Disclaimer: This review is only for season one of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, not for season two. I was incredibly busy throughout October, making this difficult to write in time constraints and limiting my ability to watch Higurashi itself. Because of that there is no ending section for this review, and it will likely be edited in at some point. Sorry. Now onto the review!
I’m not too late for Halloween, am I?
Fear is subjective. What scares you depends on how it scares you. A person with an irrational fear of spiders is going to react differently to a wolf spider than, say, and Australian will. A person who cannot stand surprise scares is probably going to react differently to a jumpscare game compared to me, as a person who thinks that genre is oversaturated.
But fear is an art, and much like art fear can be manipulated, bent and twisted like a rod of hot iron. There’s a certain set of conditions that can be used and manipulated to mess with your audience’s psychological state that will guarantee that they will be scared and vulnerable one-hundred percent of the time. Of course, it is not possible to scare everyone. But if you remember that your target audience likely wants to be scared, you can understand how to scare them.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, or When the Cicadas Cry, produced by Studio Deen and based off of a Visual Novel of the same name–recently re-released by MangaGamer with better sprites I might add–knew how to scare you. It knew exactly what your weak points were and how to strike when you were already down in the only way it could: by disguising itself as something it was not.
Story
The only thing I can compare to Higurashi’s story is Silent Hill. You all know Silent Hill, that game widely regarded as the best horror game series ever made. Well, much like Silent Hill, Higurashi is quite possibly the best horror anime ever produced. Sorry, I spoiled the review.
Higurashi starts out showing the typical setup for a Slice of Life where the main character introduces himself and the other characters. At least, that’s how a generic Slice of Life starts. A not so good one. Everything seems perfectly normal, the town of Hinamizawa just seems like a regular rural town with fun and happy people. The school just seems like your everyday rural school where everyone is in the same classroom no matter what grade they are in. The anime also seems oddly creepy with how it shows some of the…younger characters.
But it isn’t just a regular old day. No, it’s the day before Watanagashi, the Cotton Drifting Festival, a yearly event where you float balls of cotton down the river and make a wish. Sounds delightful! Everyone is excited and ready to have fun at this festival, and everything is perfect and wonderful and all right.
Ha, you wish. On the night of Watanagashi two people die to very strange causes. Tomitake, a photographer visiting the town, claws his throat until he bleeds to death, and Takano, who was accompanying him to do research…spontaneously combusts in a barrel, I guess. That’s actually one of my many sources of amusement from this anime, hearing about Takano setting on fire. These incidents mark the fifth year the Curse of Oyashiro-sama took place, a horrible occasion that happens every year on the day of Watanagashi in which one person dies and another disappears mysteriously. The villagers truly believe that this is a curse and not a coincidence, and they wait anxiously to see who dies and who disappears next
That is hardly the most terrifying thing however. Compared to the rest of this show that’s just a tiny ripple in an ocean of terror. But if I reveal more I will spoil most of the anime. So how can I talk about the anime without spoiling too much?
Poor Rena. She was only trying to help. She was only being so kind.
Anxiety. Anxiety and true terror fuels this whole story. Anxiety can range from mild to severe, from being nervous before a performance to not ever trusting your friends and laughing uncontrollably and inappropriately. It is one of the effects of fear, especially True Fear. True Fear isn’t brief. True Fear gnaws at you, causes you to think someone is always watching you do everything, even when there’s no way they could be. Not many people can say they’ve felt this level of fear, and that includes me. But we can see this fear displayed in horror, it just matters how it is portrayed.
Higurashi no Naku Koro shows what it is like to fear everything around you, what it is like through the eyes of the characters. This is best shown in the Meakashi-hen answer arc and the Tsumihoroboshi-hen arac, where both of the characters focused on are shown to be hearing and seeing abnormal and unnatural things that no one else seems to notice. Things like maggots coming out of Rena’s wounds or Shion hearing the sound of rapid footsteps at all times, causing her to go insane with extreme anxiety and severe emotional trauma.
