Recommending Higurashi When They Cry

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x1hIOj5T5g

When people recommend the Sound Novel Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, or Higurashi When They Cry, they tend to give a general outline of the story alongside its thematic crux. However, due to Higurashi’s nature as a mystery, this attempt is often fumbled and, arguably, a fundamentally wrong approach to the matter—Higurashi is a story best experienced as blind as possible. Rather, I believe what draws people to Higurashi is not the immediate plot beats, but the atmosphere. Judging its aesthetic is what determines whether Higurashi is right for you.

In a valley surrounded by mountains lies Hinamizawa. Populated by a tight-knit community of 1200 people, its isolated, otherworldly proportions are accentuated by the story taking place in the bygone times of 1983—a world before it became digitally connected. In other words, once you lose yourself within this remote countryside, it’s hard to find an exit. …The incessant crying of early summer’s Higurashi drowns you in a whirlpool of noise, a throbbing in your ears increasing in volume until it threatens to burst your head apart.

One of Higurashi’s most impressive feats is managing to bring Hinamizawa alive, almost literally. Hinamizawa feels like an actual person, a character within the story, with her own impenetrable goals and unthinkable motivations. This feeling is underlined by the prose, which utilises numerous analogies rooted in various aspects of Hinamizawa’s countryside flora and fauna, untouched by the civilisation of the booming cityscapes—the girl’s cheerful greeting is FRESH AS THE MORNING AIR ITSELF. Characters’ actions do not stand by themselves: A person screams, and terrified birds take flight from the nearest tree—person or not, Hinamizawa is an active participant in the story. It’s only natural, as the narrative takes turns into the mystic, that Hinamizawa morphs alongside: A dead Higurashi on the road, foretelling the unimaginable fate at the end of your journey. What caused this tragedy? How could it have been prevented? Only the Higurashi know.

This tailored writing style extends to the protagonist himself, a 14-year-old boy named Keiichi who moved into the village two months prior. The story does an excellent job at bringing you into his head, in large part thanks to the prose. Ryukishi07 intentionally comprises his own vocabulary and eloquence, not out of incompetence, but because it befits this ruffian city boy who struggles to express his own emotions, never having learned how to do so. To solve the mystery, the reader is forced to work together with Keiichi’s narrowminded and immature perspective. It really makes you FEEL like you’re Keiichi, if you will.

In this fashion of deciphering the mystery, Higurashi, too, ludonarratively benefits from being a Visual Novel: At the end of each chapter, short “tips” are unlocked which expand on various details of the story, ranging from the reason everyone wears different school uniforms to police reports. The crucial point is that the game doesn’t require you to read through them in order to progress with the story. As Avinovel Workshop successfully argued, by being separated into a folder different from the main narrative, it implicitly signals their qualification of “case files to be investigated”—they spurn your brain into a detective mindset which may have wavered from the hours of moé Slice of Life scenes. By then being technically unnecessary in order to complete the game, yet you, the reader, nevertheless going out of your way to read them, you become an active participant in the investigation. Your own actions reveal more clues to help solve the mystery.

Unfortunately, I’d be remiss not to discuss the aforementioned moé Slice of Life scenes—“unfortunately,” not because I dread their existence, but because of how overtalked they are. Still, I must point out the fact that this is a story, above all, about the children living within Hinamizawa. At the end of Higurashi, you’ve become intimately familiar with them to the point you can tell what each character is thinking within each and every scene, even if the story may never directly tell those thoughts to you. To be interested in the world of Hinamizawa is to be interested in its children. Hinamizawa is a wonderful place because of the people who inhabit her.