Management: This essay is meant to be less of a review and more of analysis of the show being examined. It contains plot spoilers for the Higurashi anime, especially Higurashi Kai (i.e. the 2nd Season) Episodes 6-12.

One thing that a lot of good horror stories have in common is an isolated setting. Good horror involves some dimension of disempowerment, the inability to do anything in the face of an oppressive force. The small village tucked away in the mountains, hidden from the rest of civilization, is as good a place as any to promote that anxious and hopeless feeling. An almost inevitable sense of suspicion and paranoia lingers on the outsider looking in. An all-too easy fear and anger festers in a community that’s supposed to be tight-knit. Disempowerment seemingly and realistically encroaches into the lives of its protagonists from multiple facets: the interpersonal, the political, the Kafkaesque. Higurashi’s “Hinamizawa” village embodies all those aforementioned aspects. They infect the protagonists and affect all the village’s denizens, eventually, and lead them to a gradual but inevitable doom.

Well, Kafkaesque might be a little hyperbolic a descriptor for Higurashi, at least when compared to the systematic and soul-crushing absurdity of Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares. But there’s a relatable enough parallel in the story arc of one small Higurashi girl. In the latest of a series of unfortunate events, a parent-less and brother-less Satoko Hojo finds herself suffering under the roof of her domestically abusive uncle… yet again. Satoko considers herself complicit in both her parents’ deaths and her brother’s disappearance, feels duty-bound to protect her family home and beloved brother’s room from her uncle, and suffers from a pathological predisposition to panic attacks. Satoko’s small frame bears the weight of terrible emotional issues, and being just a little girl, we might expect our society to have some mechanism in place to take her out of there ASAP, even as Satoko herself is hesitant to admit she’s being abused.

And yet too often in the world of Higurashi (and maybe even in the world of our own), the authorities responsible for staging interventions fail to act urgently, if at all. Public servants cite reverence to the process as they dig their heels and let real people get hurt. Civic organizations prefer letting sleeping dogs lie, so absorbed in not rocking the boat that the only thing spared is passing sympathy. Throughout the series, Keiichi, Shion, Rena, and the other characters of Higurashi run into these absurdly oppressive barriers, time and time again. Young and angsty themselves, their responses to these systematic injustices seem to be always and every-time violent: the swing of a bat, the thrust of a knife, the cleave of a machete, the shove off a bridge. In an ideal world, the equivalent of Child Services would step in more aggressively regardless if the victim in question admits to being abused. Higurashi is a horror story though. Satoko doesn’t admit to her abuse easily, and the bureaucracy seems content at looking away until then. Many in the village can also guess what’s going on, but do nothing besides. These parties need to be forced or inspired, and very importantly without resorting to murder.

Higurashi is a horror story that allows its protagonists to prevail in the end though, and with the Power of Friendship no less. The overarching plot of Higurashi operates under this eternal recurrence of violent cycles. The recurrence is only seeming though, if long enough in combined durations to drag into decades, according to their exhausted observer Rika. Rather than coupling psychological horror to its existential cousin, the protagonists of Higurashi begin to learn things from them and become better people in their next lives. Even if those karmic lessons end up carrying over in their future lives as instinctual deja vu more often than transparent recollections, the substance of those resolutions stick. They learn to see fewer daggers in other people’s shadows. They learn to have more faith in their friends. They learn to not so easily give in to those murderous impulses. They stop each other from giving in to murder, from killing and dying and reincarnating to do the same shit again and again, ad infinatum. Smashing fate in Higurashi is revealed to be a team effort though, and with Keiichi’s, Shion’s, and Rena’s arcs having been resolved in the temporally narrative sequence, it’s Satoko’s turn to find redemption.

