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pochapal · 4 months

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Umineko Liveblog: Thoughts/Theories [Episode 1 Chapter 14 Edition]

Umineko Chapter 14’s thesis statement was “let’s take these patterns and conventions we’re establishing and blow them all up with gleeful abandon”. Less than an hour from the Second Twilight, we’re forced to bear witness to twilights four and five, and not necessarily in that order. The Witch Narrative is off the rails. The most important character in Umineko to me died, and Beatrice may actually well and truly be real for once. Whatever’s going on here is one hell of a mess.

So let’s try and untangle whatever the hell went down here. The Chapter 14 writeup tour includes the following stops: the hot mess formerly known as the Witch Narrative, Kinzo finally being totally super dead for real, the world’s nastiest most evil twink death in human history (Kanon), identity and furniture and roulettes, Beatrice the Golden Witch’s understated grand entrance into the story, the 19th person conundrum (part 7123748296), and some downright funky stuff happening beneath the story’s surface.

Let’s get this going.

To start, we need to talk about the Witch Narrative. So far, the Witch Narrative has been the term I’ve given to a very clearly established phenomenon and set of actions. When there are characters who have some kind of vested interest in encouraging you to view Rokkenjima as a supernatural incident rather than a crime, then that’s the Witch Narrative. The person painting the magic circles is perpetuating the Witch Narrative. Characters such as Eva and Hideyoshi talking about how frightful and demonic things are is also the Witch Narrative. If you’re thinking “maybe this is Beatrice after all” or if things are aligning a little too well with the worst interpretation of the epitaph riddle, then that is without a shadow of a doubt the Witch Narrative.

So what happened? Kanon being gouged in the chest and also killed mere minutes after the discovery of the torn-apart pair who are close is not right. Skipping to twilight five (for the trolls) straight after number two is not good Witch Narrative etiquette. The sequence of murders and horrors is crucial to authenticating this slaughter as folded within the ritual to revive the Golden Witch and/or reach the Golden Land. Everything so far has dictated that in order for the witch to revive and none to be left alive certain steps must be carried out in a certain order. If this performance is thrown out of sequence for its audience, the song goes funky. Suddenly you’re aware you’re watching people playing pretend on a stage and this world you’re buying into is only ephemeral. If the sequence of deaths doesn’t matter, then this isn’t an occult ritual at all. It is in fact a disguised butchering.

Showing your hand like this this early makes things very difficult for those peddling this narrative. Deaths happening out of sequence takes this from a supernatural force happening beyond everyone’s control to something that could easily done by a human desperate to make everybody believe. If my theories about how this performance is happening ring true, then it becomes infinitely harder for Genji to make any further moves with the simultaneous blow of his most useful pawn kicking it early and the order of events getting all scrambled. How can the stomach, leg, and knee get gouged in a way that still works in service for this narrative now?

Given what I’m thinking, Genji is likely moving on his own now. Kumasawa and maybe Nanjo are complicit in the spreading of the story, but they are almost certainly unable to be as useful to any kind of scheme as Kanon was. They are older, less mobile, less physically able. Kumasawa can scream about magic circles all she likes, but does she have the strength to move and mutilate corpses? Very unlikely. The options to carry things out have been severely limited to an almost unsalvageable degree. Every crime so far has been a type of locked room that works via tricks that could only be carried out by two active parties. Being on your own can only get you so far.

Which leads you to an immediate conclusion: Kanon dying in the basement boiler room was not part of the plan. Or, not part of the Witch Narrative at least. His death marks a point where this scheme has totally gone off the rails, and Genji’s script has been rendered worthless. The presentation of the death is obfuscated, but the truth beneath it is that something went deeply wrong that shouldn’t have.

This is a bold claim I’m making, but I also think I have enough proof in the story to substantiate it. I think, going by everything, the next incident following the deaths of Eva and Hideyoshi was to involve the basement in one form or another. I also think that this was being prepared in parallel with the Second Twilight – Genji and Nanjo leave the kitchen at the same time as Kanon and Kumasawa, but the two men don’t reach the scene until after Kanon has already unlocked the room and Eva and Hideyoshi have been found dead with the stakes in their skulls. Enough time to, say, take a trip down to the basement and set some dominoes in motion.

As to what I think was part of the Witch Narrative, I think everything was on track right up until the moment Kanon set foot in the basement. The foul smell filling the hallway was almost certainly set in motion by Genji and/or Nanjo (perhaps by turning on the boiler while Eva and Hideyoshi were being found in order to time it to make the smell the strongest at the perfect time – this may also have precluded moving Kinzo’s body there depending on where he was before now). Kanon acting bizarrely freaked out was part of the plan. As was Kumasawa screaming about hearing a noise, and the two of them breaking off from the group to rush ahead to investigate. Everything falls apart when Kanon sets foot in the basement and Beatrice shows up and he dies.

So what was the intended plan in the basement involving Kinzo? I think, if I were to hazard a guess based off of pre-existing patterns, the boiler room in the basement was going to be used as another locked room, this time featuring Kinzo. I think this would have been a play in two acts. The first act would have Kanon and Kumasawa chase the noise to the basement and “find” the head’s ring on the ground. The family would search the boiler room and find the back door exit locked up, and no sign of Kinzo anywhere in sight (there would be efforts taken to keep anyone from investigating the boiler). The ring alone on the ground in an empty room would stand in for the Third Twilight – Kinzo is without his headship and authority, so it must therefore fall to everyone to praise Beatrice’s noble name in his stead. Dissatisfied and creeped out, everyone leaves the basement – the back door is locked from the inside, and the front door locked with a key placed in Natsuhi’s possession.

