Silent Hill f scriptwriter Ryukishi07’s debut sound novel Higurashi When They Cry opens each episode with a looping soundtrack of cicadas crying and a direct authorial statement. In Onikakushi, the first chapter, Ryukishi, as if a host to a guest, extends an invitation both to Higurashi as a narrative and to the village of Hinamizawa as setting. Tucked beneath this invitation is a note on ‘difficulty’—“The difficulty is extremely high, but I hope you will enjoy the reward.” Similar statements punctuate each following episode. For an author to describe his non-interactive (sound) novel as having a ‘difficulty level’ may appear to be a non-sequitur, but as the reader progresses through Higurashi in series it becomes plainly obvious he is referring to the complexity of logic required to solve the mystery—in other words the ‘difficulty of interpretation.’ In framing ‘interpretation’ as subject to such a game-like structure as a ‘difficulty level’, Ryukishi establishes hermeneutics as the ludological basis for his work. To consider When They Cry, and in turn Silent Hill f, as ‘games’ by a particular author is to contend with the significance of interpretation in them. 

Interpretation, much like the games of When They Cry and Silent Hill, has long been a site of discourses on gender and desire. Hiroki Azuma’s close reading of Higurashi in The Birth of Game-like Realism concludes in his coinage of “the (carnal) desire for mystery-solving” as the progression system that drives a reader-player to consider the sound novel a ‘game’+. In his follow-up to Higurashi, Umineko When They Cry, Ryukishi himself moves from presenting hermeneutics as the consummation of the formal intention behind a mystery novel-game to being a core narrative dialectic enabled by the work’s aesthetic metastructure: in the wake of protagonist Battler Ushiromiya failing to interpret the desires of courtship from heroine Beatrice as conveyed through a series of (pseudo-)orthodox murder mysteries, a ‘detective’ emerges in the second half. A self-described “intellectual rapist,” Erika Furudo seeks to exhaust Beatrice and her world of interpretation-as-courtship, leaving behind only denotative meanings that remain after an assault upon the textual body. This dialectic of courtship and rape as axes on the spectrum of hermeneutic methods in Umineko recalls Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Naomi Schor’s consequent polemic, Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction. Sontag, describing interpretation as a “mass ravishment” that “violates art”, ultimately calls for “an erotics of art” to replace hermeneutics. Schor, in her response, suggests that Sontag is wrong to assimilate interpretation to “(masculine) forms of aggression and mastery: rape and imperialism” and instead offers an alternative to Sontag’s call—“an erotics of hermeneutics, text-pleasure as striptease rather than rape.” In particular, Schor finds problematic Sontag’s reductivist definition of “the process of interpretation as virtually one of translation”, that the interpreter seeks to demonstrate that X is A, Y is B, and Z is C. Taking up this definition as a discursive site lets us move the dialectics of hermeneutics in Ryukishi’s work from Umineko to where it finds expression in Silent Hill f++.

The significance of hermeneutics to Silent Hill may initially appear self-evident, in the sense that the conventional interactive progression found in the series at large does not require the setting up of a “(carnal) desire of mystery-solving” to justify their status as ‘games’ to its audience as a sound novel might. That desire is instead fulfilled by each progress-gating puzzle the player-interpreter solves. Who is left hungry when the ludic desire is fulfilled is instead the character-interpretant, for whom the narrative forms the site of desire+++. Silent Hill f’s Hinako Shimizu is one such character-interpretant who emerges as a translator, a Sontag-ian interpreter in its truest sense, in a particular sequence in the game. Stuck in Ebisugaoka Middle School, the transitory physical-psychological space where the spectre of socio-sexual difference first began haunting her, Hinako must solve (translate) “girl code” to gain access to the gender-segregated lockers. In the process, she unravels a narrative left behind by other students—a rare narrative beyond Hinako’s subjectivity in Silent Hill f, revealing the complex interactivities of gender in the world beyond her.

“Girl code” allows this locker puzzle to have a double-layer hermeneutic process and text-pleasure. The first order interpretation is already complete and closed by the time of Hinako’s arrival at the school, the translation and transmission of girl code between students. In this layer, if you read the order of the notes as presented in Hinako’s journal as a chronology, the boys appear to gain a hermeneutic education in girl code over time. Miki’s lover plainly rejects girl code as not worthwhile, ‘4151+3√6’ (‘AISITERU’) being simply a “crazy formula” to him. Satou, who gets called a ‘84*4’ (‘BAKA’) by a girl gets Yosida to teach him the cipher. And finally, Aoi observes and worries that Suga’s locker spells ‘505’ (‘SOS’) without any exterior stimulus from a girl like in the prior cases. The mediation of text-pleasure here is complex—the more the boys learn and use girl code the more it ceases being “girl code”, as it loses both its intention of adolescent jouissance and the girls’ ownership over the language. On a purely socio-structural basis, the male translators of girl code are performing a (masculine) imperialist domination of girl code as text-pleasure like Sontag accuses hermeneutics of enabling. Yet on a textual basis the same male translators are extending empathy, negating any “intellectual machismo” or “hubris” which Schor identifies as the source of Sontag’s contention. The boys listen and are educated by the girls in manipulating this language, and its cessation as a juvenile pastime arises from a shared concern for each other rather than an extraction and repurposing by any gendered imperialism. This process is too adolescent and celibate and even aromantic to say it is an erotics of hermeneutics or “text-pleasure as striptease” as Schor might hope for but text-pleasure as empathy, perhaps, is the synthesis emerging.

