[haguruma]

Originally Posted by jjblue1

It's not that she hadn't thought at the answer, it's that with her knowledge she could find the right answer only out of random luck and not out of reasoning.

I think that is one of the points that goes along with Umineko and is at least what I can draw from it as a creative resource. In terms of riddles you have to know the level of knowledge your opponent possesses in order to create a fair challenge, but reality does not provide fair challenges. That is why I also think that Umineko has a lot more to say about fictionality and literary fairness than commenting on the moral question of these.

In that sense it is largely different from 'An Offering to Nothingness', more on that later though. Ange even says that no matter how many countering truths people create in the end, she will create her own Golden Truth and keep her family with her, she does not condemn the witches in the end, she merely says that she will no longer commit to being their plaything. In the end, she creates as much a 'fantasy' or a fictionalized account of real events as the witches do, only her version is her's and her's alone.

Coming back to fairness. Fiction can be fair, that is correct, but reality will not care for playing fair, providing you with clues and hints. But where "AOtN" flat out denied mystery fiction as a form of entertainment, Umineko goes for the fictionality of everything by claiming that reality is always just a construction from the imperfect knowledge we have of the completeness of existence around us. That is why I enjoyed Chiru just as much as the first four arcs, because it played with that and even took it a step further.

For example you've gotten me definitely curious about 'An Offering to Nothingness' but sadly this book hasn't been translated it so I can't really use it to improve my judgement of Umineko.
[...]
Any chance you can further semplificate things for people who can't get such a wide mystery knowledge or is it asking too much?

I wouldn't call my mystery knowledge wide, it's still lacking in several areas, even people who are far more advanced in their research than me still admit that they are merely attempting to built a larger understanding of a genre that might not even be one cohesive genre.
In that context I have to say, I like rules like those of Knox and Van Dine, but I love it even more to dismantle them and understand why exactly they were used, what they meant in their respective context and in the end turn them on their head. In the end the Eiserne Jungfrau does not control reality by forbidding certain elements, they can merely test if the real world allows their rules to exist.

I don't have to find a groundbreaking novelty in a work to find it fascinating. Merely the playing around with elements that are taken for granted might be enough to spark my interest.
In classic mystery fiction the angle of the legend-motive was used by the culprit to spread suspicion into every possible corner and push attention away from him or herself by using a well-known supernatural narrative. In Umineko it rather seems to be that one person (guilty or not) tried to gather all guilt into him/herself to give life to a supernatural tale that did not exist prior to this.

In that way I understand why it is often compared to 'AOtN'. You can read this plot synopsis (part of it was taken from a Japanese blog because I didn't remember all specifics) if you want.

Spoiler for An Offering to Nothingness:

In September 1954, a sailing boat, the Urojijimaru, that operated on the Saikan contact route left during the typhoon No.15 and capsized because of the exposure to storm and rain. Crew and Passengers put together, almost 1100 people lost their lives. Among the victims of the Urojijimaru was the family head of the Hinuma family, Murasaki Jiro and his wife, as well as his younger brother Sumire Saburo and his wife. The Hinuma family owned a jewel store in Tokyo, but it was destroyed in the post-war period, so Murasaki Jiro left on this journey to Hokkaido, where he was involved in this accident, because he wanted to discuss opening a new store with his younger brother and his wife.
In the spring of that year a salaryman called Mitsuda Alim becomes friends with the orphan son of Sumire Saburo, Mizunuma Aiji, in a gay bar in Ryusenji called ARABIQ, which he frequents. Alim learns that the chanson loving Aiji is a big fan of his childhood friend and chanson singer Nanamura Hisao, and introduces the two on the year end party at ARABIQ.
Because he immediately hits it off with Hisao, he confesses to her that after the incident he moved to Hokkaido to the main estate and started living together with the orphans of Murasaki Jiro, the brothers Aoji and Benitsukasa in the Hinuma main mansion in Meguro, where recently strange events have started happening around him. Actually Hisao, who is a big fan of reasoning based mystery fiction, received a letter from her fiancé, Mureta Toshio, who had distant relations to the Hinuma household and recently moved to France, telling her, “Because the house of Hinuma has been piling up the bad karma of the dead for generations, before long the god of death will befall it, I beg of you to stop it somehow.” So Hisao asked of Alim, who is an old school friend of Aoji, to stop by the Hinuma mansion and look for clues.
After several days Alim, who visited the Hinuma mansion in Meguro, told her that Murasaki Jiro had two younger brothers and a younger sister. The middle brother is Sumire Saburo. The youngest brother, Tojiro, was a doctor of Chinese medicine but had lost his practice in a fire caused by faulty wiring shortly after the accident of the Urojijimaru, and currently lodges at the main mansion in Meguro. Tojiro’s wife is separated from him by her age, but as she is in her last months of pregnancy she is interned in a maternity clinic. The air between Benitsukasa and Tojiro is also very thick.
Furthermore, the younger sister of Murasaki Jiro, Akemi, left Tokyo and bore an illegitimate child named Kiji while in Hiroshima. Murasaki Jiro had pity on Kiji because of his poor living conditions and entered him into the family like his own child, but Akemi had to suffer under this because she had to share her part of the inheritance with him, which caused her to break off contact with Murasaki Jiro. In the final days of the war, Akemi died due to the bombing of Hiroshima, and it was deemed unknown whether Kiji was dead or alive.