Note: Cut off a little to remove the watermark. Seriously, what a pointless watermark.
How about those arcs? How do they work? While the arcs aren’t often the same length, they all follow a certain flow, save for one, which was a prequel type arc. Each one, with the same exception, starts a few days from Watanagashi, Takano and tomitake die on Watanagashi, and chaos ensues. Each arc reveals something new, especially the prequel arc, but what is revealed is never necessarily concrete and true. In many cases the “facts” are proven to be false. This leaves a sense of confusion and keeps you interested, which makes Higurashi a proper horror mystery. Except in Higurashi’s case it consistently proves your theories wrong and changes your thoughts constantly. That’s how psychological horror runs, it causes you to doubt yourself and what you are watching.
How is the story itself though? Well, much like Silent Hill again, it does not work without the horror aspect. Demons, murders and disappearances with an underlying theme of friendship does not really work on its own. But because the anime doesn’t rely on cheap jumpscares but instead uses gradually increasing atmosphere and dread, the viewer can suspend their disbelief sufficiently enough to the see the story as something truly incredible. And that makes the story for this show truly fantastic.
Characters
Keiichi Maebara is your average student who may just be a bit perverted and weird. Or at least, that’s what he seems to be like. He is also a sufferer of paranoid delusions when in danger. Keiichi is our first victim of anxiety in the show, and it shows in his actions. Most people know about the first four episodes of Higurashi, the arc that Keiichi is focused on in. It’s actually one of the mildest arcs in the show, but it is a shocking and terrifying one nonetheless, and displays the theme of the show perfectly. But it also turns off most people from the anime, thinking it’s just going to turn into a gorefest. Or those people are complete wusses, I know those kinds of people.
Keiichi is the character who helps reveal the outsider part of the curse. Hinamizawa has an issue with outsiders and dissenters, and Keiichi’s possibly in the worst situation out of everyone. He also helps reveal the dam incident, and the murder that began the curse. This is what each character does, they reveal things.
Mion and Shion Sonozaki are twins that should not be possible. In their family, if identical twins are born, one must be strangled to death so there is only one heir. But something happened to keep this from being the case, and Shion’s existence was hidden from the public for several years. And so started the Watanagashi-hen arc, later followed with its answer arc Meakashi-hen, which is what I’ll call it from now on. This arc is my favorite arc in the whole anime. The choice to use identical twin character was a rather good choice, because the question arc half of Meakashi was the most confusing and terrifying arc in the whole anime. If they wore the same clothes and had the same hairstyle, you literally would be unable to tell the difference between the two, making you wonder who is who. The question arc makes you think you know what is going on until the very end, where everything starts to make progressively less sense as poor Keiichi can no longer understand who he is talking to and who is trying to kill him. And the answer arc didn’t really help either. It explained who was who, and not what Shion was hearing when she heard footsteps, or what happened to Satoshi.
Shion Sonozaki, this is the best image of her I have.
Rena Ryugu is my favorite character, for reasons. But she is also a complete psychopath in the last arc, which is both a question and answer arc. Rena doesn’t come from any large family like Mion and Shion, nor is she an outsider like Keiichi is, but she does have something that’s different: she has been targeted by Oyashiro-sama before. One thing that stays throughout the anime is the whole idea of ripping open your own throat with your fingernails. Rena is the one who explains why that is, and it’s all about maggots. A victim of Oyashiro’s Curse is likely to scratch their wounds, as they see maggots begin to fester in them. The anime does well to not just explain this but also show it as Rena goes completely insane in the final arc, and I just love it so much.
See, waifu material!
Rena’s backstory is also interesting. She has gone through the hell of her parents divorcing each other, and never forgave her mother for not only having an affair but also getting pregnant in the process. That was, I think, the beginning of her insanity, or at least the first case of it. It was after leaving Hinamizawa to live with her father that she first started to notice the maggots fester, and it was when she started noticing some mysterious person standing over her bed and watching her in her sleep. This is almost replicated, without the watching thing, when she realizes that her father is being tricked by the person he is going to marry, in which case she suffers more from it.
