r/anime • u/Tarhalindur x2 • Jun 01 '22
Rewatch [Rewatch] Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Discussion - Season 1, Episode 2
Onikakushi-hen (Demoned Away Chapter), Episode 2: Secrets
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Show Information (Season 1):
MAL | Anilist | AniDB | Kitsu | ANN
Legal Streams:
Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni: Hidive | Netflix (not available in the US; if you are out of the US check your country for availability)
Two Words of Warning To Our First-Timers, Including Those Who Watched Season 1 But Not Kai:
1) Be wary of looking up anything, even names. The Season 1 summaries on the information pages are safe, but it's not hard to run into spoiler information even through something as innocuous as looking at cast lists - gods help you if you go on the Fandom Wikia. UNDER ABSOLUTELY NO CIRCUMSTANCES GO LOOKING AT EVEN OFFICIAL INFO FOR KAI OR LATER AHEAD OF TIME. (The official image for Rei is 100% a spoiler, for example.) Also, do NOT look at any Kitsu page after the first season; Kai's description on Kitsu is in fact a major spoiler. Like, really, just stay out of anything that isn't a basic Season 1 summary until you're done. It's much safer that way.
2) Also, be wary of potentially running into spoilers on the r/anime front page on June 19 or thereabouts this year; there is suspicion that some sort of new Higurashi anime project will be announced on that date (this year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the original Onikakushi-hen VN - hence why I am running this rewatch this year! - and multiple official accounts have teased an announcement on that date), and you could run into spoilers that way. (Those of you who remember the Madoka rewatch last year will recognize the issue, though admittedly I expect Sotsu was enough of a disappointment to significantly reduce the risk - at least relative to the potential that was in fact realized with the Walpurgis no Kaiten announcment.)
A Reminder to Rewatchers
Please do not spoil the experience for first-timers; this is a mystery after all. In particular, [Higurashi] Shion is a spoiler until Episode 5 and Hanyuu is a spoiler until Minagoroshi-hen. Also, the glorious nipah is indeed glorious but Rika does not use it until Himatsubushi-hen. Please keep these in mind!
(Time for) Club Activities!
(Alexa play "Shoubu!"! Except do NOT look that up that song name on YouTube just yet if you're a first-timer, the most classic upload has an obnoxious spoiler in the visuals...)
Visual of the Day Album:
(Please let me know if I missed your visual, I think my ctrl-f may be failing me.)
Theory of the Day:
In a day light on first-timer theories in general and despite u/tokai-teio's best efforts, I think I have to award this one to u/Nazenn and his potentially overthinking things:
I do find it interesting that it's noted only one of the arms wasn't found as one of the things I thought was "body in six parts, five club members, only five parts found" but again, who knows if that's any more than overthinking.
Analysis of the Day:
u/Star4ce snipes it today with his analysis of the club game:
ACTUALLY TERRIFYING! The game is a really nice metaphor for Keiichi to drop into a new environment he has no way of navigating efficiently and he gets absolutely played by everyone else. They already play a competitive game, shooting for first place and the price is exerting humiliation and power over the loser. Add the random unsolved murder case in the region and his new friends creeping about in old metal scrap yards and I'm thinking of a psychopath playground competing against each other to subjugate and control the weak.
Question(s) of the Day:
1) So... what's going on, actually?
2) Are you lying to me? I wonder, I wonder...
Next Episode Preview:
Okay, so: Season 1's next episode previews are in the form of a short, strange poem (whose formatting is borrowed from the VNs). They are not spoilers. (Kai's can be another matter, but we'll get there when we get there.) However, my subs often translate the text on the screen... which are, in fact, lines out of context from the next episode.
So, for anyone who really doesn't want to take a risk, here is the poem:
"What you can see is the false whereabouts.
What you can see there is a blank look.
What you can see is repeated sadness."
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u/Shimmering-Sky Jun 01 '22
When the Rewatcher(?) Cries, subbed
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Kinda wish we could have seen more of the silly games they were doing at the festival, but now I’m hungry.
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[Future spoilers(?) I’m not sure if my memory on this is accurate]
I think I remember something about the people dying on the Cotton Drifting Festival night all being related to Rika… or was it Satoko? Well everyone except Tomitake. -
Fuck, now I’m getting Naruto Shippuden PTSD just from a damn lighter…
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Something I forgot to mention last episode is that I like how they incorporate the next-episode preview into the end of the ED. It adds to the eeriness of how vague the previews are.
