|
So, I doubt I'm on the real trail here, but the coincidences I came across were too amusing not to share.
The visual novels mentioned that Maria's name is possibly involved with the epitaph, so for fun I stuck each symbol of her name into a Japanese to English translator to see what each individually meant. For 真, I got true, real, etc. For 里, I got hometown, birthplace, etc.
Interesting, no? Suddenly I thought that Maria's name might literally point to the homeland you're supposed to start from in the epitaph. But then I tried 亞 and got... absolutely nothing. I don't know anything about Japanese writing, so if the translator had nothing to say I figured I was done. Then I remembered someone saying something about this part of Maria's name being used to identify the siesta sisters with her; specifically, they wear a cross on their armbands.
So, at this point I decided a leap of crazy was in order. Maybe 亞 is just meant a pictoral symbol? So I looked at it again and the first thing that came to mind was, well, the Swiss flag. Maybe not the golden land, per se, but they do have a lot of banks.
Now, you might see where this is going, but I didn't at first. I went to Wikipedia, looked at a list of rivers in Switzerland, and didn't really get anything out of it. I didn't think to go look in an atlas, which is really what I should have done. Why? Because atlases tend to point out important things like, say, capital cities, and the capital of Switzerland is Bern. And yes, if you check you'll discover that there was once a castle there. There's also a river: the old city (where the castle was) is built on the Aar, which eventually feeds into the Rhine.
Anyhow, I'm nearly done, but there is still one more minor coincidence. A section of the river passes through what is known as the Aar Gorge. This is apparently a popular tourist destination which includes, among other things, Reichenbach Falls. If you happen to be a fan of mystery novels (and especially detective novels) then you may remember this name because it's where Sherlock Holmes duked it out with Moriarty.
|