For an episode that the characters referred to as a "side story" it felt pretty important. Maybe it's one of Ryukishi07's famous ruses...
Rather than follow the perspective of Keiichi Maebara in 1983's Hinamizawa, this part follows detective Mamoru Akasaka, in the year 1978. The Minister of Construction, who has final say over the dam project that would flood Hinamizawa, receives a troubling phone call one night... his grandson has been kidnapped. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police aren't sure who's done it, so they spread their forces a bit thin and scatter detectives around to search for clues. For Akasaka's part, he's sent to investigate the Onigafuchi Defense Alliance. He's informed that chances are slim it's even them, but they're just covering all their bases... which is a relief for Akasaka, because his wife is in the hospital, due to give birth any day now. He wouldn't begrudge an easy job, yet at the same time he was committed to finding the truth, truly believing in the concepts of democracy and political procedure, which, if they were the kidnappers, the Onigafuchi Defense Alliance would be spitting in the face of. After all, it's already become widely known that Hinamizawa opposes the dam, and are serious enough about it that they'd resort to politically motivated violence. Why, if the kidnappers get their way and word gets out that their politicians are so sloppy, the citizens of Japan may lose faith in them and even welcome... communism.
Akasaka's naive faith in the democratic process is written expertly, and this constantly butts up against the main thrust of the conflict between the citizens of Hinamizawa and the government who wants to evacuate their village to build a dam that would flood the valley it resides in.
Encountering Oiishi once he arrives in Okinomiya, Akasaka is given the cliffnotes of the situation in Hinamizawa from someone with gumshoes on the ground. Ooishi also informs him of the situation with the Three Families of Hinamizawa, nothing that most of the power resides in the Sonozakis, while the Kimiyoshi family is sort of a sitting figurehead, and the Furude family holds much religious significance. He's given a bit of a warning as well--the citizens of Hinamizawa are an extensively united front against the dam, and were anyone to be visibly in favor of it, they would all band together to take care of them... coordinate alibis and testimonies, spread information through town, the works. Akasaka is thus instructed to stay disguised as much as he can while out on his own. When Akasaka asks Ooishi directly if he thinks the Onigafuchi Defense Alliance could be capable of such an act as kidnapping a child, Ooishi doesn't deny it. Akasaka is thus fairly quick to demonize the citizens of Hinamizawa and compare his being there to having stepped into a "warzone in the middle east". Oh boy.
With that, Akasaka's investigation begins in earnest. Posing as a tourist interested in Hinamizawa's natural beauty, one of the first Hinamizawa citizens that Akasaka encounters is none other than Rika, stumbling upon her sleeping at a bus stop. She wakes up and promptly disarms Akasaka with her childlike innocence, because after all, he's due to be a father soon, likely to a daughter no less. Letting Rika walk all over him, he realizes he'd be likely to spoil his own daughter once she was born. In comes the tour guide, who catches notice of Rika and promptly says words of prayer. Akasaka travels around with the tour guide, Rika in tow, taking pictures and admiring the beautiful scenery of Hinamizawa. For his part, he actually is enamored with the village, and even openly remarks to the tour guide and Rika that he wishes to take his wife here after she gives birth--which he immediately chides himself for internally, since that kind of gives away that he's not really here because he wants to be. Being around the humble, unpretentious tour guide and the bubbly, disarming Rika put his guard down a bit more than he expected.
As the day begins to draw to a close, the tour guide and Rika suggest one final stop, the place with the supposedly best view in Hinamizawa--the Furude Shrine, and Rika's home. Once they arrive, Akasaka takes note of all of the anti-dam propaganda posters pasted about, and although the tour guide remarks how tight-knit the united front is against the construction of the dam is, the conversation turns to how aggressive and underhanded some of the tactics they've employed have been, skirting the law and due process. And we can't have that, can we? No, says Akasaka. If you want change, vote for a politician aligned with your values, or just become a politician yourself! It's as simple as that!
...and the chips in his line of thinking are immediately turned into cracks by the childish Rika asking him a simple question with a sad expression. "How do you think we should keep our village from being flooded by the dam?" Realizing the discussion of law, politics, and due process are out of the depths of a girl whose age is in the single digits, Akasaka stumbles over his words.
Although he's not totally ready to acquiesce his viewpoint is narrow minded, he does give some credit to the Onigafuchi Defense Alliance. If not for their actions, Hinamizawa might already have been submerged... and he certainly wouldn't like it if someone from the government demanded he pack up and leave his home without giving him a say in the matter. And now, having put faces and numbers to the cause, he realizes how terrible the prospect would be at scale.
