an outsider to the Ushiromiya family, she possesses the right to demand full attention from everyone when speaking, the right to advance proceedings, and the right to investigate the crime scene before the police arrive, as well as many other special abilities.

She gets pleasure from the process of solving riddles, but her greatest joy comes from using that victory to sneer at others.

So it seems this is not simply a puppet for Bernkastel, but a character in her own right!

Dinner time! Gohda serves up. Everyone’s all ‘wow Erika is so calm and composed and good at eating formal dinners’. Hideyoshi tries to put her at ease and…

She gets really excited talking about chopsticks.

Erika: Simply pour it into a bowl donburi‐style. Is there anyone who eats gyuudon with a spoon? Of course not. We Japanese must unwaveringly, unfailingly, unflinchingly use chopsticks! So, Gohda‐san. If you please, I would like some chopsticks. I shall show everyone the proud and proper way for a Japanese person to eat!

Damn, I’d rather not know what Erika thinks about, say, Korean people at this rate…

The narration assures us that she’s this all for the bit, and she endears herself to the adults even more with her splendid table manners. Yeah, given that the narrator here is pretty much Bernkastel’s girlfriend, I feel like she’s laying it on a bit thick!

Dinner is pretty chill with Erika present. The kids, now plus Erika, head back to the guest house to play cards. The term in Japanese is トランプ, turanpu, literally ‘trump’, but apparently this is just the term for Western-style playing cards in Japan! (As opposed to Hanafuda I guess.) That’s pretty interesting. Japanese Wikipedia isn’t super specific on the etymology, just saying that in English it refers to a variety of games with the trump card mechanic.

They pass the portrait of Beatrice, which grabs Erika’s attention, so Rudolf explains the whole legend of the gold thing to her. We get a new background for the guest house, showing some golf clubs.

Erika jumps to the conclusion that solving the ritual will bestow head status, which puts the shits up the relatives a bit. She points out that the intended audience must be confined to people in the mansion; also the amount of gold is ‘tantamount to’ inheriting the Ushiromiya family’s wealth. She then pats herself on the back for this observation…

Erika: ………All it takes is the presence of that epitaph, and a deduction like this becomes trivial for Furudo Erika. ……Your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen?”

I see, so this is what her quirk will be… I’m sure Lucifer, as the stake of pride, is loving this development.

Erika further argues that Kinzo intended to create doubt so Krauss would have a harder time inheriting. She drops the ‘All it takes is X, and a deduction like this becomes trivial’ line again. Ah, so that’s her catchphrase. Let’s get it in Japanese:

……ただXがそこに存在するだけで。古戸ヱリカはこの程度の推理が可能です

……tada X ga soko ni sanzai suru dake de. Furudo Erika wa, kono teido no suiri ga kaou desu.

A painfully literal translation might go ‘Merely by X existing here… For Furudo Erika, this amount of deduction is possible.’ Obvs the Umineko Project version is more idiomatic.

She patronisingly asks Jessica to comment, and Battler observes that Erika is a bit too much like an Ushiromiya…

Riddle solution?

She takes a crack at the riddle. Bernkastel insults Battler for giving up on it after his previous attempts. All right, Bernie, you know we’re not getting the answer til episode 8, so get off your high horse…

Since we’re going to be discussing the riddle, here it is again for convenience…

Lambdadelta says that Bernie solved it right then and there… but suggests it might have taken her years. She replies she fished through just ‘a few hundred’ fragments, and asks Lambda to take her to ‘sea’ so she can deliver the answer…

Lambda tells that if Battler wants to feel gravity, he need only believe his feet are on the ground. He manages to stabilise himself. So this is like, an abstraction of unformed fictional space…? Lambda warns that without holding on to ‘will (意思), emotions (感情) or form (姿や形)’ Battler risks falling into the ‘depths of eternity’ as mere seaweed…

Bernkastel then goes and weaves a bunch of fragments together with golden threads to give us a place to solve this riddle. Wow, for all that these witches condescend to Battler, they’re not skimping on the spectacle…

As Battler passes through the ‘fragments’, he glimpses scenes—all from previous games, I’m pretty sure.

Lambda interjects to say that what he glimpsed were not memories, but fragments of worlds. We see a scene from the third game, with Eva Beatrice along with the first two stanzas of the epitaph.

Eva Beatrice …The “beloved home of old” definitely won’t betray our expectations. ……The only past that Father held dear was his years as a boy.

Since this led to the solution, this theory must be a correct hint, argues Bernie. And at the time, the characters also observed that it does not refer to Odawara, where he was born.

So, Battler argues, does that mean that Bernie exhaustively considered everywhere Kinzo might possibly have lived? No, she says, she used other hints. Hint 2 is the observation about the sweetfish river, which as it happens I screenshotted during the episode 3 liveblog…

The sweetfish element is a bit of a red herring (HA HA HA), or at least, not meant to be interpreted entirely literally but as another sort of hint. So uh… sweetfish. Hmm. ‘Sweetfish’ is 鮎, which combines the radical for ‘fish’, 魚, with a radical 占, which interpreted as a whole kanji would mean ‘fortune telling’. Other than that, I’m not sure. What about the range of the sweetfish?

Native to East Asia, it is distributed in the northwestern Pacific Ocean along the coast of Hokkaidō in Japan southward to the Korean Peninsula, China, Hong Kong and northern Vietnam. It is amphidromous, moving between coastal marine waters and freshwater lakes and rivers. A few landlocked populations also exist in lakes in Japan such as Lake Biwa. Original wild populations in Taiwan became extinct in 1968 due to pollution and present extant populations were reintroduced from Japan in the 1990s.

