seacats

The other Japanese bit of my interests aside from Aikido is the subculture of anime and manga. I don't delve too far - I do not have shelves stacked with anime character figurines, I don't share a bed with an anime character hugging pillow. I just watch several series, read a few manga and treat them as works of fiction not unlike any other.

For the first time, though, I was tempted so much by a series that I actually came to the original source for its anime and manga - a visual novel. Basically, the equivalent of a book, but with illustrations and sound effects... I would not call it a game - it shares similarities with the form of a game, but is 99% passive - just like a novel.

Umineko no Naku Koro Ni (When the Seacats... I mean, When the Seagulls Cry)

The story centers around the family Ushiromiya and their annual family conference at the island Rokkenjima in a remote archipelago. Eighteen family members gather at the mansion on the island, eventually isolated from the world by a typhoon. The head of the Ushiromiya family - Kinzo Ushiromiya - is proclaimed to be approaching his death, and his children gather to discuss splitting the inheritance of their Father's wealth, a major part of it supposedly obtained through mysterious occult and black magic.

The grandchildren are joined by Battler Ushiromiya, who has not visited the conference in six years. They find themselves interested in the legend of the Golden Witch, Beatrice, who reputedly lives on the island and rules it during the night, resulting in various ghost stories. The children contemplate the epitaph of the supposedly long-dead witch underneath her portrait in the main hall, which describes a bloody path to a "Golden Land" and Beatrice's revival.

During the typhoon, on the morning of the second day, mysterious and inhumane murders begin to occur. They appear to be murder mystery scenarios at first, but none of them seem to be possible to a human. Battler and the rest of the family refuse to believe that it could be the work of a witch, but nothing else can explain the horrible deaths.

The basis of the entire story is the problem of anti-fantasy versus anti-mystery. The anti-fantasy stance, favoured by Battler, assumes that every murder can be explained within human capabilities, and thus does not require a fantastic, magical explanation. The anti-mystery stance obviously states the opposite. Even if you can prove the scenarios are possible for humans to set up, this does not disprove that a witch didn't do it. You can prove the existence of witches, but you cannot prove they don't exist - a simplified form of the Devil's Proof.

The story is a battle between those two stances, a mixture of horror fantasy and murder mystery, and an extremely pleasant mind fuck. I think the two-three weeaboos that may be by any chance reading this already heard me praising its glorious name on high, but just in case some other weeaboo comes across this - I strongly recommend Seacats. Any of the three formats presents the story just fine, though the anime and manga adaptations have barely gotten off to a start while the visual novel is far ahead.

Besides, it's slowly consuming my mind, so I just had to write that down... Currently, I'm trying to imagine how would Beatrice work as a boss encounter in WoW, but writing that out here would be going too far. That's a little habit I have for every work of fiction with a high density of fantasy. I just finished the second episode of the novel and, yeah, I really need to let my mind rest for a bit.