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weaselandfriends · 26 days ago

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Death and Identity in Post-postmodern Mystery

This essay contains spoilers for the entirety of Umineko When They Cry and spoilers for up to Chapter 140 of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere.

Near the end of the first half of Umineko When They Cry, a bizarre curveball is tossed into the logic duel between Battler and Beatrice. Beatrice claims that Battler is somehow not actually Battler, but rather an imposter, a body double brought to the island as part of a plot to seize the inheritance. Thus, Battler is unqualified to be her opponent, meaning he must be expelled from the metafictional realm where the game takes place, and the game itself must be cancelled.

Battler, stumped by her logic, cannot form a rebuttal. He disappears, his very existence denied. "Without the one pillar that established his soul," the story reads, "he had fallen into the very depths of darkness, and had been drifting about all this time."

In The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, a parallel moment occurs at the climax of the story's first half. The protagonist, Utsushikome of Fusai, confronts the person she believes to be the murderer, someone she knew when she was young. Cornered, he attempts to appeal to their childhood friendship, indicating he had even been in love with her. Utsushikome of Fusai cuts him off coldly, saying:

"I'm not Utsushikome of Fusai."

She then bludgeons him to death with a blunt instrument, committing a murder for which the reader immediately and unambiguously knows the culprit.

Identity is the fundamental question of even the most basic mystery novel. What is the identity of the culprit? Which character, seemingly a functional member of society, is actually a murderous villain?

As the genre has developed in complexity, this question has only become more prominent. Red herrings designed to throw off genre-savvy readers necessitate many non-culprits to also lead double lives or conceal key components of their identities. Inverted mysteries, where the culprit is revealed to the reader right away, emphasize the duality of the culprit's public persona and their murderous secret: Columbo's villains are exclusively elite, wealthy, and cultured, and Light Yagami is the seeming portrait of a model Japanese youth. Even House MD, a mystery story where "diseases are the suspects," predicates its drama on the fact that the diseased victim is concealing a double identity; in House's words, "Everyone lies."

Meanwhile, the mystery genre blurs the line between art and game. A proper mystery, as genre purists will tell you, must be solvable, must be fair, must follow certain "rules." If the culprit turns out to be a character who had not appeared in the story prior to their reveal, then the parameters of the game were broken, the reader had no chance. Ditto for the implementation of fanciful poisons or contraptions, secret twins, hidden passages, and so forth. These rules are in service of preserving the phenomenological experience of reading a mystery; like a game, the value of the work is expressed through the reader's attempts to interpret it, rather than its existence as a static artistic monument.

Yet, the genre has long been entangled with literary art. Mystery's foundation lies with authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, placing it as an outgrowth of the romantic and realist literary epochs. But between 1880 and 1930—the peak of literature as mass market entertainment, before film slowly usurped it—from when Sherlock Holmes popularized the genre until the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, mystery became its "own thing," and in being its "own thing" suddenly resisted the artistic spirit of its time, whatever that time might be. The Golden Age coincides temporally with the height of modernist fiction, and yet none of the stream of consciousness or abstraction that defines the latter seeps into the former whatsoever. In the post-WWII postmodern era, when literature increasingly rejected the concept of objective truth altogether, detective fiction (both in literature and in new, televised forms) continued to doggedly assert the objective truth of the culprit's identity, the objective solvability of the crime.

A lot of this discrepancy has to do with the general schism between "art" and "entertainment" that arose in literature between the late 1800s and early 1900s. As the modernists ventured in more experimental directions, a newly literate and growing middle class continued to clamor for works that were more relatable to their pragmatic, dollars-and-cents sensibilities. (I often talk about "modernism" and "postmodernism" as these all-encompassing artistic zeitgeists, but the truth is that literary realism has never fallen out of vogue with mass audiences, and even in the 1920s a realist social satirist like Sinclair Lewis—not to mention twenty names you've never heard of writing at a similar bent—sold more than Hemingway and Faulkner combined.)

By entrenching itself within the "entertainment" sphere, and by continually defining itself against itself (the process by which "genre" is created), mystery fiction was able to develop independently of the overall artistic milieu and maintain a faith in objective reality even as that became an increasingly untenable position elsewhere. And it's what makes post-postmodern mystery fiction like Umineko and The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere so fascinating to me.