From here, this would likely have led to another discussion chapter about how the ring got there. The setup of the scene would be enough that Battler would question whether or not a nineteenth person placed the ring there, or if Kinzo himself actually dropped it there as part of some other ploy. The servants would be questioned and swear up and down there was nobody else in the basement when they entered. The sound would be discussed, as would the impossibility that anybody known to be alive could make that noise. The conversation would then turn to Kinzo as the likely suspect and Natsuhi, who’s been complicit in covering up Kinzo’s death for some time already, would start sweating as this truth grows closer to being uncovered. It’s up in the air as to whether or not the servants would help or hinder Natsuhi here, but I think it’s likely Battler would have started to think on Eva’s words from earlier. More fuel on the Natsuhi culprit fire that she can’t fight because she can’t admit to knowing what he knows. Maria would then cackle and say to everyone that this is obviously Beatrice manipulating things with her magic, and boom, scene.

Something would then happen in the next chapter to turn attention back to the boiler room. Perhaps the smell grows stronger. Perhaps the conversation about Kinzo grows to a fever pitch. Perhaps a servant fakes hearing another noise from the basement. Whatever the case, we would return to the boiler room a second time. There would be a point made of showing Natsuhi pulling out the only key to the boiler room and everyone stepping inside to find Kinzo’s body on the floor, burned up with an icepick stake in his forehead. The inner lock for the back door would still be set. Genji and Nanjo would confirm the body’s identity via the polydactyly. Somehow, Kinzo’s dead body appeared in the middle of a perfectly locked room.

Likely there would then be discussions of who could have killed Kinzo, given that at the time of his “death” everyone was yet again together (minus Kanon/Genji slipping in and out of the parlor to get food and drinks). The assumption would be that Kinzo was alive in there all along, and then killed himself for some reason – contradicted by the fact that if he launched himself into the boiler, how did he drag himself back out into the middle of the floor? The mystery would stump Battler, because the only major solution would be to assume a nineteenth person was also already hiding in the locked basement, and killed Kinzo and displayed the corpse, but Battler would chessboard himself out of leaning on that option. Out of options and stumped, we would stay at another stalemate where there’s no proof that Beatrice exists, but no way that the surviving humans could have set up this scene (there are of course ways, such as a back door that wasn’t really locked or a second key/master key with which to return to the boiler room and set things up, but nobody will think of them). The horrors would escalate. The Witch Narrative would persist. And so on. And so on.

This scenario, believable as it is, never came to happen. Instead we got what we got, and we need to figure out why. Why did Kinzo show up like this? Why did Kanon die, despite all known logic and reasoning stating that the contrary would be ideal? Why are things speeding up at such an exponential rate? I think we can get a good shape of what was supposed to be with Kinzo, but understanding what happened with Kanon is almost certainly the linchpin driving this deviation from the Witch Narrative.

So, let’s review: Kanon and Kumasawa head to the basement after “hearing a noise” that nobody could have possibly made. Kanon speeds off ahead of Kumasawa and encounters… something in the boiler room. He has a conversation with this something and comes to a revelation about his status as a human being, and then he gets gouged in the chest and killed. The presentation is straightforward: Kanon sees butterflies in the boiler room, he identifies it as Beatrice, he stands in defiance of her, and dies as a result. Except, of course, that it really isn’t that simple at all.

The tonal shift is introduced through the phrase “a fantastical scene”. Fantasy has been a phrase thrown about a few times in the story so far by characters in reference to very specific things, people, and concepts. The siblings call Kinzo’s story of the gold ingots “fantasy”. Beatrice is “fantasy”. The occult symbols around Rokkenjima are “fantasy”. Maria’s behaviour is “fantasy”. Straight away, we can draw parallels between the use of the word “fantasy” and the term “existence”. To be fantasy is to “exist”, is to be something that is propped up by narrative and belief irrespective of the material reality.

In that case, what does it mean for a scene to be fantasy? In a story about storytelling and about fantasy and about “existence”, there is surely nothing accidental about the prose describing a series of events as “a fantastical scene”. Two things are immediately happening here. The first is that we are stepping into the framework of fantasy, of belief without proof and immateriality fuelled more by ghosts than flesh. The second is that we are entering into a self-conscious scene capable of describing itself as such. This is a narrative unit that knows what it is, a story told by a teller with an agenda.

I think to explain what’s happening here, it’s worth circling all the way back to some of the metafictional stuff I was entertaining back before people started dying. More specifically, the notion that there are narrators with agendas involved in the construction and presentation of Umineko. This is most passively seen in the less-reliable third person scenes where we can be shown metaphor and falsehood to convey a deeper emotional truth – Kinzo has most likely been dead all along, and yet he has also made numerous appearances in his study over the weekend of the family conference. However, the “fantasy” of these moments is never explicitly highlighted. These scenes are a type of “fantasy”, but not a fantasy that you need to be told is the case. You can understand Natsuhi and Genji’s hearts and feelings towards Kinzo regardless of whether or not you think the family head is alive or dead.

Here, though, to be directly told you are witnessing a fantasy is tipping the scales. The arbitrator of this fantasy, of whatever might be going on in the narrative beyond the framing confines of Rokkenjima, is much more actively and directly introducing the concept to Kanon’s final moments. On their own, they would be in the same vein as whatever was happening with the Kinzo scenes if a little more heavy handed and obtuse, but we are not left to puzzle out whether or not we can trust what we are seeing. We are told outright this is fantasy. We are forced to acknowledge from the outset that there is something untrustworthy and unreliable about this chunk of the story.

Why?

I think that this is glaring evidence of some kind of discrepancy between the narrator(s) and the actors in Umineko. Something happens in the boiler room which the narrative feels the need to paint over with a depiction of swarms of butterflies and cackling murderwitches – the need to plaster fantasy over this scene matters more than upholding the story’s rule that Beatrice remains a possibility in shadow. Just as I argued that the Witch Narrative went off the rails here, I think the same thing applies to the Umineko Narrative as well. If there’s a metafictional “game” going on here, then Kanon in the boiler room knocked that off kilter, too. The zero on the roulette threatened to ruin not only “Beatrice”, but also Beatrice and also the fabric of the text itself. Whatever Kanon did or almost did rattled a lot of people all at once.