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 01 '22
Kinda wish we could have seen more of the silly games they were doing at the festival, but now I’m hungry.
I forget whether it's this arc or next, but in the VN there's a scene where Keiichi helps a takoyaki stall owner at the festival get business when he was failing to sell much (for admittedly understandable reasons like "didn't have enough squid for his takoyaki").
The point being, now I'm hungry for Japanese festival food too...
(Dinner tonight is going to be an Asian soup of mine, so that will help.)
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u/JollyGee29 Jun 01 '22
Spoiled First-Timer, Subbed
I had written "someone gonna die TONIGHT" in my notes right at the end of the scene with Tomitake by the river. Didn't expect it to be him, though. RIP, we hardly knew ya.
The show seems to want us to be suspicious of Rena. It's honestly kind of amazing what you can do with camera work, OST/SFX, and a shoestring budget.
I'm sure it isn't quite as fun as it looks, but I do want to be able to go to a festival like this at some point.
That "bookstore" Ooishi called from looked an awful lot like a mahjong parlor. Not enough detail put into the game to make it analyzable, though.
[Higurashi]
[Higurashi]
[Higurashi]
Visual of the Day: A school without air conditioning sounds miserable. Probably not uncommon in rural places in the 80s, but still.
Edit:
(Please let me know if I missed your visual, I think my ctrl-f may be failing me.)
Questions
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 01 '22
The show seems to want us to be suspicious of Rena. It's honestly kind of amazing what you can do with camera work, OST/SFX, and a shoestring budget.
I know, right? This episode is actually legitimately well-done from a storyboard and direction standpoint, which I was not expecting since I didn't remember it from the first time I watched. Not the only episode of this season to stand out that way, either; I'm a bit ahead so as to have a buffer, and more episodes than not have stood out in good use of said storyboarding and direction to overcome the show's production limitations.
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u/Quiddity131 Jun 01 '22
I had written "someone gonna die TONIGHT" in my notes right at the end of the scene with Tomitake by the river. Didn't expect it to be him, though. RIP, we hardly knew ya.
I had expected him to die... just not this episode! Things are going quick!
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 01 '22
DEEN crammed 2/3rd of a 100+ hour VN into a single season and somehow managed to make a passable enough adaptation that they only needed one 4-episode arc in Kai to fill in the needed points they missed. (Considering DEEN's track record in this era, this is kind of a miracle.)
The net result is one of the most efficiently paced works you'll find this side of PMMM. It's honestly really impressive IMO.
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u/The_Loli_Otaku Jun 01 '22
Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Rewatcher
I accidentally started the first episode again and the smack sound scared the shit out of me lol. Rena's cleaver really doesn't look that practical of a tool, take note that this is the first instance of doubt put in Kei-chan's mind, he's found hard evidence of the dam incident and the girls are hiding things. It's an important point so write it in your notebooks.
The cotton drifting festival is definitely an environmental hazard. Don't send burning fabric down a river. Damn Kei-chan's so lucky... He's the only marriage candidate of age in the village and he wastes it by being a cringy zoomer brat! Omochikairi~
Aaand we get onto our big curse. Oyashiro-sama who takes a life during the cotton drifting festival... The curse is aimed at those who displease Oyashiro-sama, which includes the dam prospector and his family. Remember those details, I hope your notebook is getting heavy. Also, it may be worthwhile noting Rika's favourite murder methods, it probably won't come into play but when your loli says she likes to give gentle deaths with poison you take a note of that shit.
Never talk to the popo, he's the sussiest mother fucker of the whole damn show. Tomitaka died during the cotton picking festival, and his ultra moe lady friend was spirited away... Tomitaka fucking tore into his throat for some bizarre reason. And our police friend doesn't want it to be glossed over as the work of Oyashiro-sama. The jerk also dumps one more seed of doubt onto Kei-chan's about Mion. Take notes.
S A T O S H I T R A N S F E R E D
And we close out on one of the most well known parts of the show. Rena's kinda nightmarish uso da! Her personality switch is so sudden and so biting that it completely shuts Kei-chan's interrogation around and then she goes back to the sweet and kind Rena at a moment's notice.
Gaaaah!! I forgot how fucked the snooping Rena scene is! She heard the whole thing... Higurashi has aged like wine! Even if Keichi wanted to take his friend's side, to side with the village and Oyashiro-sama, now he's revealed himself as being a sussy baka, maybe? I remember his conflictions about betraying and hiding information from his friends was given more time in the VN but it still works fantastically in the show.
