gloamingdaydream

This was first posted on a now defunct instagram account in late 2024, then reposted on backloggd in early 2025, but I took it down alongside a bunch of other reviews. I’m reposting it because I still like how it turned out even to this day, although there’s no doubt if I had to rewrite it now I’d prob do much better.

Layer 1 – The Mind

Umineko is the ultimate allegorical tale regarding art’s relationship with humanity and the world it inhabits. Immediately, it overloads the reader with hours of useless information, to the point of frying their brain. The entire novel is similarly constructed, with an absolutely abundant, unending plethora of word salad, poorly, or perhaps not even edited at all. Characters tend to waste time repeating useless trivia, and dialogue drags to an exorbitance that suggests the novel believes it has an infinite amount of time to tell its tale, and is attempting to stretch itself out as much as possible. 

This is not unintentional but part of its design (I’ll elaborate in a bit). Umineko frames the reader as the detective, breaking its mysteries down to three categories: The overarching mystery, the episodic mystery, and the singular mystery. The overarching mystery is the one closest to the metafictional narrative that observes the episodic and singular mysteries, watching over them, attempting to solve them, while keeping itself hidden behind an unparalleled level of unfairness. The episodic mystery, as its name suggests, confines itself to a single episode. Attempting to solve it is far easier than the overarching mystery, but still requires perhaps a good amount of experience with murder mysteries in order to deduce its approach. The singular mysteries are a bunch of mysteries that are solved on their own and together all make up the episodic mystery. These are by far the easiest to solve due to how isolated they are, oftentimes confining themselves to a single room, therefore, even an amateur that has never read a single murder mystery novel has the capacity to solve these.

Back to my point about its design. The entire novel consists of mystery after mystery, and by putting you in the shoes of the detective, basically thrusts a ton of never ending puzzles at you. The text, first and foremost, is a guide. Reading it as a narrative may allow one to perceive it as boring and repetitive, but it is in reality arming the detective with clue after clue with which they can solve each riddle with a bit of quick thinking, rendering the experience of reading it as an active one rather than a passive one. 

The reason Umineko’s base consists of a heavily active reader is due to its very existence: A text that poses the question: How do you consume art?

One would think that it would take a heavily academic approach to this answer, considering how forward it is in pushing the reader to think. Over and over again, it begs you to wrap each layer, open every box it puts in front of you, at times even taunting you. However, it’s made abundantly clear that the novel scoffs at the pseudo intellectual that consumes art solely as a means to come off as intelligent, or to prove that they are the only ones that “objectively” understand a certain work, proving it with thoroughly crafted analysis. Umineko mocks this type of person over and over again, laughing right in their face with absolute disdain. It later on puts this into words, but it is obvious even early on: Pure, rigorous intelligence is not the only, nor the core factor that makes up a work of art. The reason it cannot be anything but a murder mystery is to disprove this notion that permeates academia through one of the most “intelligent” genres in fiction. It is true that Umineko is a love letter to the genre itself, its references to Knox’s commandments, for instance, or even certain characters being obvious references. However, as much “love” as Umineko shows for murder mysteries, it shows just as much disdain for the circlejerk that has existed for decades upon decades within it.

Layer 2 – The Heart

On the chessboard, countless battles of wit occur, a detective trying to make sense of unending murders, each different then the last, each seemingly impossible to achieve. Yet far above this plane, lies a totally different battle. A battle for absolute supremacy. And more importantly, a sense of “objectivity” has finally been achieved through the implementation of a certain element.

And yet, and yet and yet….faced with an objective, undeniable proof, man refuses to acknowledge this “truth”, refusing to declare this reality correct. In spite of everything he sees with his own eyes, he does not rely on them to come to terms with facts, he relies on something else entirely.

Battler Ushiromiya knows, in the deepest depths of his “heart”, that the reality shown to him over and over again, that the “truth” that she desperately attempts to make him accept, is wrong.

If “The Mind” layer was a (very) brief overview of its concept and structure, “The Heart” is what it is. Umineko at its core, is interested not in the “Who” or “How”, but the “Why”?

What is the point in this game? What is “she” trying to show us?

The murder mystery is chaos incarnate. A never ending cycle that seeks retribution for something buried deep in the abyss. It is absolutely unhinged and absurd, laying its cards out for you, constantly reshuffling them. In a way, the game mimics the mechanisms of the human body.

Within this labyrinth of meat and bones, is a beating heart. It is stabbed over and over again, cursed with helplessness, seeking an end to the pain. It bleeds and bleeds and bleeds until it finally is left with not a single drop left, a mere skeletal husk, a shadow of itself. Screaming out desperately, unable to do anything but constantly dull itself for eons and millenia, aware of every fragment of each moment that passes.

