What the fuck just happened
The feeling I get from this part is... The real Higurashi begins here.
Lots of text and heavy content below.
So after the first part, Onikakushi, was 'about' Rena, and the second, Watanagashi, was 'about' Mion, the third part is 'about' Satoko. The story begins with Keiichi stumbling his way into a bento making contest for his school club, by way of teasing the youngest in the group, Satoko, about her assumed inability to cook. "Ok Smart Guy! Let's see YOU take a crack at it!", accuses the club. Keiichi's parents are out of town for the next two days so they can't cook him dinner with which to use leftovers for bento ingredients, giving him no way of tricking his way into winning the bento contest. It's up to Keiichi to cook for himself, for the first real time.
Deciding to try to make vegetable stirfry, he loads up his family wok with veggies, and then pours in the cooking oil. All the way to the top of the wok. And then turns on the burner.
He almost burns his house down. Luckily, predicting Keiichi's culinary incompetence, Satoko and Rika bust in and extinguish the fire. Satoko scolds Keiichi for being so reckless and stupid, and then banishes him and Rika to the living room while she cooks him dinner.
Keiichi shamefully points out how heavily Satoko is scolding him and how angry she must be at his stupidity, but Rika says something confusing. "Actually, this is the happiest she's been in a while."
Rika tells Keiichi about Satoshi, Satoko's brother who 'ran away from home' last year. Much like Keiichi in this moment, Satoshi relied on his sister for a lot, always getting scolded by her, always being cared for by her... but this was just Satoko's way of showing she cared for her brother.
Conversely, after the deaths of their parents by the curse of Oyashiro-sama, the two of them fell under the care of Teppei Houjou, their uncle, and his wife. The two of them were heavily abusive towards their new children... and Satoshi's presence shielded Satoko from the worst of it. It would so happen that, that year, it was the aunt's turn to die to the curse, and as for the uncle, he fled the town, leaving Satoshi to be the one who disappeared without a trace, as the curse so dictates. After losing both her parents, her abusive aunt and uncle, and then her brother, Satoko became sullen and withdrawn, and went to live with Rika--who, notably, was also without family.
During the dinner, Satoko accidentally lets slip an embarrassing nickname she gave her brother, "Nii-nii." After seeing a new side of Satoko, one where she wasn't mercilessly pranking Keiichi and Keiichi giving it back in turn, Keiichi realizes that, in that moment, he had inadvertently become Satoko's new Nii-nii, and Satoko seemed to see him that way too. This moment would be the spark that set the rest of the events of the story in motion.
The following night, Satoko comes over Keiichi's house again, after the two of them go shopping. On the way home, Keiichi said he really wanted to have that vegetable stirfry he attempted to make, and so Satoko taught him the ways of bargain-hunting at the discount store. After they arrive home and have another meal much like the night before, however their joyous meal is cut short by a phone call. Keiichi's parents were coming home the following day, meaning the fun family meals with Satoko and Rika were at their end, and the evenings would resume as normal.
...or so they thought. Suddenly, Satoko's uncle reappears. Still legally her guardian, Satoko goes back to live with him, and it becomes immediately apparent that he's resumed his abuse. I was actually taken aback by the word 'abuse' just being... said, directly. I was expecting it to be called something else, describing it as obvious abuse but stopping just short of actually calling it by the term. But Higurashi wasn't shy at all about calling it what it was.
The normally silly and energetic Satoko became sullen and jumpy. She couldn't attend club anymore because she had to return home to tend to her uncle's every whim. Keiichi suggests that they call the child welfare agency to step in, but Mion and Rena recall that they'd done so before, last year before the aunt and uncle had gone missing.
What they said was... not what I was expecting, but in a heart-breakingly true way. The agency had done nothing, as is often the case. Without solid, irrefutable evidence of abuse, the agency could not legally step in and rescue Satoko. They monitored the aunt and uncle for a while, and then left, concluding no abuse had happened... and then, the abuse got worse. So much worse that some of the descriptions of it were hard to read for me.
Keiichi, desperate to help his friend, flips out. He demands that Mion take Satoko to live with her, yelling at her that she has all of this land and money and influence, and when Mion responds that it's not that easy, Keiichi snaps and calls her selfish and cruel. In response, Rena chimes in with searing rage at Keiichi, noting that he has a big house too.

Out of concern for Satoko's safety, and hoping on hope to find a way to help Satoko in some way, Keiichi rides his bike to the Houjou household and finds that, oddly, Satoko's not actually there. Suddenly, the car of the Hinamizawa baseball coach pulls up, with Satoko in tow. The coach had seen Satoko walking all by herself, carrying groceries home, and offered her a ride. However, Keiichi catches a glance at what's in the bags. Sake, cigarettes, cheap table snacks. Her uncle had sent her in the summer heat to get booze and smokes. No sooner than Keiichi figures this out does Satoko's uncle stick his head out the window, admonishing her for leaving the gas for their sake heater running while she left. As Satoko struggles to carry the bags inside, the summer sun shines on Satoko, illuminating that, under her clothes... she's covered in bruises.
Keiichi wants to storm into the house to give Satoko's uncle a piece of his mind, but the coach, familiar with the situation, restrains him and covers his mouth. He knows that Keiichi stepping in would just make things worse again, and Keiichi being forced to stand there as he watches Satoko reminds him of the fact too. The coach begs Keiichi not to cry, so as not to rouse the uncle's attention.