But what is this thing, actually? What we’re shown is Kanon having enough of being bound to the whims of Kinzo and Beatrice and their bastardised excuse for “magic”, and him deciding as a result to abandon his position and furniture and ruin the demon’s roulette in motion. In real terms, this is hard to parse as meaningful outside of its fantasy context. Kinzo, as we know, is not the one setting the roulette in motion in the way we’re led to believe. Beatrice is a dubiously-extant entity represented by so many different people wearing her name instead of a concrete person. Magic is anything belonging to the realm of metaphor or anything that happens on a non-material level. And the Demon’s Roulette is the catch-all term for the epitaph ritual, the Witch Narrative, and maybe also the layers of abuse going on on Rokkenjima.

The only term that has a direct material representation is “furniture”. Luckily, this is probably the most important part of Kanon’s moment of defiance, so it is extremely fortuitous that we can more easily define furniture in a way that makes sense in order to more deeply understand what’s actually going on here.

To recap, “furniture” is the label applied to servants on Rokkenjima within Kinzo’s inner circle. Three servants in the story use this label – Shannon, Kanon, and Genji. From Shannon’s backstory that we got in chapter 8 during the proposal, it is very likely that “furniture” is a term foisted upon the teenage orphan servants that come and go on Rokkenjima as a kind of degrading, abusive brand. We see this most keenly through Shannon, who submits to Battler’s sexual harassment because she is furniture and thus lacks the will to deny anything. These vulnerable abused kids are forced into a new name and a new role where they are little more than living objects for people more powerful than them to use and abuse as they see fit. To be furniture is to be totally under the thumb of Kinzo’s abuse, serving those needs even when it goes against all morality and all that you are.

Genji’s positioning with the label is less clear, given that he was, at some point at least, on more equal footing with Kinzo. It is likely that Genji adopted the “furniture” label for himself as a kind of expression of his feelings – he is nothing more than an extension of Kinzo’s will, and all he does is in service of his master. He does not have a life outside of servitude. However, the difference here is that Genji willingly stepped into the label versus Shannon and Kanon who had it forced upon them. To an outside perspective, this creates an unfair impression of equality between the three of them, when Genji absolutely has more material autonomy and personal rights than either Shannon or Kanon. Genji feels bad about Kinzo and about how all he can be to the man is his butler. Shannon and Kanon are cruelly abused and dehumanised every second of their lives. It is a false equivalency. The only commonality here is that to be “furniture” is to occupy an undesirable position within hierarchy.

Under this light, Kanon’s declaration that he is no longer furniture can immediately be read as Kanon deciding in that moment to cease existing as an object to be used by people with more power than him – power “exists”, and in a closed environment ruled by fantasy, power can be denied with more ease than would normally be available. Kanon decides he is no longer an extension of another’s will, but instead his own person. He decides this because Shannon is dead, and the least he can do is take revenge against the systems that killed her.

That said, such an explanation is deceptively simple. If denying your status as furniture comes when you cease to adhere to the whims of power, the boiler room scene carries with it the implication that this is the very first time Kanon has done anything of his own will. Kanon has been deeply involved with the Witch Narrative thus far, and if this scene is to be trusted then this is an admission that he has had zero autonomy in the prior events. Or, to expand this further, Kanon is not where he wishes to be and is only now realising this desire. He steps out of his role as a pawn in the augmented fiction around him, and Beatrice kills him for it.

You can view this as happening on multiple layers, each one perfectly able to feed into the “fantasy” hanging over everything. On the level of the Witch Narrative, this is Kanon partaking in an act of defiance and getting killed for it. On a more abstract level, this is Kanon threatening to ruin Umineko and being taken out of the story as a result. To be killed by Beatrice so explicitly comes with much deeper ramifications given the state of Beatrice's presence in the story thus far. If a ghost-myth-metaphor appears in the flesh to kill you and turn you into a prop for the next part of the story, what does that mean?

It was not enough for Kanon to just die. He had to be gouged and killed and transformed into the victim of the next twilight – you can easily make the argument that under the terms of the story being turned into a gouged/killed victim is yet another, more severe form, of being rendered furniture. With the Ushiromiya siblings, this concept can easily exist as a form of poetic irony – these powerful abusive individuals are all left as butchered pieces of furniture to be used and deployed however Beatrice sees fit. You are never as powerless as you are when you're a mangled corpse being manipulated by your own killer.

Except Kanon was already furniture – in his own words, even, this is a servitude that applies to Beatrice as much as it does Kinzo. The reversal of fortune works less well on Kanon; his death is an act of rebellion that is transformed into a reinforcement of his inescapable position. He tries to become human and fails at the first hurdle, and thus goes from being furniture to once again being furniture.

I think this situation is worth examining through the lens of the dichotomy of self framework to yield more information. To recap, almost everybody in Umineko struggles with the gap between who they want to be and who they're forced to be. This is a near-universal constant, seen with Natsuhi as much as it is with Shannon. Everyone desperately desires to be somebody else, and hardly anybody can reach this dream.

Kanon is a curious wrinkle in this pattern in several regards. Up until now, as a servant Kanon has been markedly less furniture-like than Shannon. At every turn he has been prickly and begrudging and making no secret of his own feelings to himself, unlike Shannon who leaned so far into the mask she ended up cutting herself off from herself. With Shannon, Sayo almost certainly feels more complicated and unpleasant emotions, but this is completely partitioned off from her servant self. With Kanon, there is an emotional authenticity to his character, but unlike Shannon, Kanon's “Sayo” is nowhere to be seen.

Kanon is not trying to become his desirable self. He is attempting to transform his undesirable self. Where Shannon/Sayo was looking for an exit from being furniture through George, Kanon's actions promise no such escape. He never discards his furniture name, only the label. Kanon does not multiply himself. Kanon reduces himself into a singular concentrated point within the story.

To Beatrice, an entity that thrives on multiplicity and iterative selfhood, an individual who not only defies her rule of power but also eschews his own identity complex in the face of self-actualisation would be something to be loathed. In Chapter 14, Kanon stands for everything Beatrice is not: painfully human, and painfully material.