Up to this point, there is a certain concept that I have failed to mention, intentionally so. A concept that goes completely against the ground rules of murder mysteries that dictate that “everything must have a coherent, logical, answer.”

While the mind layer does battle against the mystery itself, the layer above it is more concerned with what the mystery presents itself as.

“Is the culprit human? Or was this all magic?”

Magic. A term so simple, and yet simultaneously so confusingly complex. Magic in Umineko could be seen as actual spells and surreal occurrences that defy the laws of nature. But “Magic” is also so much more than that. Whether that be the tons of characters that are represented as concepts to flesh out the mystery and “heart”, or whether that be an intruder who interrupts the flow of the game to present a seemingly unrelated tale, far more passive compared to the back and forth occurring on the island, the idea of “magic” seeps itself everywhere.

A critique of culture, satirizing “wealthy issues”, a forbidden romance, a standalone tale of a young, isolated girl, etc. All of these are connected by the threads left behind by Magic.

Magic is understanding. Or maybe, Magic is love, or perhaps divinity, or salvation.

Magic is subjectivity.

In short, Umineko craves for its reader to unpack it. The ultimate goal is to engage on a different plane of reality, similar to what it shows in events during the story. Simply reading it passively, flipping the nonphysical pages without any attempt to unravel the nuances behind the words, the layers hidden underneath all the fluff, is disregarding the heart of this story, it is asking to be completely disengaged from it. It posits the same question over and over again for hours at a time, hiding the meaning within a metaphor of mystery, choosing not to forego the question itself in favor of the answer in a packaged sense of the word. Regardless, despite its continual insistence, the novel ultimately opens up its heart, it chooses to allow the cat box to be opened, yet never forces itself completely, never desecrates itself to a point of unrecognizability. It collapses onto itself, sheds its skin and transcends all the while insisting not to take it at face value, striving for individual expression rather than conformity for conformity’s sake or out of a desire to adhere to certain fictional rules set up by the external surroundings that control the perspectives of art and mysteries.

It distorts perception, and “truth”, nudging you towards its desired outcome but never pushing you towards it. Umineko walks alongside its reader, at times holding their hand, at other times taunting them playfully. But at the end of the day, it wants you to look at its heart, to understand it in a way that you can rather than in a way it tells you to. It shows you something that only you can shape, and it does so by affirming its desire to place the heart above all else. The “Why” is what leads one to pierce the heart, the deepest desires born out of passion, lust, envy, hatred, frustration, anger, and every other powerful emotion that overwrites the individual’s inner logic.

Layer 3 – The Soul

Beyond the absurdity of the games, beyond the chaos of absolute intellectual stimulation, beyond the theatrical play that stages itself, that attempts to mend an irreversible wound, beyond the poetically immersive finale that swamps you with constant emotivity, lies more.

Above even the layer that resides above the chessboard, beyond the constant back and forths, the continuous self-indulgence that ends with the shattering of the world itself, is a process of healing.

After it shows itself to you, the novel does not stop there. It merges with itself, evoking a passionate spirit that fragments itself. Connecting every thread, tying itself up neatly is no longer in its interest. With the most hideous parts now in the open, with all the rubble dug up, the “box” that Umineko exists in has been desecrated. An existence that does not account for another human. Pure consciousness, an absolute state of mind, combining every memory, every feeling, every sensation, and framing them as its own “absolute” solution. It shuts itself off, closing every other possibility, focusing on a single pathway. It does not ask you to close your eyes alongside it, and does not condemn you if you do. For the novel, focusing all of its perspective unto absolute nothing opens up the way to everything, paves the way to everything it seeks. For the first time, and perhaps the last, the art’s humanity exists within a differing vessel than that of the reader. The possibility to fuse is there, and the possibility to diverge also exists, and neither is wrong.

It asks the reader: “What is your most raw and honest form?”

Is your form one of absurd, never ending games, constant stimulation, unrivaled pleasure? Is your form a stageplay, a mask of self-deception? Is your form one of self-martyrization for the sake of nullifying yourself? 

Umineko is a therapy session where you find yourself as both therapist and patient. Everything it shows you is something you desire to see yourself, and nothing more. It can be self-destruction, or it can be healing. It can be an escape, or it can be confrontation. It can be acceptance, or it can be rejection. It can be love, or it can be hate. It can be heartfelt and emotive, or it can be robotic. It can be a fun game, or it can be a tedious narrative. It can be a boring, tactless story, or it can be poetic, washing over you like the ocean.

It evokes the essence of creation within creation, through its multi-layered metaphorical mess, the masks upon masks of confusion, the inability to rely on anything concrete or tangible, thus it strips away the corrupted roots, at least in its own ever-flowing bubble, forever chasing after the transient, fleeting beauty in each unique moment that is to come, choosing to do so with eminent love.

For without that love, “It” cannot be seen.