Umineko didn't emerge in a vacuum. It extends from Japan's dedicated mystery subculture, and I've heard that it shares many similarities with The Decagon House Murders, a 1987 novel by Yukito Ayatsuji. Japan has its own unique relationship with postmodernism as a literary movement, with it being more of a clearly-defined artistic fad that reached prominence in the 1980s specifically, compared to the West where postmodernism seems to be the nightmare of a post-WWII world from which we cannot awaken. I wish I had more familiarity with the Japanese mystery subculture to more authoritatively speak on this subject, but I do know that it, like the West, still believes strongly in the solvability of its mysteries. I described Japan as having a "postmodern" mystery scene, but that's not what Japan calls it. In Japan, the term for a solvable, "fair play" mystery is honkaku, meaning "orthodox"—or, roughly equivalent, "classical." And beginning with The Decagon House Murders, Japanese mystery entered a new era, shin-honkaku—neoclassical.

These terms are a perfect fit. In the West, the classical is associated with the Renaissance, and indicates a focus on mathematical precision in service of the objective truth associated with God. (The golden ratio, after all, is called divina proportione in Italian—divine proportion.) The precise, solvable logic of a classical murder mystery fits within this framework, and the neoclassical mystery retains its core beliefs, much as how Napoleon Bonaparte wielded neoclassicism to lend divine legitimacy to his rule. Despite the increased complexity and metatextuality of shin-honkaku mysteries, there remains that belief in objective truth.

Umineko does not believe in objective truth.

Umineko, as a mystery, is fucking bullshit. Solving it relies on so many unspoken metafictional conceits, and even if you do "solve" it, it turns out that the culprit of the first half of the story isn't even the """real""" culprit, because the first half of the story was actually just in-universe murdersona fanfic and the actual """""truth""""" of what happened on the island is completely irrelevant to most of the mysteries with which the reader is presented.

And that's under the assumption that Umineko actually tells you who the """""""real""""""" culprit is, because it doesn't, unless you read the manga, where it was thrown in as a bone to an absolutely incensed fanbase. Umineko was not popular with the Japanese mystery crowd, which makes sense, because they get pretty directly and brutally lampooned. This is a story where a detective quoting Hercule Poirot gets introduced halfway into the story and is an unequivocal villain (she calls herself an "intellectual rapist"), with the heroes fighting to conceal the truth from her.

No, Umineko does not believe in objective truth. It might believe it exists, in some abstract way, but it does not believe it matters, compared to the magic of subjective reality. About 90 percent of Umineko (honestly a lowball estimate) depicts stuff that didn't really happen. Sometimes it depicts stuff that didn't really happen within the subjective reality of a fanfic that itself didn't really happen. Even most flashbacks set before the mystery or flash forwards set after are mired in unreality.

No, what Umineko believes in is emotional truth, subjective truth. The story's key phrase is "Without love it cannot be seen," referring to how biases (love) influence one's understanding of reality. The "Red Truth," objectively correct statements, are depicted as painful and punishing, or spiderwebs that ensnare helpless victims. It is in the space between what is known objectively where magic is allowed to exist, where interpretation can supersede fact, and where true emotional catharsis can be reached.

As such, it is the antithesis to the mystery genre.

It's also the antithesis of postmodernism. Not rejecting it, in an impossible attempt to return to some pre-modern understanding of the world; no, Umineko agrees with postmodern thought on the subjectivity of our reality. Where it diverges is in the interpretation of that subjectivity, seeing in it not the cynical nihilism postmodernism quickly (perhaps from the onset) devolved into, but a new method of reaching emotional and intellectual fulfillment.

This, to me, is what the post-postmodern artistic zeitgeist has increasingly turned toward. Works that recognize the information-dense, ungraspable reality of the post-internet age, but seek and ultimately find emotional catharsis within it. Everything Everywhere All at Once, Spider-verse and unlimited lesser multiverse stories, Homestuck, even the origin point of the literary mode Infinite Jest all operate within this theme.

Where Umineko seeks its catharsis is in identity. While the central "game" of the mystery, sometimes literalized as a chess match between Battler and Beatrice, initially appears to be Battler's attempt to discern the true culprit in classical mystery fashion, from Beatrice's perspective the game is an attempt to assert and confirm the existence of her identity altogether.