By rejecting the status of furniture, by holding true to the only name he’s gone by in the story, Kanon is fraying the edges of the hard rules of the fiction governing Umineko. Everyone in this story is duplicitously in tension between their perceived and ideal selves. This tension allows for a rife breeding ground for secrets and uncertainty. This grey area turns everyone on Rokkenjima from human beings into murder mystery characters. This nebulous state of being is the genesis for “existence”. This is how Beatrice asserts dominion.

Kanon chooses a position that is neither, essentially queering the witch-human dichotomy. He is not Kanon the performer in Beatrice’s narrative of magic and murder, but nor is he Kanon the servant in Kinzo’s narrative of power and abuse. His moment of empowerment coming as it does throws all this off the rails, just as this sequence of events throws the epitaph ritual off the rails.

Kanon, in real terms, deals a potentially fatal blow to the Witch Narrative through his “zero on the roulette” gambit, and Beatrice’s only recourse is to clumsily plaster over this act of rebellion with fantasy before any Detective-oriented observer can bear witness to what could be this entire pantomime’s undoing.

However, what happens in the boiler room is not a simple act of metafictional housekeeping. There is a strong and prevalent sense that whatever Beatrice does, she does it spitefully. Shortly before Kanon’s death, there is a bizarrely=presented exchange between himself and the witch, curious for myriad reasons.

Two things which immediately stand about the moment in question are firstly that this serves as our introduction (allegedly) to Beatrice’s presence in the story, and that it tips us off to the fact that there may be an element of hypocrisy to the impartiality of the so-called indiscriminate murderwitch. Kanon’s reward for his defiance is subjecting the Golden Witch Beatrice to the mortifying ordeal of being known, and so we owe it to him to see what we see when the curtain is tugged at even just a little bit.

The immediate thing which jumps out is that Beatrice addresses Kanon not with annoyance, but with loathing. There is something personal and vindictive about the retribution she inflicts upon him. It’s not enough to simply kill him with the stake and set up another Twilight; there is a mockery and a derision. Before Kanon is killed by Beatrice, Kanon is made aware of how much Beatrice hates him. The why in the moment is mostly clear - Kanon threatens to undermine Beatrice’s narrative, which applies simultaneously to all Beatrices and all narratives in play - but we are told in as many words that this rage is specific and personal.

Earlier, we have a comment from Kanon that he refuses to be led astray “again” by either Beatrice or Kinzo which is. Interesting and revealing wording to say the least. Especially when we try to consider who the person behind Beatrice may be in this scene.

If, somehow, we had confirmation that the Beatrice in the boiler room was a metaphor for Genji, then this exchange would make more sense. Kanon the begrudging accomplice making one act of rebellion too many, and Genji’s facade of professionalism slipping to show a hint of what may be true emotions below the surface. Except Genji is not in the basement with Kanon very much on purpose, so whatever materially happened to Kanon did not directly involve Genji, the most likely living target for these emotions.

It’s not even worth pretending Kinzo is alive enough in this moment to not only hear Kanon’s words, but also respond. Even in my initial hypothetical “narrative-compliant Third and Fourth Twilights” outline, for any of it to work Kinzo has to be dead at this moment. And more than that, Kanon specifically makes sure to distinguish between Kinzo and Beatrice in his speech. He has not only been led astray by Kinzo, but also by Beatrice. In this interaction, to Kanon, Kinzo and Beatrice are separate entities.

So the question becomes, as it has been from literally the start: who is Beatrice?

I don’t think it’s possible to answer this question in the direct sense of “what is the identity of the person behind the witch that killed Kanon”, but I think we can explore “what this figure we are calling Beatrice like as an individual?”. The Detective’s truth on the matter remains obscured to the point where any guesses at this point would be meaningless, but the Romantic’s truth remains a valid option. We don’t need to unmask Beatrice to get a sense of her character.

What we know about Beatrice in this chapter is thus: she appears via a cloud of butterflies, she is associated with the fantastical, and she makes the active choice to kill Kanon and wrap his death into another Twilight. From this, we can extrapolate a few things: this Beatrice operates at least in part in adherence to her own mythos, even if she doesn’t necessarily strictly uphold the Witch Narratives in the terms that the culprits have set out. She is not in total alignment with whatever scheme is going on with the Witch Narrative, and she has on some level a personal, spiteful disdain towards Kanon.

When Beatrice kills Kanon, she puts him down as the “furniture” he is. When he attempts his self-actualisation, there is a moment where the narrative insight we get into Beatrice condemns him as foolish and futile and vulgar. It is not simply annoying that Kanon is stepping out of his role. It actively repulses Beatrice on some level. From what we get of Beatrice, there is the impression that Kanon’s decision deeply violates some kind of taboo to the point where Beatrice’s mode of operation leaves the fantastical and dips into the visceral, even if only momentarily.

So what we can claim to learn is that there is something irreparably offensive to Beatrice about people stepping out of the confines of their pre-ordained roles, which is something incredibly interesting to consider. She holds a deep loathing towards Kanon for daring to defy his fate, more so than someone like Genji would if this were a mere case of Kanon messing up the Witch Narrative. Beatrice takes Kanon’s transgression personally, not in the sense that this is a specific attack on her, but in the sense that it upsets her sensibilities more than anything else could.

So why would that be? What about some small little servant choosing to throw off his symbol of abuse and oppression is so offensive to a mighty witch such as Beatrice? She’s centuries old, an accomplished alchemist, and brimming with supernatural power. According to all we know of the Beatrice mythos, she should be able to toss Kanon aside with a snap of her fingers. But there is a mockery towards him, a taunting and a toying coming from a personal degree of loathing.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Kanon got under Beatrice’s skin, but it’s something close. She takes something out on him for his transgression towards her - in his speech, Kanon marks out both Kinzo and Beatrice as individuals he is defying, and that has to be important. It’s clear to see why a furniture servant abandoning the degradation would upset fascist abuser supreme Kinzo, but what about this would be so upsetting to Beatrice? Why would she care at all?