The second order of hermeneutics lies with the player and Hinako, who as translators seeking the fulfilment of ludonarrative desire, must retrace this process of hermeneutics in text-pleasure as empathy in order to progress the larger interpretive narrative. The students, in rendering girl code not “girl code” anymore through that process, have de-bifurcated the socio-sexual difference that a middle school reifies, allowing Hinako to move into and out of the gendered spaces of the locker rooms at will in pursuit of further texts to interpret. In this second order, a further constituent element of girl code is revealed to the player—the acquiescences made in service of the puzzle in the translation of Silent Hill f itself. The game does not usually distinguish long vowels (Hinako’s friend is named “Shu” rather than “Shuu/Shū”) or render the phoneme し as “si” (Hinako’s family name is “Shimizu”, not “Simizu”), mostly following the standard of Hepburn romanisation. Yet in service of girl code, Yoshida and Sato are naturalised as Yosida and Satou within Hinako’s journal—the primary site of most interpretation in the game. Text-pleasure as empathy, then, emerges as a phenomenon powerful enough to subvert the technologies of translation that are constituent to the game’s aesthetic metastructure. Sontag would be pleased too, as even her reductive definition of interpretation-as-translation which underpins her critique of hermeneutics will be countered by the gravity of this hermeneutic method that de-bifurcates gender through subverting translative technologies.

Yet it is all a bit too utopian, is it not? Why is there a scenario that potentially negates socio-sexual difference through hermeneutic discourse in a middle school in Ebisugaoka? Especially when Silent Hill f as a whole is often contradictory and acquiescing in its liberatory attitudes? My hermeneutic instincts may be wrong. I may be, like The Trial’s Josef K. in Schor’s taxonomy of interpretants/interpretors, a “failed interpret[or]” engaging in the “overinterpretation of a relatively insignificant detail” or “the outright misinterpretation of a gesture.” To play the role of K. for a bit longer yet, defending myself against that accusation, the temporal ambiguity of the Ebisugaoka of Hinako’s psycho-space allows for a straight aspirational reading. Just as the game does not even reveal whether it is (primarily) set before or after 1964 or 1968—when the Tokyo Olympics allowed a post-fascist Japan to present to the world its newly acquired coat of liberal democracy and when the contradictions of that political presentation boiled over into city streets and university campuses across the country respectively—allowing its narrative with all of its lauded specificities to function as a mostly successful parable across multiple sociopolitical contexts, this ambiguity also allows a potential aspirational future to bloom in that same Ebisugaoka. Even in that aspirational space, Suga Yosie remains in trouble bad enough for Aoi Takeshi to notice and so the work of utopia goes on.

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++ The term he uses for desire is 欲望, which can have sort of a lustful affect which I hope to convey in the parenthetical echo of “(carnal)” here.

++ Sontag’s association of translation with masculinity had led me to potentially consider discourses of gender and translation in Japanese literature. Noriko Mizuta, in a 1991 essay in Gunzō, asserts that “Translation has long been regarded as a female act and occupation. As with typists, translators were usually women”, comparing translators to midwives of a text but Judy Wakabayashi who translated Mizuta’s piece has elsewhere, in the notes to her translation of Kunikida Doppo’s On Women and Translation, has produced a contradictory material history to this claim by stating that the role of tsūji was a hereditary male role in the Edo Period and that even in the Meiji Period structural inequities prevented a mass proliferation of women translators, the latter claim corroborated by Kunikida’s contemporary observations in the main text. This piece lacks the space to fully contend with this issue. Both of these essays can be read in the excellent Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women's Writing, edited by Rebecca Copeland.

+++ An “interpretor” is the “interpreting critic” (reader) and an “interpretant” is the “interpreting character” in Schor’s verbiage.

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Leanne Rahel is a writer interested in the crossroads of écriture feminine and otaku culture. Their essays, poetry, and ephemera can be found on their note, and stray thoughts on Bluesky.