In "reality," Beatrice the Golden Witch "does not exist." There is no magical being haunting the island. Beatrice is an identity invented by another character in an attempt to generate meaning for their life. And that meaning is, fundamentally, important, perhaps more important than the objective facts that deny her existence. Which is why, as the story continues, Battler switches to Beatrice's side and defends her existence from a slate of cackling ghouls dredged out of the annals of classical mystery, who sling the "rules" of classical mystery about like weapons to maim and kill. Objectivity is the enemy, the Red Truth is a prison, but it cannot cover everything and in the mercy of subjective reality, a different sort of "truth" can be allowed to live. As the story goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that this "truth" is everything. Umineko never explicitly reveals the true killer on Rokkenjima, though mostly only through technicality. That's fine. Even by technicality, subjectivity can be allowed to live. Beatrice's identity remains.

Return to that moment I described at the start of this essay, where Beatrice briefly denies Battler's identity. In the overall narrative of Umineko, it winds up being an almost entirely inconsequential scene. Shortly after Battler disappears, his sister Ange asserts that even if Battler was not born to Asumu, he is still Kinzo's grandson, meaning he is a true heir to the Ushiromiya family and thus qualified to be Beatrice's opponent. Battler returns and the status quo is swiftly reestablished.

What is the purpose of this scene, then? In character, it makes sense as a play for Beatrice to make. Her own identity has been constantly under assault from Battler, most recently—and most painfully, for her—when Battler forgot an important promise he once made to her. She is giving him his own medicine as revenge. But it's a very dramatic and extreme turn for something so petty. The scene does establish that Battler was not actually born to the woman he believed to be his mother (Asumu), but what does this mean for the story itself?

Beatrice's claim stems from a convoluted baby swapping plot that is revealed much later in Umineko. It turns out that Rudolf had a child with both Asumu and his mistress Kyrie at the same time, and Asumu's child, the "real" Battler, died immediately, so Kyrie's child was renamed Battler and substituted for the real thing. Both children were Rudolf's son, and thus Kinzo's grandson, and all of this really has nothing to do with anything else going on in Umineko's mystery, and is kind of pointless. (It does suggest Battler as a red herring identity for the mysterious baby Kinzo tries to foist onto Natsuhi in Umineko's fifth episode, but as far as red herrings go, it's a lot of legwork for not much deception.)

I've always been fascinated, though, by what it would mean if Beatrice's claim were true. Not just that Battler wasn't Asumu's son, but that he was not related to the Ushiromiya family at all. There's some fairly compelling evidence in its favor. It's stated early on that Battler, at age 12, became angry when his father married Kyrie shortly after Asumu's death, and estranged himself from the family for six years. His appearance at the family conference where most of Umineko takes place is the first time anyone in the family has seen him since, and almost everyone is surprised by the physical transformation Battler has undergone, particularly remarking on how incredibly tall he is. Near the end of Umineko, when it is suggested that Rudolf and Kyrie are the mystery's "true" culprits, the idea that they brought in some yakuza thug to pose as Battler and help them murder everyone becomes compelling.

But that's just the practical aspect of the mystery. What about the story itself? What would it mean for the ultimate moment of emotional catharsis at the end of the narrative, when Ange—dying of cancer—finally reunites with her long lost brother, only to discover he isn't actually her brother at all?

Well, that's actually what happens at the end of Umineko. Not because Battler is a yakuza thug, though. It's because of yet another oddly-inserted plot element where Battler receives brain damage escaping the island and develops a dissociative identity disorder that causes him to view himself as Tohya Hachijo, an amnesiac author.

Though somewhat farfetched, this last-second development makes sense within Umineko's thematic framework, where identity—and the capacity for people to inhabit multiple identities at once, either literally or through the subjective interpretations of the people around them—is one of the key drivers of the story's emotional core. For Ange, her brother is lost, and yet meeting Tohya is a moment of intense catharsis, because she is willing to believe in the redemptive magic of love and "see" a subjective truth more powerful than objective reality. After all, this meeting occurs in the "Treat" ending, and is placed in contrast to the "Trick" ending, where Ange instead embraces objective rationalism and deals with uncertainty by gunning down anyone who might possibly be a threat to her. (Which turns out to be every character in her immediate vicinity.)

I wonder how that Treat ending catharsis would read, though, if instead of the author Tohya Hachijo, who deals with his identity disorder by writing fictional accounts of the Rokkenjima massacre that, while not the literal truth, reach for a subjective or emotional truth, the version of her brother Ange met was Battler the yakuza thug, who was never her brother but a cheap imposter. It would probably undermine Umineko's entire message. It would at the very least make the Treat ending seem like a nasty trick in its own right. Or would Ange still be able to "see" an emotional truth even in this? Where does the line between subjective reality and pathetic delusion lie? What, exactly, would be the identity of the brain-damaged man she reunites with? What is the identity of the story's protagonist?

