Blatant spoilers follow:

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is the kind of series that invokes a great deal of theorizing, speculation, and at least a little confusion. Four “question” arcs have been aired and translated to English, and the first “answer” arc just wrapped up, shedding a great deal of light on one of the scenarios, and possibly others. Much like in the realm of theoretical physics, I am currently seeking a plausible grand unification theory for this show. What would be necessary for these plot arcs to all have a basis in the same set of facts?

The Victims

Who’s paying the price here? Rare is the murder mystery in which the identity of the victim isn’t important.

Name	Demoned Away	Watanagashi	Curse Killing	Time Wasting	Meakashi
Tomitake	Found dead	Found dead	Found dead	Unknown	Found dead
Takano	Disappeared	Found immolated	Found immolated	Unknown	Found immolated
Inspector Oishii	Survives	Survives	Disappeared	Survives	Survives
Mion	Beaten to death	Found in well	Unknown	Unknown	Found in well
Rena	Beaten to death	Survives	Unknown	Unknown	Survives
Satoko	Unknown	Disappeared	Unknown	Unknown	Stabbed to dead
Rika	Unknown	Found in Well	Axe-murdered	Eviscerated	Stabbed in neck
Keiichi	Throat ripped out	Dies in hospital	Survives	Dies in hospital	Survives
Shion	Unknown	Fell from balcony	Unknown	Unknown	Fell from balcony
Dr. Irie	Unknown	Unknown	Death by pills	Unknown	Unknown

The easy fits

Some things can be drawn together pretty easily. If you were Inspector Oishii (who may have survived every chapter, so far as we know), trying to put together verifiable evidence about what happened to all these people, the following present very little challenge:

• Tomitake dies every time his fate is mentioned, and every time it’s the same way: clawing his own throat out.
• Takano disappears or dies every time. In Demoned Away, the location of her remains may simply not have been known when it was first brought up.
• Inspector Oishii survives in four of the five chapters, and is simply nowhere to be found at the moment for one scene of the Curse Killing chapter.
• Satoko’s fate isn’t properly shown in any but the fifth chapter, in which she clearly was murdered and her body disposed of. Nothing in the other chapters explicitly contradicts this.
• Shion’s fate is also not properly shown in three chapters, and is consistent in the two in which it is shown. Nothing in the other three explicitly contradict this.
• Dr. Irie dies in one chapter, in the others his fate is not mentioned. This again is not an explicit contradition.

The Impossibles

Four of the Higurashi no Naku Koro ni characters’ ultimate fates just don’t jive between chapters, leading to the obvious conclusion that the stories are incompatible when it comes to the facts. If you were Oishii, could you possibly explain how the facts are compatible for these ill-fated youths?

Mion buys it in at least two distinctive ways: beaten to death in Keiichi’s house in Demoned Away, and killed by her sister in Meakashi. To further complicate matters, Inspector Oishii is seen commenting on the discoveries of these bodies in each of these chapters. Supposing that somebody might have dragged a freshly-beaten Mion back to her house and dumped her body in the well doesn’t fit. Perhaps the scene in Demoned away in which Oishii is being filled in on the details of the three bodies from that plot arc was during a mop-up of the gas catastrophe?

Rena clearly dies in Demoned Away, but clearly survives past the initial murders in Watanagashi and Meakashi. I suppose it’s possible that Keiichi could have beaten her to death with a baseball bat after his initial release from the hospital, but that’s one heck of a stretch.

Rika was presumably found in the well in Watanagashi, and we know she stabbed herself in the neck in Meakashi. We don’t explicitly know that she was put in the well in either of these, but both Time Wasting and Curse Killing dipict her as having been eviscerated at the Furude shrine. Oishii was of the opinion that Rika was still alive when her innards were pulled out, according to Time Wasting. Of the four troublesome characters, she is perhaps the most readily-explained.

Keiichi tried to kill himself in Demoned Away and died 24 hours later in the hospital. He is presumably killed at the very end of Watanagashi while in the hospital. In Curse Killing and Time Wasting, he is said to be the sole survivor of a poison gas catastrophe, though Time Wasting indicates that he died in the hospital some time fairly shortly thereafter. In the Watanagashi and Time Wasting chapters, it appears that Keiichi was put in the hospital for the effects of poison gas.

The Easy Out

In each of the above cases, the character’s fate that doesn’t fit is in Demoned Away. The simplest conclusion is that Demoned Away is the only substantive variation in the premise, the only chapter in which it isn’t possible that Shion Sonozaki flipped out an murdered Mion, Rika, Satoko, the head of the Village, and her grandmother, after which there was a catastrophic poison gas incident, followed by Keiichi’s death upon having a hallucination caused by massive psychological trauma resulting in heart failure. Whew.

For all but the first plot arc to be compatible, the Sonozakis are a terible crime family, Keiichi is violently unbalanced, and Rika is prescient (possibly the reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama, the protector-spirit of the village).

A not-so-easy out

Other than the Demoned Away chapter, we never see Mion’s corpse, and in that chapter, Keiichi is said to have died from blood loss while at the hospital, which is conceivably compatible. The mention of Mion being found in the well is from Oishii, who appears to doubt Keiichi’s claim that he was stabbed in the abdomen. This means the inspector may have had a chance to interview Keiichi about the deaths of Mion and Rena during that 24-hour period between the police finding him in the phonebooth and his death.

This theory came about while I was digging around for images to put in this post, which made me realize that the actual depictions of these troublesome characters’ deaths, by which I mean shots that show their dead bodies in the first 21 episodes, are few and far between, and not 100% incompatible with what was suggested in other plot arcs. Differences in the particulars can be chalked up to differences in timing and the rather serious psychological problems Keiichi appears to have.