Umineko When they Cry is a 2007 Japanese kinetic visual novel with about a million words in it, making it the length of a series of books.  I spent the last 8 months reading it.  For many games and visual novels, people often say “trust me, it’s good, just go in blind”, but I don’t think that’s very helpful.  Therefore, this review will contain some spoilers regarding the basic premise and structure of the story, and a few specific elements that I liked.  If you’re totally avoiding spoilers and just want a five-word summary, it’s “Epic anime Agatha Christie metafiction.”

Recently, I wrote about the idea that mystery stories must be solvable.  This is not, in fact, true of most works in the mystery genre.  The solvability of mystery stories was promoted during the “golden age of detective fiction” (i.e. the early 20th century, with Agatha Christie as its most famous author), but it was not otherwise the genre norm.  However, in Japanese literature there was a revival movement in the 1980s and 90s, known as honkaku.  Umineko is clearly part of the honkaku tradition, or at least responding to it.

That’s right, Umineko, a visual novel with a million words, is a solvable puzzle.  How does that even work, without the reader feeling like they’re gnawing ineffectually at a massive jawbreaker for 8 months?

Umineko tells the story of a very wealthy family, squabbling over the inheritance they are due to receive when their patriarch dies.  The family conference is held on a remote island, and a hurricane cuts them off from the rest of society.  Soon there are a series of murders, usually occurring in locked rooms that seem impossible to explain.  And so the structure of the story is to give you a series of smaller mysteries (how did each murder occur?), hung around a larger mystery (who is the culprit?).  And that’s the first chapter.

In the next chapter, we do it again.  The murders are remixed.  The characters who previously died early on now survive longer, and are explored in greater depth.  There are many more locked rooms.  Is the culprit the same this time, or someone new?  And now there’s an even larger mystery: what’s even going on?  A meta layer is added “above” the story, depicting two of the characters arguing over the story’s interpretation.  One of the characters is a witch, trying to convince the protagonist that she committed the murders… using magic.

When I first read this, I thought, obviously magic exists.  The witch is right there!  She is serving tea at a magical metafictional tea party.  For some reason this indisputable evidence doesn’t come up in their arguments though.  Their arguments are altogether more absurd, yet thematically significant.

Although the story is broken up into many smaller mysteries, the reader cannot treat them as standalone puzzles to be solved as they come.  The tools needed to solve the puzzles are explained bit by bit.  This put me in the position of having to think back to events that I read literally months before in order to figure out what was going on.  I don’t have that kind of memory, and I wasn’t going to spend several more months re-reading it!  Perhaps this is a weakness of the epic mystery format, or a weakness of long-form literature in general.  (But I should clarify, it’s not strictly necessary to go back and resolve every detail.  That’s optional sidequest content, or postgame content if you will.  You could also do what I did, and just look up a summary later on.)

With a text this massive, I can’t say that I loved every bit of it.  The epic magical anime battles are not to my taste.  There were some bits about the inner lives of young kids that I found overly slow and saccharine.  I didn’t think it was necessarily bad, but it’s a story with a great deal of tonal range, exceeding my own palate.

My favorite aspect was the commentary on solvable mysteries.  Over the course of the story, it explains a lot of the sensibilities and conventions of solvable mystery stories, and why they are the way they are.  For example, earlier chapters address certain hangups about mysteries, like the desire to see the best in every person, even if that rules out every single suspect.  Later chapters discuss conventions like Knox’s Ten Commandments.  Eventually it obliquely comments on the relationship between mysteries and true crime.  I think reading and understanding Umineko may improve one’s literacy of mysteries in general.

But you mustn’t expect a lecture.  It doesn’t just tell you the way mysteries are, it plays with the boundaries, exploring possibilities that I’ve never seen before.  For example, my favorite character is a brilliant young detective… who serves as a villain.  I love her.

Overall, Umineko When They Cry was a fun and clever visual novel with a great deal of thematic depth.  It was absolutely worth the 8 months I spent reading it.

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Technical notes: I played the Steam version of Umineko, but I used the 07th mod to replace the art with PS3 graphics, because the original art is pretty rough.  The novel has also been adapted into an anime series and manga, although the anime is poorly regarded.  I’ve heard the manga explains the solutions in more explicit detail, for better or for worse.