| abstract
| - KEIYA (K): I want to congratulate you for completing Umineko first. K: Even though the way to end it was sadly not quite what many players had expected it to be. K: “Won’t he reveal the solution a little more clearly?” was the expectation of many people, I think. But you have said in interviews and so on, that “there wouldn’t be a clear solution like that”. And it really became a finale just like that. K: But you gave approaches from a different angle every time. Like there are many truths. K: I think there is about the same amount of people saying “I want to know the truth of the gameboard”, as there are those asking “What is the truth of the real world”. After EP7 had already revealed so much of the truth, many might have expected EP8 to step even further into the real world, and they were quite surprised when it took this, might I even call it ambiguous direction of locking up the catbox. K: You said that many times after we had our discussion after the main arcs. K: After I had finished it, I had a short talk with Mr. Ôta from Seikaisha (the editor who is responsible for the novel version of Higurashi) on the phone. K: Just after I had posted “EP8 finished!” on Twitter, I immediately got a phone call. K: Mr. Ôta was also in a state of excitement. I was, too. “That he would really end it in such an eccentric way.” I would almost call it a kind of Anti-Mystery ending. K: I brought along my deductions which I have made during those five years, which are printed in a corner called “Forgery Author Test”. K: Thank you very much. I very much afraid, that most of my ideas I had on the evening when EP8 was released were pretty rushed and quite bold. K: There are some passages where I went wild with my reasoning and just got experimental, just not to go against the red. K: It’s a way of grading myself, yes. K: At least I believe so *laugh*. Those are still grades given during my deduction phase, so especially in the later half there are many places where I have been quite easy on myself *laugh*. There are many places which I’d maybe like to change into ∆’s in the end. K:Between the line of everything you wrote, there are many hints, aren’t there? I recently noticed, while rereading information released until EP4, how much kernel information had been around already. K: There were a ton of those. We touched on this during the deduction of EP5, but the talk of Battler’s promise surfaced as early as EP1. “There were vital parts from EP1 on” is something that has been mentioned many times, but these things have to be mentioned K: Right after the previous book was published, I immediately sat down and thought it all over again. And during that, I became really focused on the story about the promise towards Shannon *laugh*. It would have been better if I had already stumbled upon it during the last book. While reading EP4 I actually suspected Genji or Kinzô to be the one behind the message bottles. It was because of the influence they had on Maria and because their worldview was so much alike, but I really regret that I wasn’t able to connect those parts to Shannon as well. K: In Umineko you prepared many instances you can see in a totally different light, once you know about Kinzô’s death or the connection between Shannon and Kanon, right?! K: You are talking about the real world and the meta world? K: Because you basically had to write two stories, right? K: It really seemed to be hard work to join those two stories together. That’s what I thought the whole time while reading it. K: Because Umineko’s overall theme is to fight, it’s no wonder that one gets pulled into the spirit of it, right?! K: With words like, “This is going to be torture until you fold!”, this pushiness came through. K: It did a great job at expressing that fighting spirit within the worldview, as well as the feelings of both the Battler in the meta world and the one writing the stories of the gameboards. K: Among the locked rooms in Umineko there were many perfect locked rooms. K: That would be the part at the beginning of EP3, the lecture by Virgilia. It’s true that after the release of EP2 it seemed a little bit like you could bury the idea to regard it as detective fiction *laugh*. When I looked at some of the message boards back then, I was feeling like, “Eh, they are giving up already?!” about most of the fans. K: At that time there were already plans for something like Erika? K: The name is taken from the character Vergilius in Dante’s ’’Divina Commedia’’, right?! K: At the time of EP2, Battler had a pretty hard time reasoning himself. If Vergilius had appeared then, the plot would have become an even fiercer battle? K: Among some of the fans there is the idea that you could put it into Umineko Rei (an Umineko fandisc), which was mentioned on the blog on the official page, what about that? K: So you are returning it to the shelf? K: So, using the part about the staged murders, planting plain to see corpses even though there couldn’t be a culprit and even then piling up on the corpses. I imagine you mean things like this. K: I also read many pieces featuring tricks and locked rooms. But you’re right, a perfect locked room would be a bold trick that could not be solved by anyone. K: “Illusion is the key to all of Umineko” is a part I have been troubling myself over from the beginning, it fits together with the chess metaphor we discussed around here last time. But you don’t have to stop at the locked room tricks, it’s something that encompasses the whole of the series. K: Tricks like poison gas or certain gadgets, right?! K: That, with EP2, possibilities were severely cut down by the Red, was a huge help to those trying to deduce. They really were a hint, weren’t they? K: But the chance of you using it again are pretty slim, right? It’s like “this pattern has vanished”. K: But it really became scarce around EP3. K: The hints became less as well, didn’t they?! Using the Red you could narrow it down to “it’s either this pattern or this pattern”, but during EP3 there was nothing much except the confirmation of times of death. EP3 was a game with a pretty straight forward possibility of reasoning from beginning to the end, even though it leaves pretty much of the actual pattern open for interpretation. It was pretty hard to find something encompassing the possibilities during the finale into that. K: There were a lot of hints in the red words, right?! There were a lot of characters who were standing in Battler’s way, but the more they fought, the easier it got. They were really allies to the reader. K: During the story there was also Beatrice’s Definition of a Locked Room. K: It was pretty important not just to stick to interpreting the Red, but also to search for alternate patterns. K: EP1 was pretty tame overall. If you take out the locked rooms you immediatly notice the pattern. K: The hypothesis for the first twilight, the “banquet of the witch”, surfaced pretty much right after the series started. Like “Eva and Hideyoshi are the culprits, Shannon faked her death and is actually alive, if or if not the bullets available and the number of victims match, that the victims might have been transported away from the dining