One night, when Alim is visiting the Hinuma mansion, while Aoji is not present due to a consultation with a real estate agent named Hachida Koukichi about their house, he is introduced to an old man named Fujikita Makoto. The old man Fujikita is a friend of their grandfather and something like an advisor to the house of Hinuma, he has been called by Aoji from Niigata to mediate between Benitsukasa and Tojiro.
After the old Fujikita has heard both the opinion of Benitsukasa and Tojiro, Benitsukasa goes to take a bath, while Alim and Fujikita enjoy a game of chess in Benitsukasa’s room on the sencond floor. But suddenly and old servant, Ginsaku, appears and tells that the door to the bathroom is locked and that Benitsukasa doesn’t answer when called. Alim and Fujikita, Aiji and Tojiro, who had all been on the second floor, head downstairs, break open the bathroom door and enter, where they fiend the body of Benitsukasa stretched out, face down on the floor. On his back they find thin swellings, like a red cross, as if he had been whipped…
When Tojiro takes Benitsukasa’s pulse he immediately informs the others that he is dead. Confused and bewildered Aiji and Alim try to contact Kokichi’s office. Aoji quickly returns home. The attending physician, a professor Mineta, hurries to the site and does an autopsy on the corpse. Benitsukasa had had masochistic tendencies since childhood, so the doctor doubts because of the whip marks, if maybe he had enjoyed being whipped for pleasure while in the bath and then suffered a cardiac arrest and died. Aoji lays out in the open that Benitsukasa also had homosexual tendencies and had as a lover a hooligan with no family history.
If they called the police and let them dissect the corpse in such a situation, it might damage the honor of the Hinuma family, so they all agreed to announce Benitsukasa’s death as a sudden death through illness.
But, upon hearing the details from Alim, Hisao concludes that this was a murder that was made to look like an accident. Also, because Aiji and Fujikita are mystery maniacs as well, though inferior to Hisao, though they agreed to pretend it to be a natural death, they doubted if it wasn’t murder. So a few days later the four, Hisao, Aiji, Fujikita and Alim, meet on the second floor of ARABIQ and engage in a battle of reasoning to reveal the culprit and explain the trick.
After the four people have laid out their four reasonings they come to an agreement that old Fujikita’s theory of Tojiro being the culprit of the Benitsukasa murder is the most realistic and reasonable solution. They search for a chance and Fujikita is fired up to make Tojiro confess the truth…