Satoko Hojo, a young elementary school student, has had the worst of it. Her parents died from the Curse, she was abused by her uncle, and then her brother disappeared mysteriously. She then, in her arc at least, was once again abused by her uncle, but this time it was even worst to the point where she has a panic attack in class, and I mean an actual one and not in a figurative sense. Her arc is a seriously sad one, as Satoko goes just as insane as Keiichi does and misinterprets his actions.
Lack of trust in your friends is a theme that stays throughout the anime, to the point where it was the whole idea of the final arc. There’s always a case of distrust in each arc: Keiichi not trusting Mion and Rena in Onikakushi-hen; Shion not trusting her family in Meakashi-hen; Satoko not trusting Keiichi in the end of Tatarigoroshi-hen; the rookie police officer Akasaka not trusting all of Hinamizawa in Himatsubushi-hen; and finally Rena trusting Mion and Keiichi in Tsumihoroboshi-hen. It’s a very important theme that stays throughout the show, and in any other case this would be dumb, but this time around it works like a charm.
Rika Furude, the enigma of the whole show. She never goes insane and kills anyone, but she is possibly one of the strangest characters in the show. Scratch that, she’s near unexplainable. Rika knows everything. She knows everything about what will happen, what has already happened, what each character is going to do, everything there is to know except one thing: exactly why time is looping. Rika is extremely important, as she seems to be the vessel of Oyashiro-sama. Rika seems to understand Oyashiro-sama, and feels that she means well. While everyone is scared of Oyashiro, Rika always talks about her like she never did anything wrong. And who knows, maybe she didn’t.
The characters in Higurashi help reveal the plot further and further. Most of the clues we have come from their contribution to the story and their actions serve to confuse the audience more and more. Their friendship is very important as well, and their lack of trust drives the whole anime. After all, it’s the characters that go insane, not the story.
Art and Animation
Let’s go back in time to 2006. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex season two ended last year and made its mark as one of the best animated animes of all time, Ergo Proxy and Code Geass were airing, as was Rozen Maiden and Death Note and .hack//Sign was the worst thing ever. It was a year of revolutionized animation and storytelling, when art was changing, and when more people were watching anime.
Now let’s think about how Higurashi no Naku Koro ni stood up. Well, for one the art was definitely very good. I have no idea how the artists were able to completely rework all of the characters, but it was definitely a step up from this:
Quality sprites right there.
Yeah, buy the new version of the VN from MangaGamer, it’s much better.
Higurashi’s art was pretty well done, as it really did solidify the trick of looking like a Slice of Life. 2006 and 2007 were when Moe Slice of Life were gaining some ground, so Studio Deen definitely tricked that crowd. It’s still tricking people today actually. The happy colors turn to dark, creepy ones filled with dread and sorrow when you can no longer tell what’s real anymore. It’s a perfect transition that gets me in every arc.
The animation though, not so much. The lackluster animation isn’t noticeable until any scene with a lot of movement. When Akasaka, that police officer, fights a man, it just looks slow and clunky. Not even brutally slow, where every hit has impact, just odd looking. It wasn’t enough to throw me out of the immersion, but it just wasn’t good.
Music and Sound
Kenji Kawai That’s the name of the composer for this anime. Remember it when you watch this anime, because you’ll want to know his name when you watch this anime. The soundtrack for Higurashi is atmospheric perfection, and I love it. Most of you will likely have heard Main Theme, if you haven’t bring it up now in another tab and listen to it, seriously. Main Theme represents each character and their dark sides, and any time it plays or when one version of it plays it is truly horrifying. It’s a beautiful track and I love it.
Kenji Kawai understands atmosphere. While Akira Yamaoka will always have my heart for being the best horror composer ever, you cannot compare them at all. Kenji’s music draws you in and fills you up to full with dread and horror through its low pitch instruments and vocal tracks, the most memorable being the one in Main Theme. I cannot praise it more.