room…”. Back then I pretty much formed my reasoning, that “They were carried away after they had been killed in the dining room”. K: Because carrying those corpses is a painfully heavy task, I quickly dropped it. Carrying 6 corpses through a storm is impossible, right?! K: Is that so?! I have actually had some thoughts about references towards the culprit getting wet, but I never really bothered about it. K: I think that is a really important element, especially during the part when it’s in question whether Eva snuck out of the guesthouse during EP3. Back then, because Eva was lying down with a high fever, it was questioned whether she was slightly wet because she had sweat a lot or if that was a deception. K: You really felt the power of those puzzle elements. It is comparatively easy to solve each crime scene individually, but to connect them into a line of reasoning from twilight 1 to 9 is quite hard. K: In many cases you only learn the motive at the very last possible moment. Many times only when the culprit confesses to it. K: If you went through it all and thought about it, the scope of a deduction of motives does not only encompass the gameboards, but also becomes a deduction of the heart of Yasu in the real world. I think it is possible to solve that part when knowing about the “why”. K: The scene at the beach was especially harsh. And during EP7, during the scene with the letters I also thought, “Damn Battler, you’re bad!”. K: So it’s about whether we want Battler or George to be the bad guy, right?! K: Why do the two parties need to fight? The epilogue where Ikuko and Tôya reunite with Ange. When I saw those scenes it all came rushing back to me. Aah, so that’s what it was about. K: I’m sorry. I don’t really follow other people’s reasoning, therefore I don’t really understand. K: EP3 was written so that it appeared that Eva and Eva-Beatrice were the same existence, but I often had thoughts that maybe “The entirety of the murder is not restricted to Eva”. “From which point on did she murder?”, was an important topic for me from that point on. “Is it really okay to connect them equally?” or “Must I think of the actions on the gameboard and in the meta world as different things?” were things that really pained me. K: At first I thought that EP3 was pretty easy compared to EP1 and 2. It’s easy to get an idea of the plot structure. But when I read through Will’s deduction I thought again and found, that the difficulty is not that much lower. In the end it was maybe the first or second hardest battle among EP1~4. K: That’s true. I despaired about the mystery of the linked locked rooms until the very end. Will said that “The end and the beginning overlap”, but… K: I made a guess that “The guestroom on the first floor is the key”. It’s the pattern that Shannon and Kanon are alive, I think. K: Then it’s natural to enter through the first floor window. K: Among all the locked rooms, I think this one was the one everybody was most interested in. K: Will did not really talk about any of the mysteries in the later half of EP3. Was there any special meaning that he did not talk about anything that happened from George vanishing, to the death of Nanjô? K: No, no. If you prepare the proper pattern for the deduction, it’s quite logic, I just thought that maybe those were hints that would be inserted later on. K: That is something which can be countered with many different hypothesis’. If you think about it, there are several people insisting that “you don’t need to decide on one truth, there can be be several of them”. But when I do that, I think the story starts to crumble. K: So that’s something we needn’t worry about. But, Ryûkishi, which gameboard was the most difficult, what do you think? K: No matter how much you adjust, I think there will always be people who can’t keep up. K: And if it’s buried, nobody will notice it. K: Even now there are countless deductions which have drowned in the ocean of the Kakera, aren’t there?! K: I have heard and researched a little about that person who solved the epitaph, it seems it was someone who did a homestay in Taiwan, right?! K: You said that at that time there were almost no people challenging your locked room murders. K: They wanted more hints. K: It’s a theory we talked about in the last discussion, but do you mean something like “the chain of the chain locked room being unnaturally long”? K: At least it hasn’t been disproven by the red truth *laugh*. K: It’s a blind spot, yes. If the chain was longer, then there would be no problem in constructing that scene. K: But essentialy, it’s not much different from saying “the chain was cut and then later it was welt together again.”. K: If you take out that, that only leaves a simple answer like the locked room being replaced by another room. K: I actually thought about something like this. That maybe the trick is that the magic party made us mistake one room for another. K: I thought that I could solve most of them with variations of the classics. K: Will described the chain locked room in EP1 as having a “chain of illusion”. I really think that in this case it was an illusion locked room and not a perfect locked room, how about that?! K: If we are talking about locked rooms, I have the impression that there are almost no people using the term internal bleeding locked room. No matter now whether it is the truth or not, it’s one of the basic tricks, isn’t it?! K: What kind of deductions were those? Do you have any comments on those? K: At the time of EP2 I was still thinking that the culprit was somebody else each time around. K: Like Shannon dying at the first twilight in EP3, right?! You really had me confused there. K: If some people always survived together in every EP, it became quite easy to grasp I think. K: If I look back now, I wrote it down myself, “the culprit from the second twilight on is somebody else than the culprit of the first twilight”. But I didn’t come around to doubt Shannon, I was deceived there. K: You already said earlier, “I can’t go on playing catchball with the players after 4 years”. K: If you don’t return it properly, the mystery might break down this time. It’s about that, right?! K: Compared to Higurashi, it seems to be written with the spirit of making it unsolvable. K: I think the word Anti-Mystery is something that is often discussed, but it is also something used to describe works that use “a structure in which the solution to the mystery is not part of the plot”. K: It’s because of the people who defined it. My own is limited to connecting it to this one great novel An Offering to Nothingness (Kyomu e no kumotsu) (Kôdansha, Nakai Hideo), though of course there are several different definitions for it. K: A stance that denies the Mystery. K: If you look at each of the EP in continuity, it’s actually following that structure. K: In An Offering to Nothingness the culprit of the serial killings and the tricks are all revealed as well. But in the end it gets this double-layer structure through the lines: “What actually made the incident an incident was…”. That Umineko is similar in that fashion was already discussed in the last book.
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