Rika and Akasaka climb to the highest vantage point in the village, a balcony on the shrine grounds that overlooks the entire village. Rika claims it's her favorite spot... and it's here that Rika poses a question to Akasaka. "Do you think the village will be submerged?"
Akasaka's opinion budges a bit more. "It's not that I want it to be..." The dam would be a net boon to Japan, but was it worth uprooting an entire village, erasing its heritage and displacing its people? And was it worth taking this girl's favorite view from her?
But Rika responds oddly. She states definitively that the dam project will halt, and that it's already been decided. Rika's tone of voice takes a sudden shift. Rather than the cutesy little voice that had bragged about being able to add in the tens digits, an articulate and frightening voice was now speaking. "Go back to Tokyo. If you don't you'll regret it."
Akaksaka greases the wheels a bit with Ooishi to get some information from an informant, and so spends an evening with them playing mahjong out of town, along with a fourth player who is later revealed by Ooishi to be none other than the dam foreman. The informant gives Akasaka the rundown on a meeting between the Three Families that had occurred on the day of the kidnapping, approximately four days before Akasaka's arrival. While Rika happily doodles with crayons, the esteemed Oryou Sonozaki and her young heir, Mion Sonozaki, hold congress on the progression of the anti-dam movement. Suddenly, a yakuza member steps in and informs Oryou that someone has kidnapped Minister Inugai's grandson... to which Oryou simply laughs, not confirming one way or the other if it was their doing.
Before Akasaka departs, the informant gives him a freebie. That same yakuza and Oryou discuss that someone from Tokyo is likely to investigate them... a greenhorn, a young fresh face. Fresh meat. This grabs Rika's attention, and her and the yakuza have a frightening euphemistic back and forth about the incoming cop.
Akasaka shudders in fear. Not only was his cover blown... it was blown before he had even set foot in Hinamizawa.
The following day, Ooishi calls Akasaka about a lost wallet submitted to the Okinomiya PD. It has the initials of the victim embroidered on it, and further than that, inside is a card from a recent dentist appointment with his name written straight out on it. It was found in a remote location from Hinamizawa, a village that had been completely abandoned.
It was almost too convenient, but Akasaka and Ooishi proceed anyway, and stumble upon where the victim was being held. A melee ensues, and although the victim is rescued, Akasaka took a few sharp blows to the head with a rock and a gunshot to the shoulder in the scuffle, and collapses.
He awakens later that night in the hospital and is greeted by Ooishi. He's informed that the victim has been taken into protective custody. However... it's likely that regardless of how today went, the victim was going to be released that day anyway. The minister of construction announced formally that the dam plan was frozen, and thus the kidnappers had no reason to continue detaining the victim.
Regardless, Akasaka's long ordeal was over. He could return to Tokyo and see his wife, and be there in time for the delivery too. Overjoyed and despite his injuries, he gets up to try and call his wife at a payphone in the hospital lobby... only to find the cord had been cut.
And then two further payphones he tries, outside of the hospital and a long walk away, had also been cut. Realizing the time had since past for hospital phone calls, he endeavors to return to his hospital room, only to find Rika silently watching him from the glow of a street light. He grills Rika about whether or not she's been the one cutting phone lines, but Rika refuses to answer directly. With a sigh, he asks Rika to assist him in finding the hospital.
Rika instead leads him to the shrine again, which was on the way, and tells Akasaka that tonight is the night of the Watanagashi, a yearly festival. Akasaka decides to check it out, since he's already up and walking around anyway, only to find instead of a festival, it was just the Onigafuchi Defense Alliance basically sharing drinks. Akasaka has a chuckle at this, but then Rika says something odd. "Next year, Watanagashi will be a proper festival."
Luring him away to the same balcony from earlier, Rika then says something even more odd. She states with frightening clarity that in five years, she will be killed. When Akasaka grills her about this, she says that every year on the Watanagashi, someone will die and someone will disappear, and then lists the names and causes of death of each victim, culminating on her being the last victim in 1983. She states that, although she wants to live a long, happy life, spending the days with her friends, it's something she won't get to be afforded.
...The year is 1985. Akasaka is meeting up with a now retired Ooishi in Tokyo, for a night of drinks and food. The two of them reminisce over the case and its aftermath. Akasaka reveals that he did not in fact get to see his wife give birth to his daughter, who is now in grade school. On the day when the phone lines were cut, his wife had accidentally fallen to her death while descending the stairs. Despite her pregnancy, every day when she didn't get a phone call from Akasaka, she went up to the roof of the hospital so they could at least sit under the same sky together.