The opening for Higurashi is where you notice that something is very off. It’s named after the anime, and it’s such a horrifying song. The translated lyrics are creepy, the vocals use a very strange auto-tune, and the use of reversing music in the beginning and whatever instruments they used in the song seem very strange for the supposed Slice of Life you thought Higurashi was. It fits the show so well and I love it.
The cicadas of summer cry at all times, making it impossible to feel alone. The chief sound bit used is the sound of a cicada’s cry, or at least the one that stands out the most to me. The cicada’s cry signifies summer, and it accompanies the plight of the characters through the show up until the minutes of the final episode. It is both a beautiful and sinister sound that lingers at every moment possible. If you expect me to write about the rest of the sound, well then I have done so already. The cicada round bit summarizes what the sound in this anime is like. It’s intense, lingering, always following you. There’s always something you can hear, be it phantom footsteps or cicada, that contributes to the atmosphere of the anime so you are never actually ready for anything that will happen, because the cicadas will cry in your summers, and will continue to cry through your death.
Oishi misinterpreted this incident. Fuck Oishi
Finally the voice acting. This time I will review the voices as a whole, because I could never write a Higurashi review and omit the voice acting. Japanese dub has some of the most amazing voice performances I have ever heard, especially those for Shion, Mion and Keiichi. Their rapid descent into madness is portrayed by their actors so well, especially Shion’s actress. The screams too, oh god the screams. A terrible scream is one that sounds forced and one that you would not naturally make if you were scared. But a good one, well it’s one that could potentially come out of a human. Add in laughter, and you have voice acting that cannot be ignored. The immersion is perfectly supported by all this and then some, and it’s all just spectacular. I simply cannot find anything wrong with it, I just can’t.
Well, except the dub. But no one watched that, so whatever. Seriously, don’t watch it. It’s shit.
Conclusion
I cannot rate the ending when I’ve only watched season one. Sorry.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was something entirely different. I cannot stress it enough that it truly terrified and surprised me at every turn. I was even surprised by how it broke routine, and I in fact preferred it that way. Routine is boring in all ways, after a while everything becomes repetitive and predictable. This is my problem with long-running Shounen and Harems, they never change and I see a pattern in them all (especially Harems, but that would take a whole essay to explain)
Did I enjoy Higurashi though? I would be lying if I said not. I would have to be burned if I did that. Higurashi’s twists and turns that represented a rod of hot malleable metal never got old, and I’m just the person to want to be scared. The loss of sleep part is not great, but Higurashi didn’t do that, Higurashi terrified me in the moment. I never was pulled out of my immersion until I decided it was time to sleep–I mostly watched this at night–and I never stopped enjoying it. I wanted and desired to know what happened next, and that kept me on my toes for the next episode. I was scared for the characters, not myself. And that’s what I wanted, right?
Well, except Detective Oishi. Screw him and his dumbass voice, I wanted him to die.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is a near perfect horror in every way. The atmosphere was perfectly done with every aspect, especially with sound, and the only thing that was lackluster was the animation. But I’m not a technical guy, and I don’t judge an anime harshly for something I noticed like two or three times. Anime isn’t meant to be judged for technical reasons, it’s meant to tell a story and a theme. And Higurashi succeeded in this. After all, the cicadas do cry in the summer, and when they do what are they crying for? Whose corpse are they mourning?
Is it yours?
9.25/10
Gorgeously Frightful
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was produced by Studio Deen, directed by Chiaki Kon, and is currently licensed by Siren Visual in Australia and by Sentai Filmworks in NA, who refuse to do anything with the license unfortunately. It is based off of a Visual Novel by 07th Expansion going by the same name, and has been since re-released by MangaGamer on PC with updated sprites, which is thankful because the original art was terrible. There are several different mangas for it, both doujin and official, and many of which are more horrific than the anime and the VN combined.
Thanks for reading, the language this time is Cantonese, and 再見 (“joigin”).
A Discernible Lack of Catgirls 