After Benitsukasa’s funeral all the relatives and friends gather in the mansion in Meguro and get distracted by Hisao into enjoying a party of Mahjong. The participants are Aoji, Aiji, Tojiro, Kokichi and Fujikita. Because they are five one can’t play, so they are playing along that rule that after a full round the winner get’s taken out of the game. Fujikita claims that because of the games psychological elements, he will gain evidence on Tojiro being the true culprit, so he requests Alim to note down all the actions of all five people. Alim takes down several pages worth of data, chronicling all actions taken.
However, during the night Tojiro quits the game and retires to his room on the second floor. While the game is being continued among the remaining four, dawn closes in. This is when Kokichi notices the smell of gas and they confirm that the fire in the water-heater for the second floor went out and gas is leaking out. This happened by Kokichi closing the stopcock for the gas when he was brewing some tea in the kitchen during the night, which made the flame go out, and then Alim opening the stopcock again when he was about to brew some tea, which made gas leak out.
However, the smell of gas is also emanating from Tojiro’s room and he does not answer when called. Because the door is locked from the inside, Alim and Kokichi break down the door, which is how they discover that the room is filled by gas emitted from a gas stove and also the dead body of Tojiro on the bed, who has died inhaling poisonous gas while sleeping.
In the light of all information Tojiro likely entered his room on the second floor, after taking his habitual sleeping pills turned on the gas stove because his room was cold, and fell asleep when in got warm. After this, because of the closing and opening of the stopcock in the kitchen, the flame of the stove went out and gas escaped, which led to Tojiro dying of a gas poisoning.
Both Kokichi and Alim had no clue of Tojiro sleeping like a log with a gas stove turned on on the second floor when turning the stopcock, which is why this is no murder, and can only be called an incidental chain of careless actions that led to an unfortunate accident. Still, they left matters to the police, but once they heard all the information and inspected the site, their final verdict was it being an accident as well.
After Tojiro’s funeral, Alim saw Fujikita off when he returned to Niigata, but in the moment before the train departed the old man whispered into his ear.
“This was full-fledged murder. But even Mee can’t judge if this is truly the working of this human world until the end.”

As if replacing Fujikita, Mureta returned from France and set out to find a resolution to the string of incidents that Hisao and Alim had encountered in the Hinuma household.
Aiji noticed that there was originally no gas stove in Tojiro’s room and thus claimed that this was actually not an accident but a case of murder. Benitsukasa’s SM partner’s name was found written in his diary, a hoodlum named Konosu Genji, so he pointed out that this guy might be the culprit, but this was denied by Mureta. The marks on Benitsukasa’s back were actually not lash marks from a whip, but a skin reaction caused by a very special allergy. But, after the incident involving the Urojijimaru, Benitsukasa had a sudden outbreak of this rash on his back, and for him who was under shock due to loosing his parents as well as uncle and aunt on the same day this felt like an unjustified punishment from above, so what was considered to be marks of a whip during SM play was an escape from reality by enduring this state. His big brother Aoji, who knew of this, was the one who judged it to be preferable for his younger brother to be buried in the image of a pervert who is hung up on SM play.
In the light of the truth that Mureta unveiled, they are convinced that Benitsukasa’s death was no murder after all, but really a sudden detah due to illness. This is how the curtain was lowered on the incident in the Hinuma family…or so it seemed.
After this Konosu Genji, the person who had been ruled out as fictitious turns out to exist when it is revealed that, after killing his parents, he attempted to commit suicide by poisoning himself. So it is decided that the case of the Hinuma family is still not closed. So once again Hisao and Alim set out to unveil the treat and arrive at an unexpected one.

After an intense logic battle the culprit reveals himself to be Aoji. Benitsukasa actually did die a natural death, but in a different place. Aoji constructed the locked room scenario around the corpse. He does confess of killing Tojiro though. He murdered him in the room adjoining the kitchen and then brought him to his room to create another locked room. When asked why, he says it was because everybody expected the tragedy of the Hinuma to go on and created “THE HINUMA MURDERS” in a way to create a “human death” for himself and his family. After his father died while drowning he feared nothing more than “dying like a pig, drowned in the sea”, as his father did.
In the end Hisao points to the readers themselves and accuses them of being just as much of a culprit as she herself, Alim and all other people in connection to the case are. The case existed because people had a thirst for tragedy and horror, without people’s curiosity and perverted taste in the bizarre, cases like this would never come into existence.