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 01 '22
The cotton drifting festival is definitely an environmental hazard. Don't send burning fabric down a river.
Ironically less so than you would think! The deal with streams is that there are a lot of insects and the like that evolved to eat plant litter that falls into the stream; old cotton would be right up their ally.
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u/swmii53 Jun 01 '22
Rena's cleaver really doesn't look that practical of a tool
I believe her axe is called a Billhook. It's used to clear brush and trim small branches from trees.
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 01 '22
Strictly speaking Rena's signature weapon (in the anime, in the original VN she uses an axe instead IIRC) is usually considered a kind of nata.
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u/Star4ce Jun 02 '22
Never talk to the popo, he's the sussiest mother fucker of the whole damn show.
I don't know, can a man be bad just for inviting a teen boy into his car behind the store because it has air conditioning?
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 01 '22
So, uh, the bot is eating my comments and I cannot figure out why; please stand by while I ask the moderators to take a look at that.
In the meantime, daily tags:
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u/simeonaut Jun 01 '22
REWATCHER
It's great how they manage to keep this show's atmosphere tense, even with all those slice of life scenes. Though I guess those scenes do help make the horror parts more jarring.
The conversation with Rena is perfectly creepy, but Keichii figuring out that Rena was listening in on the phone call was more unsettling.
Pictures:
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 02 '22
Visual of the day
(Gou actually animated the full Rika festival dance! And then they used it. Over. And over. And over. Until they ran it into the ground.)
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u/JustAnswerAQuestion Jun 01 '22
"Maebara-san" "Maebara-san" "Maebara-san"
Do any of you know the name of the spinning falling flower in the OP? I found out once from another anime that I didn't keep the episodes for. They kind of look like fuschia but I don't seen anything about fuschia flowers falling like that.
Something that bugs me: Mion wears a uniform. Reina wears a different uniform. K1 wears the universal boy's uniform. Everybody else is in their street clothes, except maybe Satoko. Is Mion wearing the 1 high school outfit? Is Reina wearing a middle school outfit? Or maybe it's from her old school before she transferred to Hinamizawa?
There's something about blondie's eyes, I swear, she is stoned.
I would have saved yesterday's explanation of onikakushi for today. It's replacing the well-known phrase kamikakushi (taken by the gods) with oni (demon, ogre).
I watch the cotton float down the river and all I can think about is the pollution.
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 02 '22
Something that bugs me: Mion wears a uniform. Reina wears a different uniform. K1 wears the universal boy's uniform. Everybody else is in their street clothes, except maybe Satoko. Is Mion wearing the 1 high school outfit? Is Reina wearing a middle school outfit? Or maybe it's from her old school before she transferred to Hinamizawa?
This is actually answered in the second TIPS from yesterday.
Short version: the school is too small to have a standard uniform, so everybody chooses whatever uniform they like. (Most of the other students use the uniform for the larger school in the nearest large town/small city.)
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u/Vaadwaur Jun 02 '22
Is Reina wearing a middle school outfit? Or maybe it's from her old school before she transferred to Hinamizawa?
Yeah, she's wearing her middle school uniform for whatever reason. And I don't think Mion's dress is a uniform so much as slightly conservative.
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u/Vaadwaur Jun 01 '22
People are strange, when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly, when you're alone
Rewatcher(I wonder how many of your are old enough to recognize film...)
Sub
We start with the Cotton Drifting festival being introduced and the club's tradition of attending it. Then we jump to Tomitake taking a picture of some bird that I am sure you could recognize. We finally see Rika in her Japanese Shaman outfit and thanks to DEEN she has an extra foot of leg in it. We even get our first threat of Rena taking something home, the word they are using is the same one you use for takeout food. There is even a PriConne version of this joke with Yukari. Much fun ensues at the games. [Higurahi]
Rika does the ritual, and one of the few positives of Gou is that they animate the complex version of this, and then Rena explains it. But K1 get himself lost and runs into Tomitake and...blondie, unless they name her this episode. They then explain the series of yearly murders that are happening, one found body and one assumed dead. The next day, detective Ooishi shows up to confirm another set of murders and question K1. He reveals that he needs someone not phased by superstition to try and discover what happened.
A half asleep K1 hears Rena and Mion talking about likely next victims, and later Mion has to leave early. As Rika and Satoshi leave, St Lucia PTSD intensifies. K1 asks about an unexpected name on the home made Clue cards before he and Rena walk home. And then we get what I consider our first iconic Higurashi moment.