I have some idea, but to elaborate on that I first need to talk about one other curious feature of Beatrice’s presentation in this chapter. She has as tangible a presence as you can get in this chapter, except for one detail: in her “conversation” with Kanon, Beatrice never actually speaks. Her “dialogue” is relayed through the narration and through Kanon’s own responses, but Beatrice herself remains voiceless.

The immediate effect of this is that Beatrice remains in obscurity even as she shuffles around the spotlight. We know in this chapter that she gets mad at Kanon and kills him, but we don’t get anything concrete about Beatrice. No face, no voice. In other words, Beatrice is not given an active presence in the story. She is relayed to us second-hand, even though she plays a crucial role in the events in the boiler room.

There is something to this beyond the benefits to the mystery narrative that keeping Beatrice obscured entails. Of course this presentation keeps us guessing about several elements of Beatrice’s existence - we can’t say either way what Beatrice’s physical form looks like or what it could mean. Revealing Beatrice definitively as either a human or a witch would run counter to Umineko’s narrative worse than anything Kanon could ever dream of.

However, that does not necessarily mean that the only way Beatrice could have appeared in this chapter was in this way. It’s not enough that she’s a hidden presence. She’s also a passive one. She performs no direct action. She never directly tells us anything. Beatrice is kept in check by the narrative as a spectral entity. The only “active” thing we see of Beatrice happens to be her own feelings towards Kanon’s desperate stance.

Beatrice is held in fantasy and only fantasy. The one exception to this is still little more than a gesture at Romantic examination. Beatrice has no tangible, material, Detective’s presence to her. Even in death, Kanon’s murder is not described as someone plunging the stake into him. The stake appears and he is impaled by it - passive voice for emphasis. The only “active” step taken in the death sequence is when Kanon pulls the stake out of his chest. Nothing is directly manipulated by Beatrice’s hands.

Technically, we can’t actually say Beatrice does anything in this chapter. This is something that in truth ties into the broader presentation of Beatrice as a figure in Umineko. Going by the stories told by the servants about Beatrice beyond the Witch Narrative, there is a common thread in all these tales: Beatrice shows up and then something happens. Even in Shannon’s story of the injured servant, her tale is not “Beatrice pushed the servant down the stairs”. It is “a servant disrespected Beatrice and then fell down the stairs”.

There is a very understated and very curious denial of agency seen with Beatrice, on reflection. All she’s really allowed to do is sit there as a cloud of butterflies and be an emblem for misfortune happening that is later accredited to her. I’ve referred to Beatrice as a murderwitch throughout this liveblog, but what’s interesting is that while this reputation is there, we aren’t ever shown more than the reputation itself.

The excuse so far has been that the literal witch Beatrice has been unable to do anything on account of needing to be resurrected in order to return to the material plane first. But even that narrative is something contradicted to the point where it can’t be trusted. Kinzo’s scenes make it clear this is all an attempt to summon Beatrice from a place nobody can normally reach, yet he is also convinced in some scenes that Beatrice is already there, watching him with amusement from the sidelines.

This could be explained away with the whole “Beatrice lacks a physical form and thus she isn’t really there” line of reasoning, except that in chapter 14 she appears to quite literally orchestrate Kanon’s death, and prior to that she allegedly had the means of injuring a servant who disrespected her. How can Beatrice cause harm to servants and yet also be so far removed from the physical world that a violent occult ritual is needed to ensure her presence?

Beatrice is not there, and yet Beatrice is there. In other words, Beatrice “exists”. It’s not just that Beatrice “exists” but that the act of being Beatrice is to inherently inhabit a position of “existence”. Beatrice is a passive entity, strictly defined by indirect non-involvement.

In other words, from a certain angle, Beatrice The Golden Witch is just as restrictive a role as “furniture”. To be Beatrice is to be unseen, voiceless, inactive. No matter how much you may feel or hate or rage you are not given the cathartic release of wrapping your hands around someone’s throat. For all her loathing of Kanon, the only tool at Beatrice’s disposal is to continue to perpetuate her own myth-narrative, merely folding Kanon into the pattern. And at this stage, the Witch Narrative is more akin to a process than a personal action. There is something very distanced and abstracted about killing for the Twilights; it is about continuing to engage with the horror-mystery and not about yourself and your own feelings.

Even through the metaphorical allegories of Beatrice this mode is seen. Genji is bound to the role of Beatrice, defined as his tragic and terrible devotion to Kinzo. Genji couldn’t have escaped this fate if he’d tried. Kanon is coerced into upholding the Witch Narrative through his position as furniture, thus conflating both states of being into one and the same thing. Even further back, whoever is behind the story of the alchemist that gave Kinzo the gold is reduced to a portrait of a white woman in the mansion’s hallway, stripped of everything but a confining ideal. To be Beatrice is to be contained by other people’s demands and expectations.

When it’s laid out like this, it is no surprise that Beatrice reacts to Kanon’s rebellion with outrage. This choice is the one thing she can never do because her whole existence as Beatrice is predicated on that not being an option. Beatrice, no matter the form she takes, is trapped in her role. To cease being trapped by the role of Beatrice is also to lose the power granted by being Beatrice. She is the demon’s roulette. Anyone who risks becoming something more than their assigned category is anathema to her entire nature.

Kanon rebels against Kinzo’s will where Beatrice never could. No wonder she kills him for it.

But, of course, now we need to think about how Beatrice actually managed to kill Kanon in the first place. And to do that we need to revisit the next most obvious from the start question: how many people are on Rokkenjima?

The 19th person issue is one that at times feels too blatant to give more than a cursory amount of attention to: there are nineteen people “existing” on Rokkenjima because Beatrice is an immaterially real shared identity construct. There only being eighteen physical bodies is irrelevant to this count - the number of “people” increases further if you start thinking about people’s multiplicitous selves as their own entities. Witch Maria and Human Maria, adultsona George and kidsona George, Shannon and Sayo, Natsuhi and Ushiromiya Natsuhi, et cetera. Beatrice being an additional facet of the peddlers of the Witch Narrative is merely this mechanism brought to an extreme point.

