This chapter isn’t incredibly eventful, but there’s a fair amount going on for a reread, so I’m going to try and split it into two halves, one focused on the journey up to the rose garden, and another focused on Battler meeting Kanon and Shannon.
To start, we have disembarked, and Battler surely breathes a sigh of relief! Unfortunately for him, he quickly notices that something is amiss- the cries of the seagulls are nowhere to be found. The seagulls certainly must have left a pretty big impression on the Battler of six years ago for this to be the first thing he notices, and the first thing his mind ends up drifting toward is Maria’s ‘bad omen’ episode on the boat, when the shrine was noticed as missing. Battler quickly tries to act his carefree self and joke around, but George comes in with a more realistic explanation- that birds are sensitive to changes in the weather, and have likely begun to take shelter in their nests due to the impending storms.
As they continue on, George asks about Kinzo’s condition, to which Jessica responds, telling us he just about as lively as he’s ever been, before beginning to complain about how difficult Kinzo makes things for everyone; locking himself in his study, being absorbed in black magic, only allowing himself to see a select few servants, and doing something that’s smell permeates the mansion around his study. Battler gleans from this that the family is generally pretty reluctant to get involved with Kinzo, and, knowing his family, expects that many of them are waiting for him to finally kick the bucket, despite what ugliness may arise from issues of inheritance (oh Battler…).
After the trek through the woods is completed, we finally come to the magnificent rose garden, which fully lives up to Battler’s memory. While looking around, Maria notices the infamous damaged rose and claims it as ‘Maria’s Rose’, wrapping a tiny ribbon around it.
Thoughts on Jessica Ushiromiya
Before moving on, I wanted to pay some special attention to Jessica in these first two chapters, as some things stick out or invoke trains of thought only possible having already read Umineko. For me, this occurred in chapter one, when Jessica immediately shuts Kumasawa down when she begins to mention the legend of the witch.
While this particular action doesn’t really connect to what it ultimately got me thinking about, seeing Jessica, who is usually so energetic and talkative with this particularly serious and grave expression caught me off guard, especially as early as this scene is. It got me thinking, well, why would Jessica shut this down so quickly? Is it out of knowledge that Maria would enter her occult-mode with a renewed enthusiasm, and that conflict would inevitably arise between Maria and Battler? Is the subject of the witch something particularly unnerves her? Why might Jessica want to hide something in front of her cousins (though, really, it’s only Battler who isn’t really in the know)?
We know (later) that Jessica’s parents sure have something to hide, along with pretty much everyone else on the island barring perhaps Gohda or unnamed servants. This would be that Kinzo has actually been dead for a little while now. Krauss and Natsuhi have their reasons for keeping quiet about this in front of the family- as Battler predicted, inheritance issues would certainly come to the forefront in the event of Kinzo’s death, and this was precisely what Krauss tip-toes around in their discussions for a while. The question for me is, was Jessica, as someone who is an actual member of the family and who lives on the island the vast majority of the time (excepting extraordinary weather circumstances which trap her on the mainland), in on it?
When the cousins are walking through the forest path, George asks about this, as mentioned above, and Jessica states pretty clearly that Kinzo is alive and kicking, and lets on that the whole situation kind of bugs her, specifically since nobody can interact with him, among other things. If Jessica is in on the deception, this is clearly a deliberate lie. To a certain extent, I think it’s very unlikely that Jessica wouldn’t start getting suspicious about quite literally never seeing Kinzo, ever after a certain period of time, but the ultimate implications of this don’t agree very well with the themes of Umineko as a whole, with Jessica’s character, or really, even what we know of about Kinzo’s situation.
Umineko delivers a strong message on the topics of love and magic, and diving deeply into a character like Jessica who is very much not depicted as a scheming person, but instead someone who loves her family (though she is frustrated at her position at times) goes against the spirit of this. While you can look at any member of the family with and without love, the true value in much of these characters lies in what you see when you look with love. Jessica being a kind of privileged and sheltered, though kind and earnest person who wears her heart on her sleeve, and who tries to connect with Kanon like no one else really doe,s has many more interesting things to say than Jessica meekly following along with her parents’ scheme to gain an advantage in inheritance talks. If we do want to look at Jessica without love, though, what would this even reveal? Where are the stakes for her knowing the truth of Kinzo? When her parents are discovered as having been concealing this, the siblings had already mostly figured it out themselves, so it wasn’t even a surprise. What’s important is that Kinzo was dead, not that Jessica knew that Kinzo was dead, so her knowing really does nothing but drag down her character.
Ultimately what we see here in chapter two, combined with some other later knowledge, prevents it from even being possible anyway. Is it unlikely a family member in close proximity to Kinzo wouldn’t know he was dead? Maybe, but:
- Gohda never knew; clearly it is possible to conceal this information to success
- Kinzo really hasn’t even been dead for that long; only about a year
- Jessica is clearly put off by Kinzo’s demeanor and hobbies (and the smell emanating from his study)
- Jessica isn’t on the island as much as others; she has to commute via boat to school, has extracurricular activities, and sometimes can’t make it back every night
While hardly idea-damning, given how out in the open a lot of this is, it really isn’t so unrealistic for Jessica to not find out after all.
This whole idea of Jessica concealing something hasn’t really amounted to much, but what I like about it is how I ended up exploring the idea itself- seeing something that felt a little off but that got the brain rolling, and this is what I’m here for: to explore Umineko with a perspective that you can only have the second time through.
Next time, I’ll be wrapping up chapter two by taking a look at the second half and getting to some of the characters I’ve been most eager to see through the lens of the second read- Shannon and Kanon.
To be continued…