As mentioned previously, Satoko’s abusive dick of an uncle, Teppei, comes back to Hinamizawa to take custody of Satoko. Guardianship of his niece is simply a means to an end: he needs her to have an excuse to get the Hojo residence as an easy roof over his head. Absent any other familial relation in the village before Teppei returns, Satoko had been living with her fellow orphan Rika. Satoko is savvy enough around the house and kitchen take care of herself and Rika while staying over, suggesting that she can live by herself one day, if not right now. Her psychosomatic “Hinamizawa Syndrome” affliction though, her heavy traumatic baggage, and her ostracized village status makes their co-inhabition with Rika as much a pylon for her as it is a pleasure. Rika’s own status as the village’s respected priestess and only living head to one of the village’s major families helps dis-spell some of the affects of Satoko’s negative rep. Her close proximity to Satoko combined with a convenient knowledge of Satoko’s ailment puts Rika in the position to aid Satoko when her symptoms start acting up.

Those traumatic fits come when Satoko is harshly reminded of her parents’ deaths and brother’s disappearance, all of which she blames herself for because of her past displays of neediness and clinginess. The social and emotional supports Rika has set up for Satoko breaks down totally once Teppei returns and Satoko “agrees (is blackmailed)” to live with him again. Satoko stops coming to school on her uncle’s orders, and she’s later seen by Rika serving him drinks and snacks. In returning back to live with her uncle, Satoko wants to prove she’s strong and independent. She wants to protect her house and her brother’s room from being ransacked and vandalized. Now on paper, her resolve seems very noble. Compared to her brute of an uncle though, she’s a tiny kid in reality. She’s also mentally ill, very much so, and mental illness in the right circumstances will knock anyone out. With Rika’s formal support structure for Satoko gone up in smoke because of Satoko’s desperation to protect her brother’s room, Keiichi and friends gather together at school to come up with a plan to save her.

A fatalistic Rika looks on, a melancholy bystander to countless fruitless attempts by her friends to better Satoko’s situation, then something novel happens. Something remarkable happens that lifts her spirits enough to pay this meeting of many a little more attention. Knowing how lackluster the past response by the responsible authorities went when Teppei was last in town and around Satoko, Shion screams about taking matters into their own hands and killing Teppei herself. Head over heels in love with Satoko’s now missing brother and something of a black sheep herself within her family, she’s especially protective of Satoko and suspects Teppei had something to do with her beloved being gone. Her murderous fit echoes her past lives of vengefully murdering everyone that crossed her. Echoing the lessons he learned from his past lives of murderous paranoia, Rena pleads with her to rethink things while Keiichi body blocks the exit.

Shion says she’s going to kill Keiichi if he gets in her way. Keiichi tells her to try it, his arms extending the door’s width.

Shion picks up a chair and says she’s serious. Keiichi doesn’t budge.

She bashes his head with the seat. His head starts dripping out blood.

Shocked and drained by the sight of his gash and resolve, Shion resigns herself and gives the floor to Keiichi.

Setting aside the fantastical trap of violent cycles that plague every Higurashi protagonist though, is it really that morally egregious to resort violence in the face of systemic injustices? Violence as a means to rectify Satoko’s situation is just as reasonable as Shion murdering everyone and dumping their bodies down a well is unprecedented. Satoko’s friends went to the adults of the school for help, who then went to Child Services for help, who then didn’t do anything helpful. The rest of the village eventually caught on to Satoko’s plight, but decided on doing nothing, ultimately. Satoko was still a social pariah, after all and the village heads didn’t want to endanger working relationships for someone like her.

Her ostracized status was earlier revealed to stem not from her own actions, but from that of her formerly living and now quite deceased parents. Once upon a time, her parents opposed the rest of the village on resisting a dam project that would have turned Hinzamizawa in a reservoir. Their opposition resulted in the entire Hojo family being blacklisted. It’s speculated and later confirmed that the villagers have already forgiven the Hojo family for their political transgressions in private. Despite this willingness to let bygones be bygones, most still mind their distance from Satoko because the Sonozaki family matriarch, the biggest and scariest of the village heads (and also Shion and Mion’s grandmother), has yet to make end of the feud official. Rika is able to hang around Satoko without drawing ire in part because she’s both still a tiny kid herself (physiologically anyway) and an important village figure.

