Say It In Red | Episode 05: Higurashi Chapter 4: Himatsubushi

Say It In Red

This week, Sara and Runa travel to an unknown realm... 1978. More specifically, Hinamizawa in 1978 where we no longer see Keiichi as the protagonist but a new, freshly minted police investigator: Mamoru Akasaka. We've been entrusted with all of the information we might need to be able to understand Hinamizawa's mysteries, but this volume also throws a wrench in a lot of possible theories as well! Is Rika stuck in a groundhog day style time loop? Is her death in 1983 and the resulting Great Hinamizawa Disaster truly unavoidable? Just how much money has Ooishi skimmed off of discretionary funds over the years and then lost betting on Mahjong?
Higurashi no naku koro ni, Chapter 4: Himatsubushi (2003) transports us further back than we've ever been, to a time before the dam foreman was murdered and before the stirrings of Oyashiro-sama's curse took hold in Hinamizawa. As the protests against the dam reach a fevered pitch, the grandson of the Minister of Construction is kidnapped a Public Safety Police Officer, Mamoru Akasaka, is dispatched to Hinamizawa to investigate and, if possible, recover the kidnapped child safely. We already know from the first three volumes of Higurashi that he succeeds in saving the minister's grandson, but what else happened there when he was in Hinamizawa? Why is he still haunted by that case even years later? Is it possible to save someone in the past simply by learning The Truth of an incident?
As Akasaka investigates, Rika's firm declarations cast all the facts of the case into disarray and leave us all scrambling for answers...
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Content Warnings for this episode:
01:02:30 to 01:03:50: Theorizing about a suicide & related possibilities
01:16:45, 01:17:05 to 01:19:05: Discussion of death, syringes, and Torture from the Watanagashi chapter
01:35:50 to 01:37:00: Theorizing about the murder of Satoko's Parents