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Ooe Review: Literature & Theories (Spoilers!)

Ever since posting my spoiler-free review, I've received some questions about theories and references mentioned in the game, so this time I'll be talking about that! That also means that this review will discuss topics that many would consider a spoiler, so make sure to play the game first. When I wrote this review, I had only played part 1, but I've updated it with some part 2 information as well. If you're waiting to play the game in English, it has been confirmed that MangaGamer will be the one localizing it again, though we don't know the release date yet.

Ever since playing Hashihime, I've become really interested in all of the novels referenced in Adelta's games, and I love analyzing the similarities between them. I'm not sure how interesting this is to others, but I tried to add some short summaries of what each novel that's (possibly) referenced in the game is about. Of course these are just theories and we don't have an official list or anything yet.

When this game was announced, it was mentioned that all 9 main characters are named after train stations on the Yurikamome line in Tokyo (the train line most people take if you go to events like Comiket). Other names Oosaki, Shinagawa and Shinkiba are train stations on the Rinkai line, which was not officially confirmed, but very easy to find because both train lines are located in the same area. So far the last names of the side characters in the game also followed this pattern, so there's not much information I can add to this. However, their first names is where things start getting a bit more interesting. When the first names of Funeno and Shiodome were released, fans immediately recognized that their names were references to characters in existing novels. Then while playing part 1, this theory proved to be correct, as some of the other first names could also be linked to existing literature. I created this list while playing the game, but I've seen similar theories on social media such as Twitter (or well, X now) and Weibo too, therefore I think a lot of these could be correct. I will also include the Japanese titles of these works to make it a bit easier to look them up yourself. Of course I don't always remember every detail that happened in these novels, and some I only read very recently, so please correct me if anything is wrong! I'm always happy to learn more.

Ariake Shoutarou (有明勝太郎) Ariake's first name "Shoutarou" is most likely a reference to Junichiro Tanizaki's "Tojo" (途上). The protagonist is actually called "Katsutarou", which is another way of reading the kanji used to write Ariake's first name. This character has an ex-wife and a current wife, whose names are Fudeko and Kumako. This is only briefly mentioned at the end of Ariake's route, but his wives have the same names. In this novel, Katsutarou tries to kill his first wife Fudeko by purposely exposing her to dangerous situations that negatively impact her health, but he won't directly harm her to make her death look like an accident. The motive and the way he tries to kill her is different than what happens in Ooe, but I think it's definitely the inspiration behind this route. Another connection to Junichiro Tanizaki's works is the name of Ariake’s sister, who's called Naomi (奈緒美) which is a name that appears in “Chijin no Ai” (痴人の愛). Around this time the concept of “Naomiism” was born, which was used to describe a free-spirited devilish, beautiful girl. Sometimes it looks like this term was also used for girls who manipulate men, but it wasn't always used in a negative context. I'm curious if this concept was also used to create Ariake's character, as in of the official blog posts he's described as a "male femme fatale". I'm not sure if this is plot-related or not, but Ariake's ending song also has an audio clip from the play "Cyrano de Bergerac", which doesn't exactly have a happy ending either and both of the characters lose their lives.

Shimbashi Mei (新橋冥) When I looked for novels which focused on a character called "Mei", I couldn't find much, until I realized the kanji used to write his name is also the first kanji in the Japanese word for Pluto (冥王星), which is also the name of the theater company he works for. In his ending, Shinagawa even tells Oosaki that Shimbashi is Pluto, so it might also be his pseudonym. Pluto is also the cat that appears in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" and even though the story isn't identical to what happened in his past, there are similar elements. For example, the cat in this story Pluto is often drawn with only one eye, and while Shimbashi does have another eye, he usually hides it with an eyepatch. The unnamed protagonist also ends up killing the cat by hanging it, which is similar to how Shimbashi's brother used to kill animals. Later in the story, the protagonist adopts another cat who resembles Pluto, but because the new cat keeps reminding him of how he killed Pluto, he eventually loses his sanity and tries to kill the new cat as well, but ends up killing his own wife instead who tried to protect the cat. Despite the protagonist trying to hide her body, the police eventually finds her because the cat was trapped in the same wall where the protagonist tried to hide her body, and the sound of the animal scratching the wall gained their attention. Even though the story is a bit different, Shimbashi also got his revenge by murdering his brother, which he doesn't seem to regret much. Shimbashi's ending song is called ルドン (rudon/redon) which is the name of French painter Odilon Redon. The song also mentions his mentor Armand Clavaud, who was a botanist. Clavaud taught Redon many things about flowers, but also introduced him to Buddhism, which shows in Redon's later paintings too. The flowers are an important element in this route as Shimbashi's the person who was leaving flowers on the grave of Oosaki's grandmother, so maybe all of that is also intentional.