Out of options, Mion and Keiichi implore their teacher to call the child welfare agency again, however nothing seems to come of it and it clearly causes more problems for Satoko at home. Additionally, the Watanagashi is coming up soon. Clued into the fact that the Sonozaki family seems to be involved with the death and disappearance following each year's festival, Keiichi goes to Mion's house and asks, if at all possible, for the murder victim this year to be Teppei Houjou. As soon as the request leaves his lips does he understand what he'd just accused his friend of being involved with, and goes home.
Satoko misses school for a while... but suddenly returns one day, smiling and happy as usual. The five club members put their desks together and share their bentos as usual, and it seems like everything's slowly returning to normal... but when Keiichi goes to pet Satoko's head, he's suddenly thrown backwards. In confusion, he goes to do it again... and realizing too late that he had touched a wound on the back of her head, Satoko breaks down. In what was probably the hardest scene to experience, Satoko seems to be suffering a traumatic panic attack, out of fear that she's about to be hit by her uncle. She screams, and cries, and tears apart the entire classroom, begging for her brother to return. Mion and Keiichi can only watch in horror as their dear friend cries, afraid for her safety. Satoko can only be calmed down by Rena, carefully kneeling down and hugging her and reminding her where she is.
It's then that Keiichi has an epiphany. The child welfare agency is useless. It was impossible to stash Satoko at his house or Mion's or anyone else's. Mion has made no guarantee that Teppei would die on the Watanagashi, which at this point was just days away.
So he would just kill Teppei himself. Everything that follows from this point was at points heartbreaking, bizarre, and uncomfortable. The fervor at which Keiichi expresses his desire to kill a man to "save" Satoko, who at this point had become such an abstracted, objectified version of her, was gripping and nauseating. The day of the Watanagashi arrived, and Keiichi lay in wait for his target from sunrise til sundown, luring him out with a faked phone call. And then when it came time to carry out the murder, Keiichi took such an animalistic glee in doing it. On the way home, he drives his bike into incoming traffic, dodging at the last possible second and spraining his ankle... and out of the car comes Takano, who takes him home. Whether it was a joke about Keiichi carrying a shovel and being covered in mud or if she truly knew, Takano asks if Keiichi had buried the body deeply enough. Keiichi, thinking this put his alibi into question, thinks that instead of getting in the car, he should have killed Takano instead. After dropping him off at his house, he says he wished Takano would die in a fire.
After this, everything really went off the deep end. Takano's burned body is discovered, along with Tomitake who had died by clawing out his own throat again. After being told that Keiichi had spent the day at the festival yesterday rather than killing someone, Keiichi questions Satoko about if her uncle came home last night, which he did. Keiichi goes to dig up the body of the man he'd murdered, only to find Ooishi and his men were there, and that there was no evidence of the soil having been turned at all. He wishes death on Ooishi, and then later the coach, who both turn up dead the following day.
Keiichi can only surmise that, somehow, he had the ability to curse people to their death, and that he had slipped into a version of Hinamizawa that was different from the one that actually existed. He can only confirm this for himself, he decides, if he finds Satoko's uncle alive and well at the Houjou household... and if he had truly come back from the dead, or was never dead to begin with, he'd mechanically kill him as many times as it took. Fetching a hatchet and wrapping it with newspaper to disguise it, he sets off to the Houjous.
Instead, what he finds is a home devoid of people, evidence of a ruined meal from the night before, and that the hot water heater was apparently on. He breaks into the bathroom, to find Satoko sitting in the bath, her body red and puckered from heat, as she slowly, raggedly counted to 10,000. For the crime of making a bad meal for dinner, her uncle had punished her by telling her to take a near boilingly-hot bath overnight, and now Satoko was suffering from heat stroke.
After Satoko regains her ability to think clearly and walk, Keiichi confesses that he'd murdered her uncle in the "other" Hinamizawa, which frightens her into fleeing to Rika for help. However, they find Rika's corpse, cut open from the stomach, innards strewn everywhere, and Satoko, seeing that Keiichi's hatchet had lost its newspaper wrapping, accuses him of having done it.
Keiichi runs after her, trying to explain that he didn't do it, only for a tense confrontation with Satoko on the bridge to ensue, ending with him slipping off the bridge. In his dying moments, he prays for Satoko's happiness... and for whatever twisted version of Hinamizawa he had ended up in to meet its end.
...you'd think, after ALL of that, that the credits would roll. But, instead, it continues. Keiichi awakens on the riverbank, brutally injured but alive. He manages to stagger his way to town, noting the smell of burnt eggs all around him and the streets littered with cicada corpses. He then stumbles upon the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, dressed head to toe in hazmat suits and carrying body bags. They fix Keiichi with a gas-mask, and upon asking what was going on, they turn on a radio.

Overnight, deadly gas had erupted from the Onigafuchi swamp, killing everyone but him. The incident made the national news, sparking many in the population to become obsessed by it... sparking the creation of a term called "Hinamizawa Syndrome".

...and now I don't know what to expect. I was thinking Keiichi would kill Satoko's uncle, suffer some kind of fate leading to his death, and maybe things would go on as 'normal', just without him. As for the next part, since the first three parts of Higurashi were each dedicated to a character, maybe part 4 would be Rika's turn. But now the term "Hinamizawa Syndrome" has dropped, and I'm at a loss. I'm both excited and confused.
But regardless... I feel like I've learned more about the kind of person Ryukishi07 is. The depiction of familial abuse in this part was so well considered... it was brutally honest about what abuse was like, not just on a personal level but on a societal level, never once veered into being gratuitous, and made it extremely clear that there is never, ever an excuse to treat anyone the way Satoko's uncle was treating her. It didn't make it any easier to read, and there were times where I even struggled to keep reading, but it was worth doing, at least to me, as someone who, to put it bluntly, has been in shoes not much unlike Satoko's before.