Except, cutting past all the fantasy and obfuscation, Kanon does still in fact get killed in the boiler room. At the time of this murder, either eight or nine people are already dead by this point. And of the eight other survivors, seven of them very conspicuously are not in a position to murder him at all.

So this dilemma boils down to a singular issue: either Kumasawa killed Kanon, or a nineteenth individual did. The story goes to great lengths to ensure that this is the setup we’re working with here. Where Eva and Hideyoshi were allegedly killed in a way only a witch could have done, Kanon could have only been logistically killed by a witch and nobody else.

There is of course a third angle here, and that’s that Kanon killed himself. It’s technically an option on the table, but one I am not sure has much, if any, basis. The entire scene hinges around Kanon choosing to act out in defiance in a space devoid of observers. There is nobody save for the reader for Kanon to convince of the authenticity of his words and motives. For this premise to work, it would almost certainly necessitate a level of metatextual awareness from Kanon that we have not seen at all.

Kanon acts and reacts to a threat in the room. Kanon makes it clear that his goal is to take this person down with him if he can’t save himself. Everything points to there being a second person in the room with Kanon capable of inflicting harm on him. A person that would, then, hypothetically, flee out of the back door and into the night before being found.

At this point in the story, even Battler is fairly on board with there being a 19th person moving around on the island. After all, nobody among the group of survivors could have been responsible for killing Kanon, save for maybe the incredibly frail Kumasawa. The options are pared down to Kumasawa, suicide, or a 19th person. This person’s identity is unknown, but the fact of their existence is, on the surface of things, pretty undeniable.

This, however, feels like a trap. The existence of a 19th person is part and parcel of the Witch Narrative. To readily agree that there is a 19th person on the island is to buy into the same immaterial theatre spawning the magic circles and the demonic stakes and letters speaking of alchemy. You either accept all of it, or you accept none of it. It’s already been established that the occult artifacts at the murder scene are little more than decoration placed by somebody doctoring the bodies. If this fact is true, then the existence of a nineteenth person must therefore be false.

But if Kanon was murdered by somebody, that somebody was not among the eight survivors. Thus the contradiction making this yet another “impossible” mystery. The only two points of data we have are totally irreconcilable.

Save for one read on the situation: Kanon was killed by somebody outside of the group of survivors, and this individual is also not a 19th person. There is exactly one way in which this can be true, and that’s to consider the possibility that the person that killed Kanon is among those presumed dead.

This is something that’s not impossible. The obvious objection is that for a person who we think is dead not being dead is that that would invalidate the epitaph murder ritual, but we’ve already established that the sequence of events only has value as far as convincing the survivors of something inescapably occult. If twilights can happen out of order, then there’s no reason why we need to assume that a victim has to actually be dead. It’s all about the affect.

If this were true, it would allow somebody outside of the group to move around and kill without disrupting the premise of the eighteen on Rokkenjima. This would mean that Kanon’s killer is one of the victims of either the first or second twilights.

From the outset, both pools of suspects are problematic. Eva and Hideyoshi, even if they weren’t dead somehow, were both physically in the guest room at the time of the murder - there’d be no way for either of them to sneak by the others down into the basement to kill Kanon. The six on the first twilight, beyond being mangled past recognition, are stuck within a locked room to which only Natsuhi has the key.

I still think that if we’re to entertain this possibility, the culprit must be one of those assumed to be inside the garden storehouse. Which means we’ll need to interrogate the function and construction of this reverse locked room.

It’s an established fact that the shed is locked from the outside. It is also an established fact that there is only one key, and this key is held by Natsuhi who has not had a single meaningful opportunity to sneak off and unlock the storehouse.

The only way to interrogate this setup without contradicting the physical facts of the story is through a Detective/Romantic examination of chapter 10’s narration. What we know are the above datapoints. Everything else is extrapolation and assumption, especially if we abide by the non-Battler POV = Romantic obfuscation logic.

So, extending that line of thinking leads us to distrust anything that can’t be immediately verified by the scenes in the parlor. The most crucial fact, and the one that the argument I am making hinges on, is that everybody that was killed still being in the storehouse when it was locked up cannot be trusted with absolute certainty. The only people on the scene during the locking of the storehouse were those involved in the Witch Narrative to some degree, and Natsuhi, who by her own admission could not stomach to look upon the scene for longer than necessary.

Who is to say that, during this period of uncertainty and unreliable perspective, somebody playing dead inside the storehouse slipped out while Natsuhi was looking away in disgust? This would facilitate the existence of an individual who is not part of the group of survivors, yet who also does not contravene the 18 person premise.

There are holes in this, of course. It’s a huge leap to assume that Natsuhi somehow missed a whole person getting up and leaving the storehouse, and there are numerous questions as to how the narrative-peddling servants would permit someone to roam free who would then later betray the occult illusion and murder Kanon. But the basis of this theory is not impossible, so perhaps there are ways to work around this.

We already know Natsuhi’s perspective is highly unreliable, as proven earlier in that exact chapter. She so desperately wants to hide the fact of Kinzo’s death that she starts to buy her own lies, having imagined hallucination conversations in a most likely empty study to verify her own beliefs. If brain ghost grandpa can “exist” through Natsuhi, then it is much less of a stretch for her to willingly or unknowingly let something like this slip. Maybe she was in her own head. Maybe she tuned it out in an act of extreme denial. Either way, it is theoretically possible for Natsuhi to overlook something that big.

As to the servants permitting this, the obvious answer is that this person was allowed to let go as a contingency by Genji in the event of a Witch Narrative stalemate. An additional body roaming around that the audience of this theatre has already written off would be a huge boon in authenticating his own crimes. This person killing Kanon, then, would not necessarily be the end of the world for Genji - as per maybe-Kinzo’s words regurgitated through a hallucinatory phantom, total annihilation is as valid an option on the table as any other outcome. A roulette can land on many outcomes, and an “impossible” killer taking Kanon out transforms this individual into Beatrice in the consciousness of the survivors, furthering the plan either way.