Aomi Kaede (青海楓) This is not necessarily about the name Kaede, but about Takuichi (卓一), Aomi's father who he's impersonating on the island. Takuichi is also the name of the protagonist of Koga Saburo's "Aofuku no Otoko" (青服の男) and his cousin is called Shinzo, who shares the same name as the student who committed suicide in the game, Shinonome Shinzo. In the novel the two of them schedule a meet-up to discuss money Takuichi wanted to borrow, but when he doesn't show up to the meeting, Shinzo later confronts him. In the middle of the confrontation however, Shinzo suffers from a heart attack and passes away. In Ooe their relationship is a bit different, as Takuichi and Shinzo are teacher and student, and Aomi's father passed away shortly after receiving the invitation letter. In the novel Takuichi is alive and impersonates Shinzo in order to get his own inheritance money, though the theme of impersonation is relevant in Ooe too as Aomi pretends to be his father. There's nobody called Kaede in this story, but in the game Aomi mentions his father called him Kaede because he thought his hands resembled a frog's webbed feet (kaeru = frog) so currently I'm unsure if there's any further connections. Aomi's ending song is called Taichourou (対潮楼) which is actually the name of a temple in Fukuyama, a city located in Hiroshima prefecture. I'm not sure if there's any specific reason for this, but it's not too far away from Ookunoshima (also known as bunny island because of its many rabbits), which is one of the locations that was used as inspiration for some of the background art in-game.

Funeno Kureichirou (船野呉一郎) Hashihime fans might recognize this one as Kureichirou is also the name of one of the most important characters in Yumeno Kyuusaku's "Dogra Magra". Dogra Magra is not one of the easiest stories to understand, as the protagonist's memory is hazy and you never know if the researchers are telling him the truth either, but generally we know that Kureichirou seems to have murdered his cousin (who was also his fiancé). Funeno's crime is revealed at the end of the trial version of Ooe and he killed his sister. So far we haven't really seen much of Funeno in part 1 because he immediately acts strange when he sees Oosaki, probably because he has Daiba's letter and Oosaki introduced himself as "Daiba", so it's a bit hard to analyze his character yet or compare him to Dogra Magra's Kureichirou in my opinion.

Shiodome Michio (汐留道雄) Just like Funeno, Shiodome's first name was also revealed a long time before the trial version and part 1 of Ooe were released. It references Edogawa Ranpo's "Kotou no Oni" (孤島の鬼) which is not really a secret as it's one of the novels that was mentioned in one of the first blog posts about Ooe and its inspirations. Michio is one of the main characters, who's a gay man who falls in love with the main character Minoura. So far their personalities do not seem that similar, but Kotou no Oni's Michio is adopted by a man called Jogoro, which is also the first name of Shiodome's professor (Tsukishima Jogoro).

Takeshiba Yozo (竹芝葉蔵) This is one of the new names we learned about in part 1, but since Yozo isn't the most common name ever it's probably referencing Dazai Osamu's "No Longer Human/Ningen Shikkaku” (人間失格). Yozo (or ''Youzou'', it's hard to keep romanization consistent...) is the name of the protagonist. He's a troubled individual who can't relate to other human beings and doesn't understand them. At first he tries to hide these emotions by playing the clown so people laugh at him, but eventually he turns to alcohol and drugs. Takeshiba is a magician who quickly tries to change the topic when things get serious, which matches the theme of playing the clown, but we also know he gets nervous fast and he's also the character who committed some of the most brutal murders in the game so far. I think the story won't be exactly the same, but he definitely seems to share certain personality traits with the main character. He's accused of murdering his family by setting their family home on fire, though in the first part of the game he makes it seem like someone else did it, or if it was some kind of accident. His route also seems to reference Suehiro Maruo's Shoujo Tsubaki, for example him describing his mother as a snake woman, and he's also wearing a yellow shirt with red dots in some of the promotional art, similar to Midori's dress.

Shijoumae Giichirou (市場前義一郎) Shijoumae's first name could be a reference to Akutagawa Ryunosuke's "Kaika no Satsujin" (開化の殺人) in which the protagonist shares the same name as him. This is a rather strange short story that focuses on a number of suicide notes, written by a doctor who's called Kitabatake Giichirou. He's often described as a man with a rather 'western' appearance because of his beard/moustache, which matches Shijoumae's character design. He was in love with his cousin Akiko (which I guess was not uncommon during this time period) and wanted to marry her, but she married another man called Mitsumura. In the book, Kitabatake was incredibly jealous of him and poisoned him. However, even after this first murder, his cousin started getting close to another man called Honda, who Kitabatake was also jealous of. Initially, he planned to poison him too, but in the end he decided against this and took his own life instead. In Ooe, Shijoumae's wife is also called Akiko and has red eyes, which means her family's also from Ooejima, though she's not confirmed to be Giichirou's cousin like in the original short story.