The political and bureaucratic mess that’s been following and victimizing Satoko for much of her young life may not be fully Kafkaesque in its bullshit, but it’s certainly very absurd. The problem went away for a while when Teppei up and left on his own, but like walking further down that stretch you kicked that eyesore tin can at, he and the problem came back. It’s not reasonable to expect that like following the rules and doing the same thing again will save Satoko or bring justice, not without change on some fundamental societal level. The biggest changes of all come from revolutions, and many revolutions end up becoming bloody. If even the origins of the liberal democratic state are mired in revolutionary bloodshed, what humanity is there in the claim that violence to right a wrong is never justified? The absolute pondered in that question isn’t something Higurashi is seeking to answer. However, similar to how liberal democracies give people legal avenues to change the political and bureaucratic status quo without violence, the show does seem to be suggesting that there maybe more avenues toward effective non-violent change than is immediately obvious.

Having successfully used his head to get Shion to calm down, Keiichi proposes they all make their case to Child Services themselves. Retracing what’s already been done during the first Teppei incident and this one, the school staff and Child Services were informed about the situation. The former conducted a house visit. The latter made a house call. Like before, nothing comes out of either effort, with the uncle blaming Satoko’s absence as her being sick– having nothing to do with him neglecting or beating her if that was the case, of course. The uncle refused to let the school examine Satoko’s condition. Child Services took Satoko’s word over the the phone that nothing was wrong. The latter didn’t and the former couldn’t press the issue further. Thinking hard about the next step, Keiichi works out a small compromise between greater initiative and more violence. The gang decide to take a trip to Child Services themselves to make a personal case, hoping passionate a face-to-face impression will move the bureaucratic agency into more urgency. There may be processes to things and protocol to follow in government, but a damn life is on the line, right? The dull monotone from the agency lady suggests the trip is a failure though, so Keiichi and friends decides that their initiative alone isn’t enough. It’ll take a village to make them understand.

Many revolutions end up bloody, to be sure, but a key factor separating the successful revolutions from the failed ones is popular support and sustained pressure. Using extreme tactics like violence to demand change, especially when those tactics don’t have buy-in from the larger community, alienate your potential allies from supporting you and give your enemies an excuse to admit no faults and dig in. The gang decides that they’ll need more people to come with them before they begin to be taken more seriously. In addition to existing support from the school’s principal and homeroom teacher, they persuade Satoko’s classmates to join them in their cause. An entire school’s pleas finally seem to motivate Child Services to press Teppei more aggressively about Satoko’s condition, convincing him to finally let her return to school to avoid the extra trouble.

These bipartite developments come with worrying conditions though: (1) Child Services begin talking to the heads of the Sonozaki family (including the elderly matriarch) about the buzz, and (2) Teppei has been coaching Satoko into not admitting her abuse. Satoko’s is in a bad state, having either neglected or having no access to the medicine that keeps her mind from going into an easy tailspin. A police detective delivers the first bit of qualifying news to Keiichi after the sun’s set, while the gang is able to surmise the second bit from Satoko’s uncle-induced psychotic fit just a little after reporting in for attendance.

Rather than just assign Kafkaesque qualities to everything the detective says, Keiichi takes the news from the man as constructive advice. Rather than flip out at Teppei’s successes at manipulating Satoko and the system, Keiichi returns to his strategy of popular support and sustained pressure with renewed determination. Satoko hasn’t been separated and she’s still being abused. In response to their little morsel, Keiichi and friends bolster their protest numbers with people from the local clinic and family diner. From carrot to stick though, the school gets their operations threatened if the gang doesn’t cease their efforts.

In response to that sharp jab, they decide to take their case to the village association itself. Boldly storming their meeting, they denounce the village’s treatment of Satoko all this time, shame those present with doing nothing to help her now despite knowing she’s living under an abuser, and invokes the image of that heroic Hinamizawa of yesteryear –a past Hinamizawa where its denizens were all tight-knit and fought together against the political and bureaucratic forces that threatened its existence… once upon a time.