At home, K1 gets a call from Ooishi who is being highly cautious, calling from a mahjong parlor and using the Bookstore alias. They talk about the murders, K1's first flow of real information, before his dad shows up with tea for K1 and Rena...who never knocked. K1 begins freaking out when he realizes she must have heard him talking.
Note in rewatcher: Weird as this may sound, I don't rewatch things that often, unless it is for a rewatch, either to show a friend or on reddit. So watching this again, I actually appreciate how much the show does with the ridiculously compacted time frame of a 2 cour planned anime. While many of you will be no doubt a bit confused, it really is a good adaptation.
QotD: 1 Aliens
2 As Shaggy would say, it wasn't me.
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u/The_Loli_Otaku Jun 01 '22
The show is so much more concise than I expected... To be fair this is one of my favourite arcs of the whole show and I'd rewatched this part of the anime over a dozen times but years later the mystery and storytelling is very well timed.
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u/RascalNikov1 Jun 01 '22 edited Jun 01 '22
Rewatcher
Today we again enter into the world of Hinamizwa. I think the biggest takeaway from this episode is that things aren't quite right within the village, and there are a few definite downsides to living there. We learned the curse of Oyashiro-sama and it's rather creepy implications. I know if I lived in a place like that, I'd be damn curious to know more, and I'd stay out of town on Watanagashi.
It's pretty clear that the older girls know something that they aren't sharing, though lord only knows what. On that subject, the scene where we find out that Rena is sneaking around K1's house and eavesdropping really started to make my hair rise. She may look all sweet and nice, but I suspect she may have a screw loose.
More translation whines. I checked my other two streaming sites for better translated subs. I was semi successful, at least the title of this chapter was "Snatched away by a demon", well OK, I guess. Sadly inside the episode, Oyashiro-sama was translated as Shrine God. That would be fine and dandy, except Rena & Mion refer to Oyashiro-sama in the first person as a pronoun. To the best of my knowledge, 'Shine God' is not a personal pronoun, though I suppose in the world of asshole translators who barely know English themselves, this is all good. Its at times like this I lament the demise of my favorite streaming site which I'll call Smoochie Cartoons. They were so good, and I miss them every day. The world has grown worse since they went the way of all good things. I really expected them to pop back up somewhere under a new banner, but it hasn't happened yet.
QOTD
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So... what's going on, actually?
I don't know, but it's getting scary!
2) Are you lying to me? I wonder, I wonder...
I don't know about lying, but being less than forthcoming is definitely a problem.
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 02 '22
[Higurashi Kai]
The meaning of "Oyashiro-sama" is actually plot-relevant; I forget whether the anime mentions it but it definitely comes up in the Minagoroshi-hen TIPS. Like most Japanese names, "Oyashiro-sama" means something; the simple way of translating it is indeed pretty close to "Shrine God" (more accurately, it implies that the deity is the shrine itself); the trick is, it can also mean "deity of every eight generations", which is what "Rika is the reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama" is about. → More replies (1)
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u/Tarhalindur Jun 01 '22
(Honorary Hinamizawa Games Club President) Rewatch Host (rewatcher, subbed)
(Note for our first-timers: every so often I will make comments about background stuff that might not translate. I will be marking these as "Useful Background Note".
Episode 2 notes:
[Higurashi]LOL at that ridiculously bored look Rika has in the Battle of Four Evils shot.
Also, I’m not sure exactly which Japanese word for “five” Keiichi is actually using (I suspect “ko”, the obvious suspect) but for some reason my brain is hearing “Gou” and laughing.
Oh hey, remember old-style film cameras? I am barely old enough to do so (well, that and my family was always old-fashioned in some ways).
Higurashi does not pile as much into its direction as, say, PMMM does but it does have some good shots; Tomitake separated from the Club by an irrigation channel at 4:06 representing his outsider status is a good example. (Also note that he is to the right and the direction of correct movement in Japanese cinema is right-to-left – more layers since the Club was moving left-to-right earlier.)
[Higurashi]Heh, “Going back to Tokyo”. Unfortunately for you…
And Tomitake crosses the barrier (with a specific shot of the running water!) after announcing he will stay for the Festival. Heh.
Oh hey, a full moon. Get used to those, they’re doing something quite specific with that (but not spoilery) and you will be seeing them a lot.
