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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #62: When Doe-Eyed Girls Attack!

Or, The World of Visual Novels Part 2

Nitroplus may be one of the biggest commercial visual novel production companies in Japan, but they haven't necessarily become pop culture mainstays like an EVANGELION or or GHOST IN THE SHELL. Perhaps the fact that their games are rated 18+ and feature sex scenes that are pretty much porn might have something to do with, though they've had some of their games adapted into non-porn anime series.

Not all visual novels are adult porn dating sims. Some of them are teen or all-ages, and the most notable one I've come across is 07th Expansion's supernatural murder mystery series HIGURASHI WHEN THEY CRY.

HIGURASHI NO NAKU KORO NI (translation: "When the Cicadas Cry") is described as a sound novel, where music and sound effects are considered integral to the text, creating an atmosphere to evoke a mood beyond the limited still artwork as the player/reader clicks through the story. It was sold as a series of eight chapters from 2002 to 2007, each a self-contained story with a beginning, middle and end, but it remains one of the most interesting experiments in storytelling in any medium I've seen. The story starts innocuously enough: the middle-school boy hero has moved to a small town in the hills and quickly becomes friends with the tightly-knit group of girls at his school, whiling away their days with games and pranks and generally doing all sorts of cute-kid stuff like any Japanese Moe series. Then things slowly turn dark when the annual village festival approaches. He hears rumours of a ritual murder carried out as part of the festivities every year, and his school friends – those sweet, big-eyed, chirpy girls – might be directly involved, and they've been hiding things from him all along. As he gets increasingly paranoid, he wonders if they're onto him, and their usual pranks get more and more sinister. Shades of THE WICKER MAN, only things are a lot more creepy. More deaths and bodies drop, and things do not end well.

Then in the second chapter, things start all over again, it's the same summer, the same year, with the summer festival approaching, only this time, different decisions are made, minor characters take centrestage, the teenage hero finds himself in another mystery of murder and escalating horror, more questions are raised about the nature of the town and the people in it, especially the kids, and the body count rises again. The mystery deepens.

It's like TWIN PEAKS meets GROUNDHOG DAY. The first four chapters set up the deepening mystery and hints of an almost Lovecraftian supernatural presence, then proceed to unwind and unfold them in the second half of the series, where every question is answered, all set-ups are richly paid off, and it's all brain-meltingly insane in such a way that makes it unique in any genre, let alone the Japanese manga-anime scene. Along with the console video game DEADLY PREMONITION, HIGURASHI is the closest I've seen anyone create their own version of the sense of surreal oddness of TWIN PEAKS, only unlike DEADLY PREMONITION, I don't detect a sense of homage. HIGURASHI is entirely its own animal, but coincidentally has a lot of the same themes and motifs that David Lynch peppered in his show and movies in general: the rural small town with deadly secret, the surreal twist on the mundane and even corny, the dark, supernatural intrusion of people possibly not from this world, bleeding into our own, strange conspiracies and the quirky behaviour and rituals of smalltown life. With all that going on, you don't need porn sex scenes. Besides, the main characters are underage. The series is proof that you don't need gratuitous sex scenes to be a success.

It's hard for me to talk about HIGURASHI at length without spoiling the plot, since it's all so mad and unique that the sense of discovery from watching the revelations unfold is part of the experience of the story. Like Lynch, the series takes known genre conventions – the murder mystery, the ghost story, the smalltown drama, high school comedy – and spin something entirely new out of it. At first glance, especially if you judge the artwork, it looks like a typical harem manga story about a teenage boy who ends up friends with a lot of girls, and then proceeds to twist the Moe convention into something darker and scarier. You know those cute, idealized, big-eyed girls in their cute sunny dresses? They might be psychotic homicidal maniacs who know their way around body parts with an axe, a machete or a kitchen knife… and they're looking at you in a way that you shouldn't feel too flattered about. In that respect, HIGURASHI is the most subversive commentary on the creepy Japanese obsession with Moe I've ever seen. And where a lot of Western plots set up a mystery whose answer is often something of a letdown, the payoff in HIGURASHI are even more weird and mind-blowing than you could ever predict. The motive behind the ritual murders is far more insane than you think. The hints of the supernatural are not a hoax. The scary girls may not be crazy at all. Minor characters turn out to be far more significant than initially thought. One supporting character turns out to know history is repeating itself over and over again literally from one chapter to the next. The ghostly presence that several characters sense in the early chapters but can't see really exists, and finally makes an appearance that changes the way everything turns out.

HIGURASHI is one example of a series that transcends its limitations: the art by its writer Ryukishi07 is often crude and unpolished, but it's the urgency and intricacy of the story that keeps readers/players hooked. 07th Expansion, the company that produced HIGURASHI is tiny, consisting of the pseudonymous Ryukishi07, his brother, and a handful of programmers and web managers. Like fellow doujin company Type-Moon (more about them in next week's column), they began as a fan circle selling their visual novel on CD-Rom at Comiket and ended up selling over a hundred thousand copies and eventually incorporating as a full-fledge multimedia company on the strength of a small body of work, in this case just one breakthrough franchise IP. The HIGURASHI series has been adapted in an anime series that lasted two seasons, a manga series, a series of prose light novels (about 17 at last count), two live action theatrical movies and even ported to the Playstation 2 and Nintendo DS, the latter two with expanded and additional storylines and much more polished art. Their second visual novels series, UMINEKO NO NAKU KORO NI (basic translation: "When the Seagulls Cry") is another Lynchian murder mystery about a dysfunctional family gathering on the island of their deceased patriarch only to find themselves trapped and murdered one by one, with hints of a supernatural presence driving the paranoia and insanity. Its concluding chapter is being released on disc this August and manga and light novel adaptations are already underway.

At this point, I should declare a personal bias: if you're not in the mood, clicking away at a computer screen for hours on end to read a story told in words and pictures can get incredibly tedious, and I haven't actually played through the HIGURASHI visual novels. I've found it easier and more painless to follow the story through the anime adaptation and manga series, both of which have been released in English. The art in both are a lot more polished and the traditional TV and comics storytelling are a lot easier to follow. They're also extremely faithful to the original plot. Funimation has licensed the anime in a boxset, and Yen Press has already brought out the manga that cover the first four chapters of the visual novel, with a different artist drawing each of the eight chapters.

For those of you who want to sample the original visual novel, it has been translated and available as downloads from a company called Manga Gamer. They are, alas, rather pricey, and the manga and anime versions are actually cheaper. On the other hand, the first two chapters are now available in English on the iTunes store as an app for the iPhone and iPad, with the first one free and the second costing only a few dollars.

Oh, for those of you who read Japanese, here's a link to 07th Expansion's official website.

Still prefer actual paper at lookitmoves@gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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