Higurashi no Naku Koro ni – 31

It took me a while before I found out that a new fansub group called Ni-paa~ released this episode on Animesuki. I’ve been so used to the fact that Tokyo Toshokan lists all available fansubs that I didn’t realize that there are sometimes exceptions. I never understood what was so great about this Ni-paa~, by the way. It’s just a random word to sound cute, same with the “Uguu~” and all other variations. The only phrase I’ve found that actually worked was Akazukin’s Zukkyun, because it actually had a deep meaning in her backstory. Anyway, about the episode: I loved it. This is exactly the kind of Higurashi that I originally fell in love with, and finally this anime picks up its mystery-roots again, and it starts introducing and answering questions again. I originally thought that Rika was to be proven wrong, by some kind of miraculous act from Satoko, but that turned out completely wrong. I originally thought that this would be a Rika-arc, but guess what: Satoko is the actual main character. Rika plays the part of the vital character, while Oishi is the main side-character in this arc. Rika’s going to have to wait till the next arc to be proven wrong. After a long recap of the previous episode, she realizes that her murderers are about to kill her, so she hides Satoko from them. The murderers turn out to be the guys in uniform, the people working under the Sonozaki-family, but now under the control of the real killer. They were after something in her stomach. Satoko runs into her after everything is over, though she didn’t wait long enough for the killers to go away, so they notice her. They start to chase her, until the bridge, from which she falls, just like Keiichi in the third arc. And yes, this in fact means that she survived the Hinamizawa-disaster. To make things even better, she doesn’t lose her consciousness after falling, and wanders into Hinamizawa, just after the great disaster took place, and people are busy to collect the bodies. Satoko then wanders to the school, in which the entire population of the village seems to have been dumped. They all look like they’ve been brutally murdered from the inside, or that they were in the middle of awakening from the disease at the point of death. Satoko then goes into a mental shock, and gets taken to the hospital in a nearby town. Oishi (who happened to be away at the time of the disaster) then goes to visit her, and quickly sees that she doesn’t respond to anybody. He tells her something interesting, though. Rena’s hat was found, bloodied, quite a distance away from Hinamizawa. Oishi suspects that Satoko knows some key elements to this mystery, though he leaves her alone. However, when he mentions Rika’s name, she reacts for a split second. The nurse says that this is just a subconscious reaction, and that she didn’t really awaken or anything. She looks worried, though. Especially a close-up of her hints at her significance in this scene. Oishi then returns to the police station, where he talks with a colleague about another one of his colleagues who disappeared. I suspect that that’s the guy who got shot at the previous episode. When he hears that the guy was about to do stuff relating Furude Rika, Oishi suddenly remembers that Satoko and Rika lived in the same house. He then realizes that Satoko didn’t turn out the way she did because of the Hinamizawa-disaster, but because of the things that happened to Rika. Okay, this isn’t exactly right, but this does make him go back to the hospital. He’s too late, though. The nurse seemed to work for the killer as well, and the killer’s henchmen have started to appear in the hospital. Satoko actually awakens, and imagines Rena, running away from the same henchmen, and getting killed, with her hat being the only thing that remains. She gets killed before Oishi reaches her, though. Probably via an overdose of medicine. The episode ends with Oishi screaming because of this loss. The most interesting thing in this episode for me was definitely Rena escaping, because it ruthlessly shattered the theory I’ve been having that Rena was able to survive in the sixth arc because her disease was rendered useless. This arc suggests that the sixth arc wasn’t the only one in which she received Takano’s scrapbooks. We’ve never seen her much in this episode, but we just don’t know what happened to her, and she may have been doing quite some interesting things while the attention was focused on other characters. In fact, this could have happened in the second, third and fifth arc as well, simply because we don’t get any information about what happened to the individual victims. The big question is now, why did Rena survive? Now the following is just a theory, but could it be that Rena knew quite a bit about what was going on in the different arcs? What if the sixth arc was the only exception for this, whn she was too much distracted by her disease which awakened too early? She managed to survive back then because her disease was indeed already cured, but what if she just saw all of her friends going berserk and dying, right before her eyes? I can imagine that this would cause an even bigger trauma than with Satoko in this episode, and that she quite simply forgot all about it, which is why the killer let her live: she didn’t pose a threat anymore. The next episode should really start the second season off, where the final two arcs will be told in nineteen episodes. Unfortunately, I’ve already been spoiled about the identity of the real killer and the role of Rika’s companion, but there remain enough questions that still need to be answered, especially the whats, hows and whys of everything. Arc 8 should deal with the whats and hows, while arc 9 (in the anime, not the game) should deal with the hows, if I recall correctly. Overall, I do like the past arc. Not only did it introduce some new questions, and answered others, it was a good build-up to the next arc. We now know a bit of what’s going on inside Rika’s head, and that she’s pretty much in despair, and that she doesn’t want to do anything. Let’s see if she still thinks that way in the next one. :)]]>