In my attempt to solve it in the last episode, I interpreted it as an ocean current. However, perhaps it’s more of a culinary thing… I’m not sure what’s commonly eaten with sweetfish. Or, with the ‘family tree’ thing suggested by Eva Beatrice, we could even imagine the cladogram of the fish… and find some related fish. Probably not that one…

There is a line I didn’t remember, about how the ‘key’ is not six characters long, suitable for the linguistic manipulations that Kyrie suggested…

But then there is some way of writing it that fits.

So the solution is indeed: find the correct six-character ‘key’, and a suitable source to delete characters from. Battler reasons that we should read the string 第一の晩 (the first twilight) as the target, and contemplates ways of writing it in English like ‘the first twilight’ or ‘first night’. So, OK, hold on… I was assuming all along that we had to muck around with kanji, but actually this is probably working in katakana or even the Latin alphabet?

Abruptly we drop back to Erika and Battler discussing the same theory on the game board. Since Kinzo is such a Westaboo, they figure it is probably in English.

Erika then leads them to conclude that the second twilight should be interpreted by separating adjacent pair of characters remains after the first manipulation into the second target. I thought perhaps ought to insert the rest in between them, for ‘those who remain’? But that’s not where they go with it.

OK, I think we’d better pause the explanation here, that feels like more than enough hint to solve it. Supposing that the ‘key’ solution to the first part of the riddle is the string I guessed above, we need to figure out what we’re deleting characters from, and this time we’ll assume that we need to work in English not Japanese. After all this time that I was hoping I’d be able to apply all my Japanese learning to solving this damn riddle… Ah, but I’m still stuck, let’s get a bit more.

For ‘praise my noble name’, this sounds like perhaps you should add BEATRICE in. Battler instead reasons that it has to do with rearranging the letters. He reasons that there must be 11 characters to start with, given that there are 11 ‘kills’ in the riddle (and I guess the ‘none left alive’) line; or ‘13’ if ‘tear apart’ means to delete rather than separate. But how can that be? If you delete all the characters, you just have a blank string? Perhaps the lines you generate along the way are somehow meaningful…

As this goes on, Erika continually praises Battler, in a way that is also self-aggrandising: well done for thinking like me.

Outside, player!Battler is annoyed that piece!Battler is getting ahead of him. Bernkastel says she was controlling his piece for him at this point in the game. Interesting implications… so in fact Erika’s lines are straight up Bernie patting herself on the back…

Battler accepts to go along with the revelation of the solution, and instead contemplates Lambda’s line that if the riddle wasn’t hard, there would be no point to it—something she flags as being a hint in itself. OK, sure. Why come up with a difficult rather than easy riddle? Battler observes that, since Kinzo was already dead, the display of the epitaph might have been by someone else, the person we’re calling Beatrice. He further observes that, by finding the gold, Eva was allowed to survive in the third game, and killed in every other game. He wonders why Beato would create this obscure ‘miracle’ possibility…

At this point, they give up solving the riddle without knowing what string to insert into the first twilight, so I guess we’ve just been given some pretty huge hints but not the answer just yet… well, everyone except Battler gives up. If she’s just gonna play Battler as the ‘detective’, why did Bernie even bother introducing Erika..?

Rosa, the last to go upstairs, continues to discuss with Battler; she observes that the last line switches from 黄金郷, ougonkyou to 黄金の郷, ougon no sato, changing the reading of the kanji. Hmm, hold on, HOME OF THE GOLD has 13 characters, doesn’t it? But no overlap with the hypothetical key above.

She also observes that we might have ten positions leading up to the eventual ‘home of the gold’. So maybe we need to put the letters we ‘kill’ in each twilight into a certain order? She also brings up Kyōto in relation to 黄金郷… hey, hold on a minute, KYOUTO has six characters in romaji… In any case, Rosa says she knows where Kinzo grew up and it was ‘a long way away’, and reasons that it might be a string of places from there to another place.

On his way upstairs, Battler runs into Erika, who unlocks and opens a door. When did she get the keys?

Erika goes into the archive, looking for ‘reference material’. She promises she’s in it only for the love of the game and won’t take the gold for herself.

Erika says the book she was looking for is an atlas, and the chapter ends.

Well that’s a big dose of hints. I think I’d already become convinced of the ‘place name’ theory after episode 3, but I guess this about cements it. The problem is figuring out a compatible key and targets for deletions. But, OK, how about islands? Let’s look at the Ryūkyū Islands, starting at Taiwan. Here are a few…

• Iriomotejima
• Ishigakijima
• Taramajima & Minnajima
• Miyakojima
• Okinawa
• Okinoerabujima
• Tokunoshima
• Amami Oshima
• Kikajima

…but it’s really arbitrary which ones I’m counting because there’s a bunch of really tiny ones like Suwanosejima that don’t even show up until you zoom in ultra far. So this doesn’t feel definite enough to be the correct path.

Agh, I feel like with these big hints, I should be able to get it by now. Maybe I’ll figure it out by the time of the next liveblog. They’re being really cagey about actually saying Kinzo’s home outright though, so it seems we are still in the ‘hints’ stage and they might keep teasing a little longer. Frustratingly, though, the only way to confirm I’m on the right lines is to derive a solution to the whole riddle from it.

And Erika, then! Well, I see why she’s so polarising. ‘Ultra smug’ was not the vibe I would have guessed, but here we go. She’s as quirky as the rest of ‘em. ‘A deduction like this becomes trivial for Furudu Erika’ isn’t quite so catch as DAME DA, ZENZEN DAME DA or ‘flip over the chessboard’ but it’s got the makings of it. We shall see.