Given that, the question then becomes: which of the dead six could theoretically do this? Who here would pretend to be dead, skulk around the island for a time, and then end up killing Kanon?

I think there are a few suspects we can eliminate off the bat. Krauss and Shannon, the half-face corpses, most likely don’t fit here. As individuals, it does not track with who they are to imagine them acting this way - going by my theory, this would place Krauss as someone who played possum to survive his own assassination attempt backfiring on him. There is absolutely no way that someone like that wouldn’t have immediately come out of the shadows to expose Eva and Hideyoshi; Krauss didn’t even have it in him to keep his embezzlement bragging on the downlow. As for Shannon, the victim in this situation is Kanon. There is absolutely not a single scenario in which Shannon would kill Kanon for any possible reason - he is probably the only person in her life towards whom she feels unconditional love and trust. We’ll never know for a fact how Shannon/Sayo felt towards Kanon’s desperation to save her, but even in the most emotionally complicated interpretation, it still makes no sense for Kanon to be killed by her in retaliation, and it makes no sense for Kanon to have done anything he did in the intervening twilights had Shannon actually survived somehow.

More than that, I have always thought that Krauss and Shannon’s faces being half-destroyed is as close to cast iron proof as you can get that they are definitely, totally, for real dead, for the simple fact that a mystery story’s base assumption is that anybody with injuries that buck the trend are suspicious. Instead, I think this is more likely a case of a tree hiding itself in a forest.

Which turns our attention to the three failsiblings and Gohda. It’s not Gohda, because narratively it makes sense for Gohda to be as much of a victim of circumstance as Shannon in the end despite his bullying of her - middle manager and minimum wage worker alike are insects before the CEO. His abuse of a shred of worthless power cannot save him, therefore he must be dead. Rosa, likewise, would not work narrative-wise to survive. She had a complete character trajectory highlighting the revolving wheel of abuse within the introductory chapters. Her character was never destined for anything more than being doomed by the systems she never managed to do more than perpetuate - surviving the First Twilight would give her licence to try to escape the cycle, which would undermine the whole point of everything that came before.

So we’re left now with two candidates: Rudolf and Kyrie. Both of whom are understated characters with ulterior motives that were never fully elaborated on before they met their ends. Kyrie’s conversations with Battler hinted at the existence of a strategist’s mind with a scheme of her own separate from the gambit Eva strongarmed everyone into going along with. Rudolf, meanwhile, has the lone dangling thread of his “tonight I think I will be killed” comment, the sole thing that, as of this point in the story, we have no clue as to what he could have really meant by that. All we can glean is that the “murder” comment was most likely not a literal portent, but a fear of his that whatever secret he carried would see many people turn against him - either way, there is a Big Thing with Rudolf that never got elaborated on at any point ever.

For this reason, and a couple more, I am inclined to think that if there is a person playing dead, then that person is Rudolf. It would give us room to explore this abandoned plot thread, and it would create a full circle parallel with the comments earlier in the story about how much Rudolf acts like Kinzo - the dead father pretending to be alive, the alive son pretending to be dead. And more than any of that, more than any narrative or thematic reason for this working, is the fact that there is something associated with Rudolf that has otherwise only come up with the discussion of dead bodies.

I am, of course, talking about makeup.

There is a point made of highlighting that Rudolf wears makeup in the earlier chapters as a means of highlighting his superficiality and vanity. He is the pervert covered in glamour. He is, quite literally, bringing a false face to the family conference. Rudolf’s face, his true self and his secrets, have been concealed from the start. Makeup as an image is tied to Rudolf and used as a reinforcement of the fact that this man is not to be trusted.

The word “makeup” is also used in exactly one other context: the mutilated bodies. First we are told that all this gore has ruined the immaculate makeup on Rudolf’s face, and then further down the line we are treated to the description of blood described as "makeup” plastering the corpses. It’s a very curious word to throw into Battler’s panicked monologue, incongruent enough to stick in your mind more than most details.

Given that, it is not much of a stretch to assume we are seeing the literal masquerading as the figurative - this is the whole MO of the Witch Narrative, after all. In a sea of real blood and guts, who would notice that one person in the group was instead pained with makeup? We already know that there is an artificial substance in abundance on Rokkenjima that can be used to mimic the appearance of blood - if it can be painted on doors to create the illusion of a magic circle, then surely it can also be painted on a human face to create the illusion of a corpse.

So in this scenario, Rudolf sits pretty and painted in a sea of bodies, and slips out at the last possible moment. He then hangs around somewhere unseen for a while, before being the one to murder Kanon.

On several levels, this makes sense - whatever schemes Rudolf and/or Kyrie had cooking were derailed by the Witch Narrative, and as someone firmly cemented in the Ushiromiya hierarchy his first instinct would be to take it out on Kanon. This would serve as an explanation for the loathing and disgust conveyed by Beatrice in the boiler room scene, but it does still leave several elements unanswered.

If we assume the Beatrice stuff to be a fantastical plastering over a mundane killing, then we need to ask why Kanon would think and say the things he does if the person before him was Rudolf. Rudolf is emblematic of several kinds of power and abuse, but he is not directly a literal or metaphorical figurehead for Kanon’s oppression. Rudolf is most Kinzo-like when his face is full of makeup - it is an insincere mask with no substance to it. Rudolf is someone Kanon only sees once a year. It makes no sense for Rudolf to be someone Kanon feels the need to take a stand against like this. Rudolf doesn’t really have it in him to be a satisfying Beatrice.

Unless, of course, something changed during the time the surviving Rudolf was off-screen. There are eight whole hours he is unaccounted for. Enough time, perhaps, for someone dedicated enough to solve the epitaph and learn of whatever grim truths lie alongside the gold vault? Perhaps something that relates to his final unspoken secret? There’s still a lot of ground to cover in that area. There’s every possibility the answer lies there, that somewhere down the line we’ll find out how someone could so easily embody a Beatrice position.

