In June of 1983, transfer student Keiichi and his new friends, a colorful group of female classmates, hang out together and explore around their tiny village of Hinamizawa. It is time for the town’s annual cotton drifting festival, where the townsfolk pay tribute to their guardian spirit, Oyashiro.
A few years ago, an outside development team had plan to build a dam in the quiet rural village, which outraged the locals into a mass protest and lead to an ultimate cancellation of the project. But ever since that year, people who were in support of the dam have been mysteriously murdered every year during the night of the cotton drifting festival, an occurrence that the townsfolk call the Curse of Oyashiro.
This year is no exception, as a traveling photographer and his companion end up dead by the end of the night. Since Keiichi and his friends had known the victims, they end up in the middle of the investigation themselves. But as Keiichi learns more about the Curse of Oyashiro and the back story of his new pretty girl companions, he starts to spiral into the madness and horror of this quiet town. And by the end of the fourth episode, Keiichi and every one of the main characters are dead, each one of them meeting a gruesome bloody death at their own hands or murdered by one of their friends.
The End.
Wait. Did I just give away a spoiler?
Nope, because when the fifth episode begins, everything starts all over again from the beginning. It’s June of 1983, and Keiichi and the girls are all alive, happy, well, and they’re preparing for the upcoming cotton drifting festival. And this time around, they might not all meet the same bloody fate they had in the first four episodes.
I am a sucker for creative nonlinear narrative, so I absolutely loved the way Higurashi – When They Cry goes above and beyond anything I’ve seen before in an anime series.
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