Shamed, moved, but still cautious of pissing off the wrong person, the leader of the village association promises its support if they can convince the elderly, crotchety, and prideful Sonozaki matriarch to go along with their plans. Keiichi and friends do just that, with Keiichi displaying in one scene the redemptive dynamic that’s been at play with every protagonist, realized to its most climactic point yet. The gang appeals to the Sonozaki matriarch to help them out. She toys with saying “No,” and Keiichi immediately flips out. He threatens to kill her, and she threatens to kill him. Keiichi then backpedals his anger and prostrates himself, making himself clear he’s doing this for a friend. Both impressed and taken aback by Keiichi’s simultaneous demonstration of intensity and humility, the Sonozaki matriarch also relents her rage and ultimately agrees to help Satoko. While in this state of sobriety, she also puts herself in the remarkable position of tolerating criticism for how petty or cowardly she’s been at keeping Satoko ostracized, all without lashing out herself in her trademark menace.

It took a village to make sure Satoko’s status in the social system as a pariah was erased. It took a village to successfully pressure Child Services’ inert and apathetic director — now dealing with daily protests, the prospect of scandals, and lawmakers making inquiries — to try harder, starting with another phone call to Satoko. And while the injustice of a system that requires child victims to admit to being abused remains on the messed up books, everyone — the village, her friends, Rika even — rallying for her despite everything, moves Satoko enough to save one life. Everyone’s efforts to help her bring Satoko to work up the courage to trust them and defy her uncle. And just like that, the police listening in, no longer mistrusted and working with everyone, mobilize from nearby, arrest Teppei, and take Satoko outside and away from him.

If you ask me, the most important and moving part of this whole arc isn’t Keiichi convincing Shion to back down after bashing his head with a chair, or the village heads getting all on board with Keiichi and friends’ plans to save Satoko despite “bad blood”, or even a despondent and pessimistic Rika sloughing her edgy grimace from her face as she begs Keiichi, in tears, to save her best friend. The most important part was the bit where the protagonists, defeated for the day from protesting, are returning home with Satoko’s other classmates. Wallowing in the frustration of the moment, Keiichi’s directed by Mion to listen to the other kids behind them. They’re not giving up on Satoko. Rena notices the discussion too and, ever the wise and incisive member of the gang (at least when she’s not going crazy herself), she remarks that it’s their first experience. It’s an important first experience of political activism, and the feedback coming out of their mouths is one that’s the opposite of discouragement.

I’m a political scientist by degree, a democrat by heart. I tend to look at media that I consume from a socio-political perspective, though I think the points Higurashi is making about social and political change in Japan are fairly transparent. Many first world democratic countries suffer from consistently low election turnout. Japan is no exception to this trend, and yet there’s this sentiment among many Japanese, ironic from where I sit, about their society getting steadily worse — nothing can be done about this decline… these problems can’t be really helped. In this pessimistic and mistrustful clime, many Japanese feel better off distancing themselves from their neighbors, prioritizing more heavily the me and the mine. These attitudes about the state of society are something of a self-fulfilling prophecy though. So many people from these supposedly leading democratic states bemoan this slow moving trainwreck and that in the wider community without engaging with the one apparatus that has the most power to prevent or at least address it.

It’s somewhat astounding then that a story with oodles of horrific disempowerment like Higurashi’s decided to come out out on this issue with such a proactive and optimistic tack. Change for the better happened because the village of Hinamizawa came together and demanded it from the government and each other. Civic disengagement only makes problems fester longer and build pressure, and murderous vigilantism doesn’t have to be the default response to social issues. Civic engagement is important and political participation can work to make things better, if only everyone keeps at it. Satoko’s classmates, the next generation of Japanese Hinamizawans, find solidarity in even their failures and see their efforts ultimately rewarded. They may grow up to be leaders someday, motivated to make the world a better and kinder place. They will at least have a better chance of becoming compassionate adults, in part because of what they accomplished for Satoko. The youth with fresh optimism and energy take over from the conservative old guard, and the winds of change blow out the stagnant Hinamizawa air. It’s funny where in the anime this all happens, in a village infamous for its ominously suffocating insularity…

…in a setting inspired by Shirakawa-go. Shirakawa-go is a UNESCO world heritage site. Tucked away in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture, it’s famous for its time-preserved example of the traditional Japanese village.