Toyosu Rouren (豊洲浪蓮) I was a bit confused when I heard the pronunciation of his name in-game, as it sounded a bit unusual to me, though many fans so far have pointed out that the name sounds similar to ''Lawrence/ローレンス'' who's the antagonist in Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" which is the novel that gets mentioned in-game too. In the novel Lawrence fakes his own death, which reminds me of the boat scene in Ariake's route in which Toyosu drowned, but the whole scene seemed rather sudden to me. For example, he tries to convince the others that nobody else should join him, and the food at the inn also disappeared around this time. After finishing Aomi's route, we know he's lying about his real identity too because no matter what temple they visit, there's no monk with his name, and other characters also suspect him of being the client, which is later revealed to be correct.

Daiba Shizuma (台場静馬) Another name we've known for a long time is Daiba's first name Shizuma, which is a reference to Yokomizo Seishi's "The Inugami Family/Inugami-ke no Ichizoku" (犬神家の一族). This is another story about impersonation which fits the main theme of Oosaki pretending to be Daiba on the island. There are actually multiple characters in this novel who share the same names as some of the Ooe characters, such as Sukekiyo (佐清) the name of Daiba’s brother who passed away in the boat accident, and Sahei (佐兵衛), Daiba's father Oosaki meets in the common route. The connections between characters in this story get very complicated, but Sahei is the head of the Inugami family who has an illegitimate son called Shizuma, who went missing. He also has a grandson called Sukekiyo, who was disfigured on the battlefield. Similar to Ooe, the story starts with Sahei's death, though in the novel he leaves a suicide note and in Ooe he seems to die rather suddenly after talking to Oosaki. In the novel, it's revealed that Sukekiyo actually passed away some time ago and Shizuma has been pretending to be him. There are also some other shared elements, such as the Shizuma in the novel trying to take revenge for what happened to his mother, and in the game Daiba takes his mother's last name "Hama", and expresses that he doesn't like the Daiba family.

Oosaki and Hinode This is another update after playing part two, but I'm still a bit unsure about both of them. Oosaki's first name is Hiiro which translates to 'scarlet'. One of the things I can think of is that it's maybe a reference to the Sherlock Holmes series, "A Study in Scarlet" as this is of course also a detective story. As for Hinode, in the pamphlet that came with the game Dostoevsky's book "Crime and Punishment" is mentioned. Even though there's no character named Riichi, there are some elements of the plot that are similar. For example, the eight years he spends together with Oosaki after the main story ends is the same length as Raskolnikov's prison sentence in the book.

Side characters I haven't looked much into the side characters, but I assume their first names are also references to something. The names of Shinkiba and Shinagawa (Jinza 甚三 and Zakuro 柘榴 ) could be referring to some of the side characters from some of Edogawa Ranpo's works, as there's a short story called ''Zakuro'' (石榴) and there's also a "Jinza" in the novel Ghost Tower (幽霊塔), but I can't exactly find any connections between them and the Ooe characters. For Oosaki I'm guessing his name could also be something related to the Inugami Family too because it is a bit suspicious that he looks almost identical to Daiba, I think they have to be related to each other in some way.

Other literature references In a previous blog post I wrote in 2022, I mentioned that when Ooe was announced, one of the official blog posts also mentioned works that inspired them to create Ooe. I will include those in this blog post again as the previous one is a bit outdated now.

Of course the main inspiration is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, as it follows a similar closed-circle murder mystery story on an island. In Ariake's first ending, Oosaki even compares some of the characters in the novel to characters in the game, calling himself Vera for example who murdered for love. Another important connection is that the owner of the island in this novel calls themselves "U.N. Owen", a fake name which basically just stands for ''unknown''. This of course sounds very similar to "Ooe" and the game's official alias is also "Owen" according to the official website. The actress who passed away is called "An Ooe", which also sounds a bit similar to "unknown".

Previously, I mentioned that Shiodome's first name Michio is a reference to Edogawa Ranpo's "Kotou no Oni", another novel that focuses on a murder mystery story, this time about the death of the protagonist's fiancé. As the title of the novel suggests (which translates to "Demon of the Lonely Isle") they also travel to an island, though this one is inhabited by people who all have some kind of deformity. Of course most of the characters in Ooe look pretty normal, but if you've played part 1 you've probably noticed how many characters either suffer from an illness or were born with some kind of physical abnormality, although sometimes it's not really severe. Ariake's has a thyroid disease (Grave's Disease according to his character profile in-game), Shimbashi has strabismus (misalignment of his eyes) and Aomi has webbed fingers which his father made fun of. If we look at the other characters, there is of course Hinode who won't talk and also seems to have difficulty walking, though the reason for this has not been explained yet in-detail. In the full body art, Shijoumae is also drawn with a cane, which might also be linked to something related to his health, but I'm not completely sure about some of the other characters yet.