Akasaka laments that had he just made one different choice back then--if he had heeded Rika's warning to return to Tokyo, lest he regret it--his wife would have had no reason to climb the stairs on the day she had slipped and fallen. More on how I feel about that later.
Akasaka and Ooishi begin talking about the disaster in Hinamizawa... the sudden death of the entire village by way of an overnight eruption of toxic gas from the Onigafuchi swamp. Akasaka laments that it was sad that Rika had died, but Ooishi's response confuses him, implying she was indeed dead, but it wasn't the gas that killed her. Ooishi then goes onto clarify--the day before the gas had erupted and killed everyone, Rika Furude had met a grisly end, as seen at the end of Tatarigoroshi. Stomach split open, entrails strewn, picked at by crows. Akasaka seems startled by this, and as Ooishi leaves the room to request service, Akasaka breaks down and cries. Concerned, Ooishi tries to comfort him, when Akasaka tells him that Rika had predicted her own death, as well as the subsequent Watanagashi deaths. Ooishi asks him why Rika seemed to resigned to her fate and if she had ever asked for help, sent out a coded SOS for rescue or anything of the sort.
Akasaka breaks down further. She did, he cries, when she had told me in the first place. With no trust in the police and clearly no allies willing to prevent it in Hinamizawa, perhaps it was her telling Akasaka in the first place that she wanted help from him.
Both of the pivotal chances to save his wife or Rika had been in the same night, and he missed both of them.
Akasaka and Ooishi decide they can't let the villagers get away with having killed Rika or the other victims of the Watanagashi murders, but Ooishi laments that they're missing pivotal information tying the cases together back to an actual perpetrator or perpetrators, and additionally, it's unknown when the quarantine on Hinamizawa will be lifted, as small eruptions of gas continue to occasionally spew forth. So they petition the aid of the general public by way of writing a book about the mystery, asking the viewer to fill in the gaps and share hypotheses. The one thing Akasaka remembers about his time in Hinamizawa were the ceaseless cries of the evening cidadas--the higurashi. And so their book receives its title. "Higurashi -- When They Cry."
...So yeah, for a 'side story' it seems pretty important. It was the shortest part, clocking in at only 8 chapters, but what happened was still pretty dense. More details about the goings-on of Hinamizawa were revealed, including the pivotal information from Rika that the entirety of the events from 1979 to 1983 seemed premeditated.
The butting heads of "proper" political procedure vs. direct action was an interesting theme as well. Akasaka begins the story as a true believer in democracy, but eventually relents that his point of view has obvious gaps in it, and he had no reason to believe that the residents of Hinamizawa wouldn't try to resist the dam through bureaucracy if they could.
However, what I found most interesting in this part of Higurashi were its own side stories. Higurashi is an entirely linear experience despite its VN trappings. There are no choices to make, ever. ...except, for one side story included in Himatsubushi. It goes as thus--
You are presented with a red box and a blue box. You do not know the contents of either box, and you can choose one. Upon selecting a box, the other box vanishes entirely--you truly can only choose one. Which box do you select? Let's say you select the red box. You're awarded with a piece of caramel. Seems like a bit of a let down, after all the grandiosity. Maybe the other box had a whole big bar of chocolate in it, or maybe even an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii. You'll never know now.
...but why not try to think of it positively, in that case? Maybe the other box had nothing. It's too late to find out now, after all.
...then the game gets cheeky. You can play this scenario again and choose the other box and you get a stick of gum. "Earlier, you thought that you might have gotten the wrong box, but now that you look at them together, you realize that neither can really be called the wrong box, right?"
There's no use thinking "If I did XX back then, or if I didn't do it back then, ...then I probably would've been much happier (or unhappy) than I am right now."
And much like Akasaka's lament over if he had been there with Yukie, or his lament over having not realized Rika was asking for help, or the red or blue box scenario... I started to cry.
13 years ago today, July 5th my mother passed away. It was just after midnight. She had sleep apnea and didn't like wearing her CPAP machine. Ever since then, I've always wondered what would've happened had I been there to notice she'd gone to bed without it... but I was nowhere near her when it happened. I was miles away. The regret followed me like a rain cloud ever since then, and I've talked about it with a few scarce people.
But the simple way Ryukishi07 had put it... it was like it cleared the rain cloud over my head. I still miss my mom, of course, and there's no guarantee I'd have been able to do anything for her. Just having that notion of "if I could just go back and time and change this or that or do this" shaken from me meant a lot.
Regardless of what he's writing about, Ryukishi07 has a way of writing things with such sympathetic clarity that I almost feel foolish for not seeing it his way to start with.