That's where The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere comes in. When its central mystery starts, a metafictional interlude occurs in which rules for solving the murder(s) are established. The first rule reads:

1. THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PROTAGONIST IS ALWAYS TRUTHFUL

This rule, like many of the subsequent rules, is highly questionable. The story has already thrown into doubt who exactly the "protagonist" is. That seems like an odd thing to say, because the very first chapter, numbered 000, appears to make it explicitly clear:

"Understand this: Your role in the scenario has been elevated from that of bystander to that of the heroine, and your victory condition is thus," she continued. "You must ascertain the identity of your opponent, the cause of the bloodshed to follow, and prevent it before it comes to pass. In order to accomplish this goal, you must pay close heed to all which transpires, and use deduction, alongside your skills and past experience of the events to follow. Do you understand your role?" "Yes," I said, muted.

The issue is that whoever the perspective character is in 000, they are not the same person as the perspective character for the rest of the story. It eventually becomes clear that they share the same body, that they are both called Utsushikome of Fusai. Nonetheless, they are distinct identities. They have different memories, different motives, and different personalities. Much later, they even hold a conversation with one another in the same metafictional realm where the mystery's rules were outlined, a metafictional realm that turns out to not be metafictional at all.

Of course, neither of these Utsushikome of Fusais are actually Utsushikome of Fusai. They are gestalt personalities that combine the memories and personality of an original Utsushikome of Fusai with the memories and personality of an entirely different girl named Kuroka, and then after the two Utsushikome of Fusais diverged from one another for reasons that are, as of writing, not fully clear but potentially due to the accumulation of memory over a centuries-long time loop. This labyrinth of identity defines the story as much as its core mystery. As said mystery hurtles toward its climax, scenes in the present are intercut with flashbacks detailing how the current identity of Utsushikome of Fusai came to be. In the present mystery, there is no ultimate reveal of the culprit (one is proposed, but in fairly faulty fashion). In the past, though, the reveal of the truth of Utsushikome's identity is laid bare, brutally and explicitly, to the point that it consumes the main narrative, and culminates in the scene I described at the beginning of this essay, where the gestalt entity inhabiting Utsushikome's body discards her identity as Utsushikome and performs a brutal on-screen murder.

In doing so, the traditional climax of the mystery novel—the unmasking of the culprit—is reframed. It is the protagonist, not the culprit, who is "unmasked." Flower is, ostensibly, a time loop murder mystery (though only one loop is shown), and shortly after committing this murder, Utsushikome meets another character, who tells her that in 90 percent of loops, Utsushikome herself is the murderer. It's a claim that seems unbelievable, despite what just happened, based on the reader's knowledge of Utsushikome as a bumbling and indecisive girl who needed the most extreme circumstances to rouse herself to violence (an "anxious waif," as the author, Lurina, described her to me). It's a claim even Utsushikome meets with doubt. At the same time, how much does the reader really know about this character? How much does she know about herself? Throughout the story, her name is split into various nicknames: Utsu, Su, Shiko, each tied to a different part of her existence. The fragmentation of her name symbolizes the fragmentation of her psyche, and the version of her the reader follows—the ostensible "protagonist"—is Su, the smallest and most fragmentary scrap of her, the one most divorced from knowledge and understanding.

If Umineko exhibited faith in the magic of subjective interpretation, Flower provides a cynical counterpoint. Forget comprehending other people, or the confusion of your increasingly complex world. What if you cannot even comprehend yourself? What if, rather than the redemptive turn of Umineko's Treat ending, one looked inward and saw only greater incomprehensibility? In Beatrice, Umineko has its own character whose psyche fragmented into various constituent personalities, each with their own name and appearance. Yet Umineko posits a beauty in these personalities, and its protagonists fight for their right to exist in the face of crushing objective reality. For Utsushikome, her fragmented selves are base, ominous, potentially murderers, or indeed actually murderers—as even Su considers herself the murderer of the original Utsushikome. Her primary goal, more important to her than solving the mystery, is finding a way to undo the gestalt fusion that underlies her personality and restoring the original Utsushikome. Beatrice fights to justify her existence; Su fights to destroy it.