That said, this is not the only option for explaining things. Beyond the idea of bodies not being dead and blood makeup and failsons turning into witches, there is something else very weird that goes on in this chapter that absolutely needs looking at, and might even take us to a stranger place than that.

Structurally, chapter 14 is strange. It is a chapter with several oddities - the appearance of the otherwise ephemeral and totally unseen Beatrice, and it is a chapter without a defined timestamp. Every other chapter in Umineko tells us when it happens and goes out of its way to make sure it doesn’t tip its hand too soon with the Beatrice enigma. So for Kanon’s death chapter to feature a lack of time and an abundance of butterflies and other witch-related happenings is more than a little suspect.

Namely because this is not even the first time this has happened in this story. There is one other chapter in the story which deprives us of a timestamp and shows us a golden butterfly, and that’s chapter 9. Which is also, curiously and alarmingly, Shannon’s final chapter.

I spent a lot of time going over chapter 9, highlighting the strangeness of its structure and what that could mean. My conclusion at the time was that we were witnessing something doctored and unreal - to borrow terminology I’ve learned since, my conclusion was that chapter 9 was a “fantastical scene”. I also spoke about how Shannon and Kanon have the curious quirk of being the only ones to ever actually see with their own eyes evidence of Beatrice’s existence, a fact which continues to hold true even in chapter 14.

Now, you could argue that this “disruption” is evidence of the metatextual ripple effect Beatrice’s manifestation is having on Umineko’s reality, but even that wouldn’t be a satisfying answer, because there is also one other time Shannon and Kanon have had structurally identical scenes, and that example was completely devoid of any hints of Beatrice or magic.

Way back at the start of the story, Shannon and Kanon have basically the same introduction scene: they awkwardly present themselves before the family, they fumble their duties and drop something, one adult berates them while another adult berates the first for being too harsh on them, Battler makes the same comparison to a waitress dropping a fork for both of them, and then they have a debrief scene afterwards that hints at deeper, more complicated feelings towards the situation.

Shannon and Kanon enter the story using the same narrative beats with a slightly different retexture. Shannon and Kanon also leave the story using the same narrative shape with a slightly different retexture.

Both walk off on their own going directly against their assigned duties - Shannon heads to the mansion instead of the guesthouse, and Kanon runs off on his own instead of sticking with Kumasawa. Both have a conflict between their “furniture” and real selves - Shannon calms the Sayo inside her to prevent causing a scene, and Kanon attempts to cast aside his furniture role in order to directly cause a scene. Both witness glowing butterflies on their own in a dark corner, and both are heavily implied to have been directly murdered by Beatrice more than any other person in the story. The only difference is that for Kanon, we see it happen, and I can’t help but wonder that had chapter 9 been a full length chapter that we wouldn’t have seen something very similar unfold with Shannon.

This is yet another heap of stuff to add to the pile of “weird parallels and symmetries between Shannon and Kanon” that keeps growing throughout the story. This still isn’t even really touching the bizarre relationship they have to Beatrice and all the ways that that’s played out - both having the ghost story in common, both occupying an odd proximity to the role of “Beatrice”, Shannon as vessel and Kanon as performer. There is a lot of this kind of stuff swirling around the two of them, and I think it really comes to a head with Kanon’s death.

After all, one way of reading this chapter is that both Shannon and Kanon end up suffering the exact same destiny. Neither escapes being furniture, and Beatrice kills them for it. Shannon buried Sayo where she shouldn’t have, and Kanon’s casting aside of being furniture came too little too late. Different textures, but the same shape. This, combined with the fact that both are notorious Witch Narrative spinners in their own ways, paints a very bizarre picture full of question marks with no clear answer.

Nobody else in Umineko shares this level of direct parallel, so it has to mean something deeply significant that Shannon and Kanon are entwined like this. I don’t have the answer yet, but I do think that this is not the end of it. I think that as soon as the metafiction stuff really comes into focus that all of this will become extremely relevant. These two are wrapped around Umineko’s core story structure in a way nobody else is, narratively weird in a way that is only otherwise seen with entities that “exist” in the story. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but there very much is something going on that cannot and should not be ignored.

And one final thing, one final deranged detail that’s worth pointing out that threatens to possibly undermine several thousand words of this very writeup, is that the word “makeup” appears in the description of Kanon’s death. He lies there, hole in his chest, blood makeup dribbling down his body. I previously asserted that this was indicative of a surviving Rudolf taking up the mantle of being a threatening individual acting outside the group, but Kanon also has this word applied to him. A hint towards his killer, or something else?

If Kanon’s death is tainted with the word “makeup”, this means we should suspect something about it. Perhaps it is merely drawing attention to the fact that the stake to the chest is just decoration and affect - to get really tinfoil with it, Kanon managed to pull the stake from his chest before collapsing. If everything is fantastical, perhaps so too is the assertion that the stake was ever in his chest in the first place - perhaps for whatever reason his assailant did not have the time/means to set this up exactly like an epitaph murder. Or perhaps something more is going on. After all, Kanon leaves the chapter mortally wounded, but he is not actually confirmed dead. There’s wriggle room here for something else to happen.

Maybe, just maybe, what we saw here was merely another farce. Kanon taking the chance to fake his death and take himself out of the story while he still can - killing “Kanon” the furniture so the human beneath the mask can survive. Notions of Beatrice and a 19th person and an impossible murder as theatrics to cover up the fact that the tragedy at the heart of the scene is without substance. If so, the question would be whether or not this was intended by The Plan or if this is indeed Kanon acting out on his own. Has Kanon gone behind the scenes to be Genji’s “ghost” because there is no miraculously-surviving Rudolf? Are there two people in this position now? Is there any true substance to any of these theories at all?

I don’t know. I think the truth lies somewhere among all this noise, but I do think it’s starting to come into focus.

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