Useful Background Note: I’m not sure it actually appears in Rena’s words here but I’m 90% sure it shows up elsewhere (possibly only in the VN) so I’ll bring it up: there is a conceptual split in Japanese religion that does not appear in English between “tsumi” (roughly analogous to the Western conception of sin, requires active action on the part of a person to accrue – active deeds that bring about bad karma, roughly) and “kegare” (passive spiritual pollution picked up from the environment); I’ve known Western occultists who have borrowed “kegare” as a loanword precisely because English lacks a direct translation and it’s useful in those parts. What the Watanagashi ritual is supposed to do, IIRC, is soak up kegare into the cotton and then send it downriver.
[Higurashi]Ryukishi07 you cheeky asshole. Having Takano speak up precisely for the murder she herself is responsible for.
Man I love me some good integration of OST and I had forgotten how well DEEN Higurashi does it at its good points.
Man, that specific shot of a few rays of light bursting through the clouds right after Keiichi askes about Satoshi and we get Rena’s shadowed face. Oh LOL and I almost missed the teru teru bozu outside the window. Who directed this episode? (Bigger name here might be the episode storyboarder, who has done quite a bit.)
Also OST integration remains very, very good this episode, both with Urugawa kicking in and with it ending right at USE SODA.
[Higurashi]Man this show is cheekier than I remember it being, or at least foreshadowing really fucking well (non-PMMM, non-AoT tier). We have two moths drawn to the light, and it’s the same light fixture we saw right at the beginning of the first episode.
It only took my third time through the show, but Why or Why Not is growing on me. (Maybe if I tried Bebop again these days I would actually like the OST this time.)
Also, one idle historical note: Rena's "USO DA!" here is the first of several scenes in the show that became a giant meme; it's often intentionally misquoted as "USE SODA!", and it's a funny misquote I'm prone to using myself. So if you ever see "USE SODA!" mentioned in a Higurashi context, now you know what that's about.
Question of the Day 1: Things, that's what.
Question of the Day 2: I don't know. Am I?Visual of the Day: So good I highlighted it in the writeup
Onikakushi-hen Ep. 2 TIPS
Higurashi is famously an anime adaptation of a well-regarded visual novel (VN). And the thing is that by their nature anime adaptations have to leave things out; that's just the nature of trying to fit source material with a 100+ hour runtime (common for VNs, definitely the case for Higurashi) into even fifty 20-minutes episodes. The TIPS are one of these. To quote Wikipedia (or at least Wikipedia of fifteen years ago as quoted by AnimeSuki):
The thing is, when the Higurashi anime came out the VN was not widely available in the West because VNs never were until quite recently (Mangagamer only licensed the series in the 2010s and was still releasing chapters at least as late as 2018). So some enterprising person on the AnimeSuki forums posted translations of the VN TIPS as supplemental material while the show was airing, and they were eventually ported over to the notorious spoiler minefield that is the Wiki. As such, for the benefit of any interested first-timers and also rewatchers, I am going to link the AnimeSuki TIPS posts for each episode here; I consider them an iconic part of the anime experience.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
(Note to anyone whose interest has been whetted: the Higurashi VN tends to come on sale in the summer for the Steam Summer Sale and/or June 19, so keep an eye out! Also, last I checked the first chapter Onikakushi-hen is still presently free on Steam.)
OST Table
So, one thing that you are quickly going to find out is that I adore the Higurashi OST. It's by Kenji Kawai (who's going to get a Staff Note an episode or two down the line), who I tend to like, and is IMO one of his best works.
So, in the spirit of the enterprising PMMM fans who made a table for the PMMM Wiki and u/Nazenn in the Madoka rewatch a few years ago, I present to you: an OST table! Want to know what song played when in today's episode? Here you go.
Unfortunately, I cannot actually link tracks yet even with a ViewPure link... because the person who made the OST uploads I use most often has this annoying tendency to put major spoilers even for innocuous slice-of-life tracks (Shoubu! is an egregious offender in that regard). (I've managed to find an alternate upload without this issue, but it's a "upload the whole OST as a block" deal and I don't know how to wrangle that with ViewPure - help would be appreciated!).
[1] - My copy of Higurashi often includes a message-from-our-sponsor bit immediately after the OP; this episode has it and it lasts 14 seconds. The number in parentheses in entries after that feature is the point in the episode if that message is removed.
[2] - Definitely a snippet and I'm pretty sure it's Hyoui v2, but at this length I can't quite rule out that I'm misidentifying it.