The same blog post also mentions three incidents which happened in real life, but which all have novel adaptations as well, with the first one being the "Anatahan Incident", or also called the "Queen of Anatahan Incident" (アナタハンの女王事件). This incident focuses on a number of deaths that happened on Anatahan Island, located in the Pacific Ocean. The island became Japanese territory after the First World War and Japanese settlers began living on the island together with natives. Years later near the end of the Second World War, most locals fled after the American military called for Japan's surrender during the war. During this time, some refused to surrender and stayed on the island. Initially, the Japanese people who refused to leave the island were left alone, but things changed when a U.S. Boeing crashed into the island and guns were found inside of the wreckage. Afterwards, these guns became a symbol of power among men on the island, and some of them would kill each over the only woman on the island, Kazuko. After this, it was reported that more men died under "mysterious circumstances", and eventually Kazuko surrendered herself to the U.S. military, as she felt like she was the root of all the problems on the island. Writer Iwasaki Sakae also released a novel based on these incidents, which is just called "Anatahan".

The second incident mentioned is the "Hikarigoke Incident" (ひかりごけ事件), and translates to "Luminous Moss Incident", though the name comes from Takeda Taijun's short story which is based on this incident. The short story is actually just based on rumors rather than factual reports, so there are some differences. The real incident is rather graphic and took place in 1944 in Hokkaido. It was reported that after ending up in a shipwreck, the captain of the ship survived by eating the corpses of his own crew. The captain was later arrested on charges of corpse mutilation, corpse abandonment and murder. Even though he said he didn't kill them, he did admit eating them. This case stood out back then because even though cannibalism had undoubtedly happened before in Japanese history, it was the first time such a case was reported by the newspapers. If we want to link this to what happened in the game, there's of course Shiodome who was accused of corpse mutilation. He also took Funeno's head in the first route, and in this case the captain admitted that he ate the brains of one of the crew members (... as well as their genitalia, so do with that information what you want).

The final incident mentioned in this blog post was the "Mount Hakkoda Disaster" or "Mount Hakkoda Snow Disaster" (八甲田雪中行軍遭難事件) which happened in 1902 when a group of Japanese Imperial Army soldiers got lost in a blizzard on Hakkoda Mountain, located in Aomori. This incident is considered one of the most lethal disasters in history and 199 people lost their lives. After getting stuck in the blizzard, during the next days many soldiers would freeze to death, while others fell down the cliffs during their ascent. This incident also has a novel which translates to "Death Wanderings on Mt. Hakkoda" (八甲田山死の彷徨) by Nitta Jiro, which was also made into a movie "Hakkoda Mountain". Of course, Ooe's story is about an island and not a mountain, but I do understand the similarities about getting stuck somewhere and being unable to leave.

Final thoughts and information from the pamphlet/Cool-B One thing I was really curious about after playing part 1 were the red eyes, as eye color was a pretty important theme in Hashihime and Uuultra C. In Ooe, all the main characters have red eyes but most of the side characters have black eyes. This did turn out to be relevant as the pamhlet that comes with the full version of the game confirms that descendants of those who lived on Ooejima do all have red eyes, though most ordinary people will just see it as black. It seems like only Daiba's father Sahei and Ariake are able to see this red colour though, so just being a descendant from Ooejima doesn't mean that you can easily spot others whose families are from the same island.

Another thing that was teased long before the game was released was the so called "madness scale" which was published in Cool-B magazine. This scale ranked the characters from 1 to 5 (with 5 being the worst) which gave us some hints about what these characters would be like in their own routes. Aomi and Toyosu are ranked 1, Shimbashi and Funeno 2, Hinode is the only one who's a 3, Takeshiba is 4, and Ariake, Shiodome and Shijoumae all got a 5. Oosaki and Daiba weren't included in this list. I think while looking at this again later, this scale does make a lot of sense now.

Lastly, the letters you unlock in-game are also really interesting to me and even after finishing the full game I still have some questions. I think it's clear that some of the earliest ones were sent by Ooe Ann whose sister married into the Daiba family, but the final ones look like they were sent by Hinode's mother. Anyway, it has been really interesting to read everyone else's theories about the game so far! The creator Kurosawa Rinko is still working on all kinds of Ooe-related projects, so I'm hoping that some answers to the questions I still have will eventually be published in the Q&A which will be part of the supplementary reader. I did submit some questions, but I'm sure others might have submitted the same ones.

Here's a list of my previous blog posts about Ooe! Though I haven't looked at these for some time now so some might be outdated...

Old blog post with general information -> X Trial version review -> X Part 1 review -> X

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