Postmodernism's focus on the subjectivity of individual experience quickly turned it toward cynicism, even nihilism, and the all-pervading "irony" that David Foster Wallace made his personal bugbear. One can only know their own experience of the world, not anyone else's, and the outside world is becoming increasingly complex, increasingly unfathomable, increasingly disorderly. Post-postmodernism was, from its inception, a deliberate turn away from that cynicism. A way of finding emotional catharsis even after logic dissolved. Umineko operates within this framework, while Flower goes in the opposite direction. The postmodernists were too optimistic. They at least believed in subjective truth. In the world of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, even that strip of reality is shredded.

Entropy features big in the postmodern landscape, brought to literary prominence by Thomas Pynchon, who studied engineering physics and often used mathematical motifs as analogies for social concepts. Flower, too, engages with the concept of entropy, or rather revolves around it. The central murder mystery is set at the sanctuary of an order of scientists dedicated to curing death, and the way they have sought to do so involves stealing a piece of an entropic god-entity and incarnating it in human form.

As such, Flower strongly ties the concept of death to the concept of entropy. I said before that identity is the fundamental question of even the most basic mystery novel, but the same could be said for death; you'd have to go back to The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, or maybe mystery stories made for children, to find a mystery without murder. Van Dine's rules for mystery put it emphatically:

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

I love this because it's such a cavalier treatment of death in narrative, as though death, rather than a tragedy, was simply a way to kickstart a plot—or a "reward" for the "expenditure of energy" (as though a reader's energy is finite, and always being entropically lost). Indeed, many of the Golden Age detectives who found themselves amid a new murder a month seemed to take a similarly detached tack toward the whole affair. Umineko lampoons this as well; its Hercule Poirot parody, when faced with a group of people playing dead, goes on a six-man mass decapitation spree just to ensure there really is a mystery to solve.

Flower philosophically confronts the question of death as early as Chapter 002, when fan favorite smarmy bitch Kamrusepa goads Su into an argument over the moral implications of curing death. Kamrusepa takes a rationalist, "anti-deathist" perspective, stating that not only is curing death a fundamentally good thing to do, but the most good thing that can be done; that curing death would not only be valuable in and of itself, but would also lead to the alleviation of every other social ill. Su is less sure. Certainly, a deathless world wouldn't be free of social strife. But there's also another argument she flirts with: Perhaps people, like Van Dine's readership, somehow need death to orient the meaning of their lives around.

Her thought process mirrors that of the mystery genre. If the genre has absolute faith in objective truth, it also has absolute faith in utter destruction. Crimes less than the complete annihilation of a thinking being will not suffice. In such a way, even the most orthodox or classical mysteries themselves have a drop of the postmodern in them, a faith in the incontrovertible necessity of entropic dissolution, though in the form of the human body rather than society or information. It's notable to me that, in contrast, Umineko posits a sort of immortality for its victims, alive in the "Golden Land" within the Treat ending despite the objective reality of their tragic deaths, or even alive within the metafictional conceit of the Rokkenjima game board, where if the players desire they can always open up the box, set the pieces aright, a play with these characters once more. Through its use of the time loop, Flower rejects this proposal; its characters are trapped in a game without end, and ultimately conspire to escape this hellish immortality they've wrought for themselves. (Remember also that Utsushikome's role as protagonist, explicated in 000, was not to solve a murder, but to prevent it, which she fails at utterly and quickly.)

The Flower That Blooms Nowhere is still ongoing, and many of its mysteries remain unresolved simply due to that fact. I've spoken extensively to the author, Lurina, and she assures me she is committed to the solvability of the mystery, which suggests that she intends to ultimately reveal the truths behind the murders and everything else. This essay isn't intended to be predictive of the story's future (which, as of the latest updates, is heading into some of the most exciting territory yet, with many meditations on death and identity that I would love to talk about in this essay but withheld because I know many readers aren't caught up), but rather an assessment of what currently stands. What I find most fascinating about Flower is how it rejects so many of the redemptive post-postmodern precepts that imbue Umineko, despite borrowing so much of its metatextual complexity, and without retreating into the classical or even postmodern, as would seem to be the only alternative. Instead, Flower's vivisection of identity and death within post-postmodern concepts strike me as a wholly new and unique artistic direction, and once more makes me excited for the growing avant garde to be found within web fiction.

#umineko #the flower that bloomed nowhere #tftbn #umineko no naku koro ni #umineko when they cry #mystery #postmodernism #post-postmodernism

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